Psychological Landscape Research Articles

Exploring the landscape of modern academic psychology: Finding and filling the holes.

Like any other domain of human activity, psychology has its fads and fashions. One consequence of fads is an overconcentration of resources on specific problems or approaches, which leaves other important problems or approaches (holes) underappreciated and understudied. This article is primarily about different factors (such as negativity bias, polarization of positions, focus on internal causes of behavior, dedication to a narrow view of what science is) that result in holes and about explorations of some of these holes that have interested the author. Psychologists should look more in the holes left behind by current enthusiasms.

Principles and methods in landscape ecology: toward a science of landscape

Prefaces.- Glossary and Acronyms.- 1. 1.1 Introduction. 1.2 The contribution of different disciplines to the creation of a paradigmatic framework in landscape ecology. 1.3 Definitions of landscape (A gallery). 1.4 An epistemological approach to the landscape. 1.4.1 The nature of landscape. 1.4.2 The role of landscape. 1.4.2.1 Landscape as domain. 1.4.2.2 Landscape as system. 1.4.2.3 Lanscape as unit. 1.5 The description of landscape. 1.5.1 The 'ecological landscape'. 1.5.1.1 Principles of landscape classification. 1.5.2 The cognitive landscape. 1.5.2.1 Spacing - The perception of the landscape. 1.5.2.2 Space and memory. 1.5.2.3 Embodiment and cognition. 1.5.2.4 Safety, aesthetic landscape, amenity. 1.5.2.5 Topographic prominence, the visual landscape. 1.5.2.6 The psychological landscape. 1.5.2.7 Mistery in landscape. 1.5.2.8 Behavioral ecology and landscape ecology. 1.5.2.9 Information landscape. 1.5.2.10 The eco-field hypothesis. 1.5.2.11 The sound-scape. 1.5.2.12 Animal movements in the landscape. 1.6 Summary. 1.7 Suggested readings. 1.8 References.- 2. Theories and models Iicorporated in the landscape ecology framework. 2.1 Introduction. 2.2 Complexity. 2.2.1 The emergence of complexity. 2.3 Information. 2.3.1 The information as universal coin. 2.3.2 Information as measure of probability. 2.3.3 Information-processing performance of ecosystems. 2.4 Cognition and autopoiesis. 2.5 Semiotic, bio and eco-semiotic. 2.6 The hierarchy theory and the structure of the landscape. 2.7 The percolation theory. 2.8 The metapopulation. 2.8.1 Introduction. 2.8.2 Dispersion. 2.8.3 Examples of metapopulation structure. 2.8.4 Metapopulation and conservation biology. 2.9 The systems source-sink. 2.9.1 Definition. 2.9.2 Implications of the source-sink model. 2.9.3 Pseudo-sinks. 2.9.4 Traps. 2.9.5 Source-sink in time or multiple source-sink model. 2.9.6 Stable maladaptation. 2.9.7 Source-sink dynamic and conservation issues. 2.9.8 Concluding remarks. 2.10 Suggested readings. 2.11 References.- 3. Scaling patterns and processes across landscapes. 3.1 Introduction. 3.2 Moving across scales. 3.3 Some definitions. 3.4 Scaling the landscape. 3.5 Change of scale perception. 3.6 The multiscale option. 3.7 The importance of the parameters at the different scales. 3.8 Grain size and scaling. 3.9 Assessing landscape scale of analysis. 3.10 Examples of scales in landscape and in ecological related disciplines. 3.10.1 Scaling the quaternary landscape. 3.10.2 Scaling patterns: The catchment scale. 3.10.3 Scaling abiotic processes: Hydrological processes and scales. 3.10.4 Scaling evidences in animals. 3.11 Suggested readings. 3.12. References.- 4. Emerging processes in the landscape. 4.1 Introduction. 4.2 Disturbance. 4.2.1 Introduction. 4.2.2 Snow cover, an example of abiotic disturbances. 4.2.3 Human disturbances. 4.2.4 Gap disturbances in forest. 4.2.5 Gaps in savanna. 4.2.6 Fire disturbance in dry landscapes. 4.2.7 Pathogens disturbance. 4.2.8 Animal disturbance. 4.3 Fragmentation. 4.3.1. Introduction. 4.3.2 Scale and patterns of fragmentation. 4.3.3 Community composition and diversity in fragments. 4.3.4 Species, guilds and fragmentation. 4.3.5 Habitat fragmentation and extinction. 4.3.6 Predation and fragmentation. 4.3.7 Island size and isolation, a key to understand fragmentation. 4.3.8 Habitat fragmentation and animal behaviour. 4.3.9 Measuring the effects of fragmentation. 4.3.10 The complexity and unpredictability of fragmented landscape. 4.4 Connectivity, connectedness and corridors. 4.4.1 Introduction. 4.4.2 Corridors: Structure and functions. 4.5 Soil landscape and movement of water and nutrients across landscape. 4.5.1 Introduction. 4.5.2 Soil landscape. 4.5.3 The role of riparian vegetation in nutrient dynamics. 4.5.4 Origin, composition and flux of dissolved organic carbon in a small watershed. 4.5.5 Leaf litter movements in the landscape. 4.5.6 Spatial patterns of soil nutr

G. Stanley Hall's Contribution to Science, Practice and Policy: The Child Study, Parent Education, and Child Welfare Movements.

G. Stanley Hall influenced several social movements that had great implications for child wellbeing: the Child Study, Parent Education, and Child Welfare Movements. However, while Hall laid much of the foundation for the field of scientific child study and policy-relevant research, his legacy is virtually nonexistent. The current article reviews the life and contributions of G. Stanley Hall, and the dual role Hall played in history as a revered leader of the Child Study Movement and a controversial figure in the landscape of early child psychology.

Agricultural Intensification: Will Land Spared from Farming be Land Spared for Nature?

How can intensive agricultural systems be designed so that they have fewer and smaller impacts on surrounding ecosystems? This is not a new challenge, but its importance to conservation—particularly in developing regions—has become apparent in recent years. This challenge is a major part of the ongoing effort to provide for the needs of a growing human population and at the same time sustain the life-support systems of the planet (Vitousek et al. 1997; National Resource Council 1999). To many in the conservation community, a growing human population makes the goal of harmonizing food production and conservation all but impossible. That psychological landscape has changed fundamentally, however— the end of human population growth is within sight over most of Earth (the peak population will be realized sooner and at a lower level with intensified, committed effort). Nevertheless, population will continue to grow for some decades. In many areas, standards of living and levels of nutrition will (and should) increase. What are the best ways to meet the dual challenges of agricultural production and conservation? Many agronomists suggest that the best way to meet those challenges is through intensifying agriculture and increasing yields on the “best” lands. That way, the necessary production can be obtained on the smallest area of land and more land can be “saved for nature” (Waggoner 1995). Intensification leading to increased yields per hectare provided most of the last doubling of agricultural production—and the potential for another doubling in yields now attracts both debate and research. An alternative pathway by which agricultural production and conservation could be harmonized is wildlife-friendly farming, which involves designing agricultural systems so that they support important components of biological diversity within the agricultural landscape itself. Recent analyses by Green et al. (2005) and Balmford et al. (2005) evaluated these alternatives regionally and

The Use of Heritage and Environmental Justice in Urban Regeneration: The Case for Constitution Hill, Johannesburg

The South African cityscape has been redeveloped through precinct planning and urban regeneration initiatives. Various conceptual planning tools like sustainable development have re-shaped these cities—this study tested the potential of heritage, and environmental justice as means for driving this urban regeneration. The paper determines the potential links between urban regeneration, sustainable development, environmental justice and heritage—through testing the success of these interventions by assessing shifts in the psychological landscape of the city. Secondly, the paper traces the extent, to which users of these spaces buy into and support objectives of the regeneration interventions. Through interviews with all stakeholders at Constitution Hill, the study determines the extent to which visitors' understandings of urban regeneration, heritage and environmental justice influences the physical landscape. Conceptually, an environmental justice approach informing regeneration is not fully implemented at Constitution Hill, affecting the role of environmental justice in the building of future sustainable cities.

Training in Family Psychology: A Competencies‐Based Approach

After providing an overview of the family psychology landscape and the competencies-based movement in professional psychology, attention is paid to eight family-specific competencies in the following areas: the application of scientific knowledge to practice, psychological assessment, psychological intervention, consultation and interprofessional collaboration, supervision, professional development, ethics and legal issues, and individual and cultural diversity. Effective strategies for providing family-focused education and training to psychology trainees at the doctoral, internship, and postdoctoral levels and to psychologists through continuing professional education in these core competency domains are provided.

Psicodiagnóstico e psicoterapia dimensões e paradoxos

Este ensaio examina as relações entre psicodiagnóstico e psicoterapia, pressupondo que a prática da psicoterapia implica duas dimensões não coincidentes. Por um lado, é uma prática social reconhecida e regulamentada, uma dimensão pública. Por outro lado, é um certo tipo de relação entre pessoas, uma dimensão privada. O ensaio começa abordando a relação entre a prática do psicodiagnóstico e o debate teórico - sobre a doença mental e seu tratamento - que tem dominado o panorama da Psicologia e da psiquiatria no século XX. Em seguida, apresenta rapidamente a teoria dos tipos lógicos, assentando as bases das análises que se seguirão. Então, examina a prática psicodiagnóstica e psicoterápica em busca de problemas causados pela tensão entre as determinações impostas por aquelas duas dimensões. Finalmente, argumenta por um debate coletivo que permita a construção e o progressivo aperfeiçoamento dos parâmetros que devem balizar a prática do psicodiagnóstico e da psicoterapia.

PSYCHOSOCIAL FACTORS IN PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC KIDNEY DISEASE: Life After Transplantation: New Transitions in Quality of Life and Psychological Distress

ABSTRACTIndividuals with kidney failure often elect to undergo kidney transplantation because they believe that they will be more active and return a sense of normality to their lives with a functioning transplant. Therefore it is important to assess whether these objectives are being met. To do so, we can examine health‐related quality of life (HRQOL) in transplant recipients. A number of tools have been used for this purpose, including general HRQOL instruments such as the 36‐item short‐form health survey (SF‐36) and transplant‐specific surveys such as the Kidney Transplant Questionnaire. In general, HRQOL assessments improve with transplantation in functional and physical domains. However, many factors actually influence HRQOL in a negative way, including comorbid conditions, kidney function per se, rejection episodes and hospitalizations, employment status, and adverse effects of medications. Perceived physical appearance, issues related to sexuality, stress, anxiety, and even guilt complicate the emotional and psychological landscape after transplantation. This constellation of factors may be predictive of posttransplant life events, such as resumption of employment. Posttransplant HRQOL may be exceedingly important in understanding the issues related to adherence with treatment regimens, especially in the pediatric and adolescent transplant populations. HRQOL is now established as an important issue after transplantation. Nonetheless, shortcomings still exist in our ability to address HRQOL after transplantation. In particular, more study of patient‐centered interventions is needed. The use of standardized methodologies for patient assessment could improve our ability to identify if such patient‐centered interventions actually succeed across populations, and help us further address the panoply of factors encompassed within posttransplant HRQOL.

Many Ways to Remember: Layered Time in Mora's House of Houses

That Pat Mora arranges her memoir House of Houses according to a Western secular calendar seems apparent at first browse. At first reading, however, this orderly notion of a representative year breaks down, for book begins not with January or even with a preface or introduction, but with a title chapter. Immediately, therefore, essentiality of Western calendar comes into question. The title chapter establishes that Mora will shed restrictions of time and logic: her is a dream in which dead walk alongside living, past is simultaneous with present, and future is so certain that she can name grandchildren yet to be conceived. Why, then, should Mora impose a calendar at all? An answer is suggested in past comments by Mora herself. During an interview conducted by Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak and Nancy Sullivan, Mora reiterates her fascination with concepts of and geography as they help define a person's psychological landscape, a zone she refers to as internal rooms, issues of or the world of dreams, mental space (145). In House of Houses, she interjects time into definition of this region. In response to her own query, How much does our know that we know not? (2), she declares that inner body, of self, knows all because psyche remembers all. Through generations, she writes, sun, wind, rain, hands, voices, and dreams create and alter this place pregnant with possibilities in a landscape as familiar to me as my body (4). Fluid and accepting, inner carries one's knowledge as well as one's still unsettled questions. Within it, people, stories, fears, joys, doubts, and certainties of many lives rise bidden and unbidden to surround, interpret, and absorb a new experience. This house is repository for all that creates a sense of heritage, belonging, and identity. Mora further concludes that people both influence and are influenced by psychological construct in which they are raised. The of self is a living, reciprocating entity impervious to time, a grouping that nest[s] like bodies inside one another (3). The notions that time is concentric rather than linear and that all of our past is simultaneously available to us are reiterated throughout House of Houses by foregrounding of landscape and generations. Insisting that we internalize our pasts, Mora writes, the landscape imprints itself; and when we can't see world that is home ... we yearn to see shapes and vistas that live in our interior (25). Viewing her family as a house in her imagination, she describes a home of concentric design. Orchards surround this home, which itself presents a smooth adobe wall to outside but allows guests to penetrate increasingly more intimate zones until they reach very heart of family. In this house, rooms open onto a covered porch, which in turn opens onto a garden, which in turn surrounds family life source, a central fountain. The internal sphere is a separate world of flowing water, living greenery, shifting shade, and timeless intimacy: a personal space, womb of family. Investigating such a presents a significant writing challenge. Mora's readers, receptive as they may be, live outside her and must be invited in before they can learn its geography. Even as they learn to accept cumulative presence of people and influences in her inner world, they need to know which characters and events preceded others. Mora must consolidate her extended family even while she preserves family's numerous personalities; their ethnic, social, religious, and political diversity; their sometimes polarized generations; their gender issues; and their levels of information and misinformation. She has to demonstrate that inner allows living and dead to exist simultaneously, for line between corporeality and spirituality is hazy there. …

Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (review)

Reviewed by: Pyschosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body Elizabeth Green Musselman Elizabeth A. Wilson . Pyschosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2004. 125 pp. Western feminism has a history of ambivalence about how to handle its cultures' entrenched commitment to mind-body dualism, a dualism that has typically imagined women and femininity (and the poor and racial "others") as having more affinity with the somatic side of the divide. Some feminists have argued, echoing François Poullain de la Barre, that the mind has no sex. In the attempt to argue for the equal opportunity for reason, the body became a rather embarrassing and heavy piece of baggage. Some feminists, particularly during the second wave, have hoped to avoid this problem by trying to re-value embodiment. The danger with this position is that it might appear to be giving [End Page 347] up the fight: if women are to revel anew in their bodies, who will challenge male dominance in the world of the mind? In her fascinating and innovative book, Elizabeth A. Wilson cuts through this Gordian knot with a scalpel edge. Wilson turns her critical eye specifically on the conversation—or rather, lack thereof—between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Neuroscientists, she says, have committed themselves to a nervous system without psyche, while psychoanalysts (feminist and otherwise) have committed themselves to a non-biologized psyche. Bridging the gap left by this disciplinary specialization and uncritical acceptance of dualism, Wilson argues, provides surprisingly liberatory possibilities. She begins with the radical notion that biological reductionism—long a bogeyman of humanist scholarship—might not necessarily lead to a "static, incoherent, or critically useless" understanding of the body and psyche (3). "For too long," she writes, "the neurosciences have been the target of feminist censure when they could be active, innovative contributors to feminist scholarship" (13). Wilson equally faults biomedical specialists for failing to recognize fully how social, psychological, and other environmental processes can integrate themselves into biological processes. To bridge the divide, Wilson employs her most creative maneuver, namely to examine the historical and current scientific literature on the nervous system beyond the brain. Psychology, she says, has mistakenly focused on cognitive function and has ignored the equally important psychological events happening in the stomach, in reflex action, or in our "reptile brain." Wilson proposes a "theory of the psyche that is more extensive and less attached to the primacy of rationality, self-control, good judgment, and sound appraisal. If the psychological landscape could be more broadly surveyed, if, for example, it could be seen to be composed of an innately affective nervous system, then psychological events could be more readily integrated into biomedical accounts" (41). In the process of making this argument, she provides truly fresh readings of Freud, Darwin, Simon LeVay, and other biological reductionists, showing that their work need not lead to static or anti-feminist (read: hopelessly reductive) visions of the neurological body. A careful reading of Freud's early work on gastric pain, for example, shows that the enteric nervous system (which handles digestion) develops profound psychological responses that cannot be explained simply by arguing that the ENS takes cues slavishly from the more cognitive central nervous system. In fact, Wilson's argument for the complexity of biological reductionism proves so convincing that I wondered why she continues to use the concept of psyche at all. Wilson depicts the body, even in its seemingly most automatic functions, as so vital, so complex, that the additional metaphysics of a psyche seems to defeat the purpose. For example, Wilson concludes her chapter on the gut with the point that "the nervous system extends well beyond the skull, and as it so travels through the body it takes the psyche with it" (47). After providing such a persuasive argument that the psyche is not ontologically distinct from the body, but rather emergent from its complex functioning, language like that I have just quoted is jarring. Four of the six chapters in this brief book have appeared elsewhere, and even here they still could be read independently of each other. The title indicates that the book will contain more direct feminist analysis than it actually does. The...

Time Is Everywhere: Review of H. Helfrich, (Ed.), Time and Mind II: Information Processing Perspectives.

Is Everywhere: Review of H. Helfrich, (Ed.), and Mind II: Information Perspectives has been a topic of intense interest to psychologists from very beginnings of field, and it continues to be focus of much experimental and theoretical work. The reason for this continued interest is that time is everywhere in psychological landscape. Temporal phenomena represent a core clement of virtually all psychological processes. All behaviour, from macro level of actions, perceptions, and thoughts, to micro level of brain function, neurological networks, and responses of individual neurons, occurs in time. These processes have their own temporal dynamics, they operate on their own time scales, and they affect timing of other processes and mechanisms. This wide-ranging character of time has drawn attention of many different specialists, and Helfrich's book represents a sampling of some of these perspectives. The book is based on symposium Time and Mind 02, held at University of Hildesheim in September 2002. The contributions represent a mixed format, ranging from straight experimental reports to literature reviews to descriptions of elaborate theoretical models. The 12 chapters are divided evenly into two parts, Time as an Object of Information Processing and Time as a Constituent of Information Processing. Part 1: as an Object of Information Researchers in time perception probably will find first part of book to be of greater interest and relevance. The first three chapters relate to Scalar Expectancy Theory of timing. Scalar Expectancy Theory (SET), originally derived from animal timing literature, describes a multicomponent timing model involving a biologically driven pacemaker-accumulator mechanism, a memory component, and a decision-making component. Chapter 1 (Simultaneous Temporal Processing by Russell M. Church, Paulo Guilhardi, Richard Keen, Mika Maclnnis, & Kimberly Kirkpatrick) consists of a review of work on simultaneous timing in laboratory animals. The authors describe segmented fixed-interval procedure, in which fixed interval includes stimulus events that serve to subdivide interval into smaller parts. Although procedure has been used to test hypotheses related to chaining of responses and secondary reinforcers, its major impact is that the fixed-interval procedure makes it clear that they (animals) are able to time two intervals simultaneously (p. 12). The authors argue that simultaneous timing is also evident in numerous conditioning procedures, including Pavlovian delay and trace conditioning, and in effects of variations in trial and intertriai intervals. They suggest that modifications to SET, such as incorporating another set of independent pacemaker-memory-decision components, may be required to account for results. However, human research on multiple timing (not discussed by Church et al.) may require more substantial changes to SET than those envisioned here. Indeed, researchers in recent years have adapted some of standard animal research paradigms used to test SET in an effort to evaluate theory in terms of human timing. In Chapter 2 Applying Scalar Timing Model to Human Psychology: Progress and Challenges, John H. Wearden provides a well-organized review of this work. Wearden points out that theory faces certain challenges when applied to human timing, especially memory and decision components of model. Other compatibility issues arise with shift from animal to human experimentation, including role of attention in timing and implementation of different time judgment methodologies. One of chief benefits of application of SET to human studies, in Wearden's view, is that it brings back emphasis of an internal timer/clock mechanism to human timing. Richard A. Block's contribution (Chapter 3, Psychological Timing Without a Timer: The Roles of Attention and Memory) is a good companion piece to Wearden's paper. …

Geographic Patterns in Customer Service and Satisfaction: An Empirical Investigation

When firms’ customers are located in geographically dispersed areas, it can be difficult to manage service quality because its relative importance is likely to vary spatially. This article shows how addressing such spatial aspects of satisfaction data can improve management's ability to implement programs aimed at enhancing service quality. Specifically, managers can identify areas of high service responsiveness, that is, areas in which overall satisfaction is low but customers are highly responsive to improvements in service quality. The authors estimate the spatial patterns using geographically weighted regression, a technique that accounts for spatial dependence in the variables. They apply this methodology to a large national sample of automobile customers served by a network of dealerships across the United States. The authors also investigate the extent to which factors related to the physical and psychological landscape explain the importance that people in different regions place on dealership service and vehicle quality.

Historical Data for Health Inequalities Research: a Research Note

In 1999–2000, a pilot study was conducted to assess the feasibility of using local historical archives and oral histories to map historical factors that may be important in understanding contemporary variations in health. Focusing on housing clearances in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the pilot study drew on a wide range of materials (documentary and oral) to explore how changes to local housing impacted upon the local social and psychological landscape. This research note considers methodological issues relevant to the use of documentary and oral history resources and illustrates the value of the historical resources we identified. We suggest that, on the basis of this pilot research, future explorations of the link between places and inequalities in health should incorporate an historical analysis.

Ethics, professionalisation and the future landscape of educational psychology

AbstractThis article considers the status of ethics in relation to the emerging profession of psychology, and how the former has not kept pace with the latter. Starting from an examination of the scope of ethics, it is argued that ethical analysis informs more than individual encounters between clients and practitioners and has important applications both for the culture of educational psychology and the organisations in which psychologists work. As part of the process of professionalisation, the next five years are likely to be characterised by lengthened training for educational psychologists (EPs), an increase in specialisms and strategic tasks, and a harnessing of EPs’ energies to national agendas, such as school improvement and the raising of achievement. However, there are competing claims on the territory known as “educational psychology” and one prediction is that the professional culture will need to sustain different roles: “constrained” practitioners who seek to preserve traditional, individual client-based roles, and “complexity” professionals whose focus is more strategic, concerned with organisational development. Whatever shifts in practice occur, there is an urgent need for the profession to become more ethically minded.

Review of Exploring existential meaning: Optimizing human development across the life span.

GARY T. REKER AND KERRY CHAMBERLAIN Exploring Existential Meaning. Optimizing Human Development Across Life Span Thousand Oaks, cA: Sage Publications, 2000, 237 pages. (ISBN 0-7619-0994-X, us$31.95, Softcover) Reviewed by WILLIAM E. SMYTHE In summer of 2000, first International Conference on Personal Meaning took place in Vancouver. The theme of conference was Searching for Meaning in New Millennium. Conference Chair Paul Wong of Trinity Western University declared conference to be historymaking endeavour, especially as it served as launching pad for International Network on Personal Meaning (INPM), home for what is now dubbed positive revolution in psychology. Those of us who attended this conference came away with distinct impression that something was emerging on disciplinary landscape of psychology. The topic of which had long been on back burners of academic psychology, was coming into foreground again. The personal quest for meaning in could no longer be dismissed as naive preoccupation of popular psychology but could be treated as serious issue for psychological research and practice. These impressions are certainly reinforced by contributions to this volume, edited by Gary Reker and Kerry Chamberlain. As James Birren writes in Forward to volume, new doorways of behavioral and social sciences are opening that are encouraging traffic in ideas and especially about issues previously considered off limits to scientific inquiry because of their theological, religious or metaphysical implications. The form of personal meaning that constitutes main focus for volume is existential characterized by editors in terms of attempts to understand how events in fit into larger context, which involves both a sense of coherence (order, reason for existence) and sense of purpose (mission in life, direction) (p. 1). This they distinguish from implicit the attachment of personal significance to objects or events in life (p. 1). Although existential meaning may be relatively as topic for systematic psychological research, it is rooted in traditions of thought that date back over half century, including work of existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre, of literary scholars such as Bakhtin, logotherapy of Frank], and other influences. At first, these various traditions may seem somewhat discordant. The stark nihilism of existential throwness seems to stand in sharp contrast with Frankl's will to meaning, for example. However, common thread that runs through all historical traditions of existential indeed through modernity itself, is notion of meaning in as personal achievement rather than something simply given in structure of world. But if existential meaning is in this way personal achievement, it is by no means wholly idiosyncratic one. One assumption entailed by taking existential meaning seriously as research topic is that it must have some general features and constraints that can be discovered and systematically formulated. The present volume, among other recent work in this area, is predicated on this assumption. The editors give no details in their Introduction to volume concerning how this particular collaborative undertaking came about. However, they have managed to gather together contributions of an impressive array of internationally recognized researchers in this area. This is remarkably well-- integrated collection of essays, given usual standards for edited volumes. The contributed chapters, sandwiched between editors' brief Introduction and their longer integrative chapter at end, are organized into distinct sections addressing, respectively, theoretical and conceptual issues, empirical research, and applications and interventions. Part I of volume examines theoretical and conceptual issues in study of existential focusing primarily on its historical and philosophical roots. …

A Conference That Couldn't Take Place

Those who are acquainted with Vygotsky's theory probably know that his publications were blacklisted in the Soviet Union from 1936 until 1956. Regrettably though, only a few adherents of Vygotsky in the West are informed about the great pains taken by the Russian Vygotskians to get hold of a firm position in the local psychological landscape between 1956 and the origin of the perestroika at the end of the 1990s. With this in mind, we here present Vasilii Davydov's vivid account of an endeavor to organize an open conference on Vygotsky's theory at the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1981. Ultimately, the Communist Party officials prohibited this conference. The story involved is actually an excerpt from an unedited audiotaped interview I had with Davydov in my residence on June 13, 1994. Davydov spoke in a flawless, sparkling Russian. Therefore, it was a great challenge to translate his narrative adequately. Elina Lampert-Shepel and I have done our best to render the subtleties that reverberate in Davydov's account of the event concerned.

The Russian Perspective on the Psychological Landscape

The Russian Perspective on the Psychological Landscape

Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam: A Jewish-Arab School for Peace

All students in Israel confronte with cultural difference and intergroup conflict and violence owing to the ongoing struggle between Jews and Arabs in Israel, and in the Middle East more generally. This inquiry provides an overview of the lived experiences of a number of students and facilitators who have been involved in a peace-education program sponsored by a school in a small village in Israel. Through the sharing of pedagogical experiences, as well as personal and professional stories, a new paradigm for peacemaking is created. This study is an exploration, by means of these peace-workshop encounters, into the desolate psychological landscape that Jews and Arabs must navigate, and into their emotional journey towards breaking down the barriers of fear, hate, and mistrust that have saturated their daily existence. The main goal of this study was to collect and examine data from the participants in this conflict-resolution educational endeavor through in-depth interviewing and participant observation in order to highlight the multiplicity of tensions, failed hopes, dreams, and traumas that are pivotal within the configuration of their personal and professional lives. The author explores the social and psychological complexities inherent in this educational odyssey towards peaceful coexistence, and discusses the sites of struggle and negotiation in the “border dialogues” that the students and facilitators gradually created for themselves in their search to give equal expression to their national identities. She examines the epistemologically complex implications of understanding conflict resolution as a dialogical relation, the purpose of which is to create a geography of inclusion within the context of an Israeli educational setting.

History of Humanistic Psychology in Czechoslovakia

An historical study of humanistic psychology in Czechoslovakia during the Communist interregnum of the Cold War is presented. It is argued that the Marxist milieu and censorship affected the introduction of humanistic psychology to the psychological landscape of Czechoslovakia. The shape of humanistic psychology and techniques used to evade Marxist censorship is discussed, along with the reasons Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers received much attention from Czechoslovak psychologists. Reflections and criticism of humanistic psychology are explored. Two special sections discuss the life and work of Stanislav Kratochvfl, the earliest advocate of humanistic psychology in Czechoslovakia, and review psychotherapy institutions and individuals who today profess a humanistic psychology orientation.

Post-traumatic stress: a personal experience

A sudden medical emergency during labour exiled Susan into a psychological landscape she had never visited before. Where could she find help that was non-threatening and non-stigmatizing at a time when she was in emotional pain and particularly vulnerable? A research chaplaincy position gave her access to information about trauma and stress which would contribute to her recovery. Her closing remarks suggest the potential helpfulness of an attendant, someone who is responsible solely for being with the person who has suddenly been sucked into the medical machinery.