Personal Construct Research Articles

The Unstable Subject: Public Constructs and Borderline Personality Disorder

Kelly’s intense focus on personal construing processes is understandable given the aims he put forth when creating personal construct psychology and the socio-cultural context in which his theory arose. Plenty of space remains, however, to elucidate the interaction between public construing processes and personal constructs to the extent that these can be separated in a relational theory such as this one. Previously, this exploration was largely theoretical, and it involved drawing parallels between Kelly and theorists such as Foucault or Bauman. In this paper, the relationship between public and personal systems of constructs is theorized with clinical applications in mind, emphasizing its practical importance as a means of understanding clients and situating their change in a wider social context, while understanding the possibilities and limitations determined by constructs structuring and governing social relations. This paper will attempt to create a new framework for further expansion of Kelly’s theory. A brief clinical vignette will be used to illustrate how this approach reframes borderline personality disorder as a primarily relational issue.

Drawing a Portrayal of Science Teachers’ Epistemic Cognitions Around Different Concepts Characterizing Science Education

AbstractThe objective of this descriptive study is to provide a detailed examination of science teachers’ perspectives regarding scientific knowledge, science learning, science concepts, and science teaching. A total of 304 science teachers created metaphors to express their cognitions about the epistemological aspects of their work. A specifically designed metaphor construction task was used to capture the participants’ epistemic cognitions. The participants’ metaphorical reasoning was captured since the metaphors might deliver experience-based conceptions, perceptions, beliefs, or comprehensions about four concepts regarding epistemic cognition. In-depth, descriptive analysis was undertaken through open, axial, and selective coding procedures with higher validity and reliability. The participants’ epistemic cognitions were gathered around five-order themes: function (accepting science knowledge and science concepts and their teaching/learning as vital entities by adopting an instrumentalist or tool-based perspective), personal epistemological stance (seeing science knowledge and science learning as an endless and immortal accumulation of factual knowledge), motivational construct (scientific knowledge attaches importance so it should be taught in the school systems in the science lessons), sociological construct (science knowledge provides power), and pedagogical construct (not the science knowledge but the science concepts should be taught in the schools in the science lesson). This study concluded that the participant science teachers mostly held conventional orientations in externalizing their epistemic cognitions. Theory-based explanations are presented in terms of the participants’ traditional epistemic orientations in the sense of future directions of further research.

I do and I understand: A virtual reality-supported collaborative design-assessing activity for EFL students

Instead of learning in a passive learning mode or aimlessly exploring VR scenarios, a collaborative design-based VR learning environment has great potential for developing classrooms. Through personal knowledge construction in a collaborative design-based learning (CDBL) environment, this study combines CDBL and VR technology to motivate students to build VR projects and practice speaking English in rich contexts through learning by design; students gradually generate knowledge from design experience and sufficient practice. Peer assessment was further introduced to enhance timely evaluation and reflection. Therefore, this study proposed a VR-supported collaborative design-assessing activity. 113 Chinese seventh-graders participated in a quasi-experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of this method. Compared to the collaborative design-assessing (CDA) activity, the results demonstrated that students in the VR-supported collaborative design-assessing (VR-CDA) activity greatly enhanced their English-speaking performance, collaboration tendency, and critical thinking awareness while lowering their English learning anxiety. In contrast to the VR-supported collaborative design (VR-CD) activity, however, the VR-CDA group activity did not significantly improve students’ English-speaking performance. The interview results proved that the students in the VR-CDA group were highly motivated to learn English because of the innovative classroom instruction. They also enjoyed designing the projects collaboratively, posting assessments, and self-reflection.

They are Just for Making Nyángá: Ethnosemiotic Significance of Waist Beads Among Young Women in Nigeria

ABSTRACT Waist beads are important cultural accessories with different layers of signification among young women in Calabar metropolis, Cross River State, south-eastern Nigeria. Drawing on ethnographic qualitative approaches involving focus group and semi-structured interviews with thirty participants who were purposively sampled, this article explores the social, symbolic and aesthetic values of waist beads based on subjective accounts and nuanced experiences of young women who have used them for varying length of time. The study is anchored on ethnosemiotic methods and anthropo-semiotic framework to foreground an investigation of indigenous system of signs in a particular cultural context. It aims to interrogate how young women make sense of body practices and representations through waist beads in shaping their social universe. Waist beads can be identified as social texts with enormous symbolic capital that is useful in beauty projects, fertility narratives, discourses of spirituality and the expression of femininity. The study concludes that waist beads are essential components of participants’ material culture that provide new opportunities for self-expression, self-representation and personal identity construction. Waist beads, therefore, offer a prominent performance site through which the aesthetic of the female body is redefined, recreated and transformed.

Психосемантичні особливості уявлень української, французької та африканської молоді про імперіалізм

B a c k g r o u n d . The current geopolitical situation, including Russia"s war against Ukraine, makes the study of young people"s perceptions of imperialism relevant. Imperialism is a multifaceted phenomenon that has economic, cultural, and socio-political impact. The purpose of the study is to identify and analyze the constructs used by young people in different countries to perceive France and Russia as imperialist powers. M e t h o d s . A mixed-methods research was conducted, combining qualitative methods (analysis of interviews using George Kelly"s theory of personal constructs and an association experiment) with statistical methods, such as regression analysis. R e s u l t s . The qualitative analysis showed that respondents used different constructs to describe France and Russia. African respondents most often mentioned constructs related to power and domination, while French respondents focused on imperialism and cultural differences. Ukrainian respondents focused on cultural differences and ideology. Detailed analysis allowed us to identify eleven constructs that were used in the questionnaire with a semantic differential. The regression analysis showed that for African respondents, the most important constructs for perceiving France in the context of imperialism are "Hostile – Friendly", "Eastern – Western" and "Militaristic – Pacifist", and for Russia – "Hostile – Friendly", "Aggressive – Peaceful" and "Discriminating – Discriminated". In the French group, the construct Aggressive – Peaceful is significant for the perception of France, while for Russia it is Militaristic – Pacifist. In the Ukrainian group, the constructs "Hostile – Friendly" and "Conservative – Modern" are significant for the perception of France, while for Russia – "Aggressive – Peaceful" and "Authoritarian – Democratic". C o n c l u s i o n s . The analysis of qualitative data showed that different groups of respondents have different perceptions of French and Russian imperialism, focusing on cultural, ideological and historical aspects. The regression analysis confirmed the importance of the constructs "Hostile – Friendly", "Aggressive – Peaceful" and "Militaristic – Pacifist" for the perception of both countries. This study highlights the importance of cultural and social context in shaping geopolitical perceptions.

Stance and Construction of Persona in Live-streaming

Stance and Construction of Persona in Live-streaming

Divine Intimacies

This article foregrounds the complex self-making of Black Jamaican women living with HIV to explore the political and religious significance of their queer intimacies. Jolly argues that women's embodied pleasures and spiritual consciousness present a form of divine intimacy that exposes the complex relationship between queer studies, Black religious thought, and the sexual desires of Black queers in general, and Black queer women in particular. Furthermore, she asserts that the embodied knowledge of queer HIV-positive Black Caribbean women shifts the geography of reason around female sexuality and Blackness in studies of queerness and religion. This article considers how lived experiences of religion play a central role in the construction of personhood and how Black queer women's spirituality requires resisting denominational assumptions and distinctions between the sacred and secular that have no salience in their interpretations of everyday life. HIV-positive Jamaican women have revealed the ways women's spirituality thrives outside the dichotomy of “indecent” subject and “redeemed” victim and beyond the grips of institutionalized sexism, misogynoir, and homophobia within and beyond the church.

Opinion: Which animals have personality?

Human personality generally refers to coherent individuating patterns in affect, behavior, and cognition. We can only observe and measure behavior, from which we then infer personality and other psychological processes (affect, cognition, etc.). We emphasize that the study of personality always explains or summarizes patterns not only in behavior but also in these other psychological processes inferred from behavior. We thus argue that personality should be attributed only to nonhuman animals with behaviors from which we can infer a sufficiently rich set of psychological processes. The mere inference of a biological trait that explains behavioral variability, on our view, is not sufficient to count as a personality construct and should be given a different term. Methodologically, inferring personality in nonhuman animals entails challenges in characterizing ecologically valid behaviors, doing so across rich and varied environments, and collecting enough data. We suggest that studies should gradually accumulate such corpora of data on a species through well-curated shared databases. A mixture of approaches should include both top-down fit with extant human personality theories (such as the Big Five) as well as bottom-up discovery of species-specific personality dimensions. Adopting the above framework will help us to build a comparative psychology and will provide the most informative models also for understanding human personality, its evolution, and its disorders.

Impact of social exclusion on social identity: social-philosophical dimension

The article examines the impact of social exclusion on a person’s social identity. For this purpose, the works of foreign and Ukrainian researchers were analyzed and it was found that the latter is mostly considered as a personal construct that arises against the background of intergroup differences and ingroup similarities and expresses a person's solidarity with group norms, values and ideals. The latter can change during a person’s life under the influence of various challenges and transform a person’s social identity in a positive or negative direction. Thus, in cases where a person has internal resources for solving certain problems or overcoming life challenges, which are accompanied by his exclusion from the usual social environment, his social identity changes in a positive way, and he himself moves to a new level of social life and occupies the corresponding last place in society. Under such conditions, the change in his social identity occurs quite naturally and contributes to the formation of relatively stable ideas of a person about himself and society about him. These ideas are confirmed by the new social status, which marks the role and place that the individual occupies in the social system according to the main spheres of social life. Instead, the exclusion of a person from the usual social environment, as a result of one or another life challenges (loss of job or housing, occupation of the region, migration, etc.), which deprives a person of the opportunity to fully integrate into social processes and be a full-fledged part of society, can be accompanied not only by radical changes in human value system, but also deviant forms of behavior that will lead to social exclusion in the future.

Motivational Interviewing as a Tool to Increase Motivation and Adherence to a Long COVID Telerehabilitation Intervention: Secondary Data Analysis from a Randomized Clinical Trial.

Although motivational interviewing was originally developed to address abuse disorders, scientific evidence confirms that it is an increasingly used and effective approach in a wide range of therapeutic interventions. To date, however, no studies have analyzed the use of this tool in patients with persistent symptoms following coronavirus disease 2019, a condition known as Long COVID. To analyze the effectiveness of motivational interviewing with regard to the adherence to telerehabilitation for Long COVID using a mobile application. As a secondary objective, factors related to greater motivation before and after the motivational interviewing techniques were analyzed. This longitudinal design substudy used a sample of 52 adult patients with Long COVID participating in the intervention group of a randomized clinical trial. This trial examined the effectiveness of a telerehabilitation program for this population using a mobile application. This program included three motivational interviews to achieve maximum treatment adherence. In this study, the main variables were motivation and adherence to application use. Sociodemographic and clinical data, personal constructs, and affective state were also collected. Subsequently, a descriptive, correlational, and regression statistical analysis was performed using the SPSS Statistics program. The median motivation prior to the first motivational interview was 8 (IQR 2), the median at the end of the last motivational interview was 8.5 (IQR 2.75), and the change in motivation levels after the three motivational interviews was 0.5 (IQR 1). Affective state and final motivation scores were predictors of greater adherence to telerehabilitation treatment. A high level of motivation after participating in motivational interviewing appears to be related to higher levels of adherence to telerehabilitation in patients with Long COVID. This suggests that motivational interviewing may be an effective tool in the treatment of this disease.

Development and Initial Testing of the “Personality Potential” Questionnaire for Athletes

The study focuses on the development and primary validation of the Personality Potential Questionnaire for Athletes. The study involved 429 members of Russian national teams in various sports aged 17 to 40 years. Psychodiagnostic instruments: questionnaire "Personality Potential" (author's questionnaire), "Self-Actualization Test", "Subjective Control Level", "Hardiness Survey", “Purpose-in-Life Test”, “Test of General Self-Efficacy”, questionnaire "Facilitator — Mediator — Moderator”, method "Express-diagnostics of the tendency to affective behavior". The results showed that the scales of the "Personality Potential" questionnaire have asymmetry and kurtosis values less than unity, which shows normality of the distribution at an acceptable level. The exploratory factor analysis was carried out by a method of factorization of the main axis (PAF), oblique rotation Oblimin; 5 factors were allocated: involvement, meaningfulness, internalizing, independence, positivity. The final model of the author's questionnaire was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis, priority was given to the higher order model, CFI = .900, SRMR = .047 and RMSEA = .032 fit indices. Retest reliability was assessed using correlation analysis (by Spearman): on the general personality scale p = .850, inclusion p= 0.867, meaningfulness p = .603, internalizing p = 690, positivity p = .728, independence p = .554, significance level of all indicators p < .001. Discriminant validity showed that the scales of the developed questionnaire were not related to other techniques that were not part of the personality construct. Factor validity was obtained by Principal components method using Oblimin's oblique rotation: the scale load of the “Meaningfulness” scale was .809; “Inclusion” scale .592; “Independence” scale .756; “Internality” scale .574; “Positivity” scale .610. The data were statistically processed using SPSS Statistics 23, Jamovi 2.2.5 and RStudio. The developed questionnaire “Personality Potential” is a reliable psychodiagnostic tool and can be recommended for testing the components of personality potential.

Творче конструювання особистості в автобіографічній повісті (на матеріалі творів «Хризантеми» Уляни Кравченко та «Десь на дні мого серця» Василя Лопати)

The article analyzes the tools of creative personality construction in two autobiographical novels, Chrysanthemums by by Ulyana Kravchenko and Somewhere at the Bottom of My Heart by Vasyl Lopata, and the thematic and narrative features of these works, as well as the importance of including documentary elements in the plot, are clarified. It is determined that the tools that helped to depict the formation of the author's creative personality in an autobiographical story were a distanced view of oneself, both in appearance and in the inner world, the use of humor, and emphasis on important stages. There is a difference in the narrative style – Ulyana Kravchenko focuses on the goal of developing intellectually since childhood, evaluates herself according to her readiness to serve the people, to form herself according to artistic laws, so the plot is often interrupted by lyrical inserts and reflections, although she simultaneously supplements it with historical and portrait essays. He compensates for his silence and loneliness in childhood by realizing it in music and his first attempts at writing, and explains the lack of words already when writing his memoirs by his own emotionality, creating an aura of mystery and understatement. V. Lopata introduces the main narrator into the story for a different purpose: to provide textual explanations, comment on the narrator-child's story, and express a short future continuation of the described events, the author much less often focuses on the process of recollection itself, having clearly defined for himself its purpose: to find out the origins of his own creative formation, which has already taken place (Ulyana Kravchenko writes about it as a process). The fragment of the diary, introduced into the textual space of the work, demonstrates the naivety and vulnerability of the protagonist in the conditions of orphanhood and war, and shows the boy's tendency to perceive even everyday events deeply in order to later convey them in his work. Through the adult narrator, the childhood traumas are closed and «liberation» from the described situations of childhood powerlessness is projected into the future.

The Role of Illness Perceptions in Dyspnoea-Related Fear in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Dyspnoea is often the most distressing symptom described by people with a chronic respiratory condition. The traditional biomedical model of neuromechanical uncoupling that explains the physiological basis for dyspnoea is well accepted. However, in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), measures that are linked with neuromechanical uncoupling are poorly related to the restriction in activity during daily life attributed to dyspnoea. This suggests that activity restriction that results from dyspnoea is influenced by factors other than expiratory airflow limitation and dynamic pulmonary hyperinflation, such as the ways people perceive, interpret and respond to this sensation. This review introduces the common-sense model as a framework to understand the way an individual's lay beliefs surrounding sensations can lead to these sensations being perceived as a health threat and how this impacts their emotional and behavioural responses. The aim is to provide insight into the nuances that can shape an individual's personal construct of dyspnoea and offer practical suggestions to challenge unhelpful beliefs and facilitate cognitive re-structuring as a pathway to reduce distress and optimise health behaviours and outcomes.

Construing the COVID-19 Pandemic in the UK: A Qualitative Study

The COVID-19 pandemic and measures used to contain it have had a significant psychosocial impact. This paper reports a study of its psychological effects in 108 UK residents who completed an online survey between the first and second waves of the pandemic asking them to describe the main difficulties that they experienced and how they coped with these, what they had learnt from the pandemic, and their anticipations of a post-pandemic future. Deductive thematic content analysis of the results in terms of diagnostic constructs of personal construct psychology identified overarching themes of transitions, with themes of anxiety, threat, loss of role, sadness, contempt, and stress; strategies, with themes of constriction, hostility, and individual coping strategies; reconstruction, including revision of superordinate constructs, revision of subordinate constructs, and no reconstruction; and anticipations, with themes of recovery of certainty and structure, constriction, dilation, aggression, and no anticipation. Two contrasting patterns were observed, one characterized by failure to reconstrue, hostility, and/or constriction, and the other by revision of superordinate constructs, dilation, and/or aggression.

Мотивационно-потребностные аспекты личности, вовлеченной в террористическую деятельность

<p>Despite significant measures taken by society, the problem of terrorism remains relevant to the entire global community due to its totality, cruelty, pronounced psychological impact on people, and its anti-human orientation. In this regard, research aimed at identifying the overt and hidden motives of terrorist actions, psychological and social factors shaping the unique personality traits of terrorists, and in particular, motivational and need-based aspects of personality that underlie terrorist activity, is of special value. However, such studies are complicated by objective specific circumstances that prevent many researchers from conducting comprehensive research on target samples of individuals involved in terrorist activity. The aim of the study is to examine the socio-psychological attitudes in the motivational-need sphere of personality in individuals involved in terrorist activity, as well as to analyze the psychosocial factors contributing to the formation of these personality constructs. Methods: individual personal examination using a clinical-demographic card specifically adapted for the purposes of the study, and also the diagnosis of socio-psychological attitudes of personality in the motivational-need sphere (using O.F. Potemkina's method).Two samples participated in the study. The first sample - experimental, included 32 individuals - persons under investigation for committing terrorist-related crimes; the second sample - control, included 31 individuals who had no legal problems. All examined are men in the age range from 19 to 45 years. The study results indicate that in this category of individuals, socio-psychological attitudes aimed at altruism and freedom dominate, with low values of egoism and money orientation indicators. It was found that individuals involved in terrorist activity have lower indicators of the formation of such motivational attitudes as process orientation, result orientation, work, freedom, and power, compared to ordinary citizens.</p>

A experiência materna no cotidiano de cuidados dos bebês de risco no domicílio

This article proposes to present the maternal experience in the daily routine of caring for babies at-risk. Thematic oral histories were carried out with three mothers of babies attended at a rehabilitation service in the city of São Paulo, selected for convenience. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, textualized and transcreated and, after thematic analysis, two empirical categories were identified: (i) Going home: the first care between joy and fear; (ii) Care at home, the referrals and the personal construction of the network. The study concluded that the arrival of the baby in the post-discharge household was a moment of joy and fear and that the mothers assumed the role of almost exclusive caregiver, having to deal with the instability of the baby's health condition. In addition to routine care, mothers performed specialized procedures and outpatient follow-up of infants. The precarious supply of programs and policies to support post-discharge care required mothers to undertake the personal construction of a care network. Thus, the daily care of at-risk babies at home proved to be an exhausting experience for women, although perceived as pleasant and full of affection.

Spontaneous Hierotopia in Modern Myth-Making: The Case of Arkaim

The phenomenon of spontaneous hierotopia is considered as a process of spontaneous sacralization of places, which, according to the participants of this activity, have supernatural properties. Its development is conditioned, on the one hand, by the effect of the image of the sacred rooted in the cultural consciousness, on the other hand, by modern socio-cultural problems, in relation to which spontaneous hierotopia acts as a compensating factor. This phenomenon has insufficiently reflected positive potential embodied in a set of vital functions. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze the peculiarities of spontaneous hierotopia, which expresses the real needs of the subjects involved in this activity, who act outside the institutional systems, including confessional ones. Therefore, their cultural creation is characterized by eclecticism and bricolage way of creating sacred artefacts, which is typical for spontaneous myth — making in general.The autonomy and uncontrollability of this phenomenon to the generally accepted institutional systems generates a sharply critical reaction from secular (scientific) and religious (traditional-confessional) authorities. The analysis shows the lack of objectivity of such criticism: claims to the unscientific nature of spontaneous hierotopia are unfounded due to the fact that it is based on mythological imagination; the inconsistency with canonical attitudes is an irreversible consequence of personal and creative situational construction of sacred objects.Concretization of the peculiarities of spontaneous hierotopia, made on the example of the archeological monument Arkaim, allowed to reveal the main regularities of the process of spontaneous sacralization and to establish the urgency of the problems reflected in it. Specific features of the formation of sacralized loci are analyzed. The special atmosphere of tolerance, peacefulness and positive interaction inherent in such places due to the totality of their subjective and objective properties is characterized.

Self-reflexivity, Recessivity and the Evolution of Psychology

This paper supports the idea that the epistemology of Psychology had a fairly progressive line of development, and it was not only an incessant swing between the primacy of two opposing perspectives: from out-side in and from in-side out. Although the recessive dynamics of these two metaphysical principles of Person Constructs Reality and Reality Constructs Person (Buss, 1978) was the critical marker of any major paradigm change from the history of Psychology, the development of psychological thinking has presupposed, in addition, a general evolutive path. I will demonstrate that these combined movements of alternation and progression form a unique complex sense of epistemological development of Psychology accompanying the corresponding development of human personality level of self-reflection. In contrast to pessimistic viewpoints suggesting that the reflexivity inherent in this dual paradigm shift consigns the field of Psychology to an eternal return, it actually elevates the evolution of human self-reflective consciousness to a collective plane of self-reflexivity. The final considerations are made about the current mainstream of psychological research and unreflexively practices detrimental to the substantiation of a Humanistic Psychological Science, which become vital in the Age of artificial intelligence.

From Psychological Distress and Distrust to Conspiracy Beliefs: A Constructivist Study of Negative Phenomena of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Conspiracy beliefs (CBs) occured on a large scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research has identified numerous factors associated with CBs at both the individual level (e.g., cognitive bias, distress) and the social level (e.g., distrust). However, emphasizing either individual or social factors leads to incompatible accounts of CBs. Based on the framework of personal construct psychology, we propose an integrative account of CBs. A precursor of CBs is a distressing situation (e.g., the pandemic) that invalidates individuals’ construct systems. If a person prevents his or her construct system from being invalidated in a hostile way (i.e., extorts its validity), he or she becomes more skeptical and suspicious. At the social level, these processes are intensified by a decrease in sociality, which is associated with distrust and leads to the elaboration of CBs. Using a mixed-design approach, we conducted a study involving a sample of 23 participants who endorsed CBs to varying degrees. We found that participants with elaborated CBs experienced distress at the onset of the pandemic. They also exhibited the strategy of hostility and developed distrustful relationships with people who expressed opposing opinions about the pandemic. The results indicate that hostility could be the key process underlying CBs.

Empowering Youth to Combat Malicious Deepfakes and Disinformation: An Experiential and Reflective Learning Experience Informed by Personal Construct Theory

The potential to weaponize deepfakes is growing at an alarming rate. The study aimed to explore how education can help youth develop resilience to malicious deepfakes and the ability to counter disinformation, regardless of context. Sixteen youth between the ages of 18 and 24 participated in a 9-h, cutting-edge, experiential, and reflective learning experience on deepfakes and disinformation informed by personal construct theory (PCT). Participants experienced the creation of deepfakes and assessed their ability to counter disinformation. They delved into their own construct systems and reflected on the genesis of their vulnerabilities. They moved from being unfamiliar with the deepfake phenomenon to becoming empowered digital citizens, motivated to develop their skills in assessing the validity of online information and resisting manipulation regardless of its source. The study provides recommendations for more targeted education about deepfakes and disinformation for youth. Educators, curriculum developers, and policymakers can use these findings to ensure that a well-equipped generation of digital citizens protects society from the growing disinformation plague. With this proof of concept, the next step is to bring this approach to a larger number of youth and contribute to the fight against malicious deepfakes, while developing strategies to integrate PCT-informed learning experiences into education.