Understanding Of Psychological Phenomena Research Articles

Lay person’s and psychology officers’ beliefs about memory, investigative interviewing and deception detection: data from Malaysia

ABSTRACT It is very typical for people to think that the understanding of psychological phenomena is a matter of common sense. In many parts of the world, the general public and even some professional groups, often express commonly held beliefs about topics in psychology that are not in line with up-to-date scientific literature. To date, comparable data from Malaysia is lacking. In this study, 101 psychology officers serving the Ministry of Home Affairs as well as 130 student and community members in Malaysia completed a survey on beliefs about human memory, detecting lies and police interviews. Generally, participants possessed beliefs that were not in line with current psychological research, which is consistent with findings from many parts of the world. This study serves as an important gauge of the advancement of the field in this region.

Descartes on emotions, reason, and the adaptive unconscious: The pioneer behind the caricature.

The 17th-century philosopher René Descartes's radical new understanding of psychological phenomena is usually presented very inaccurately in psychological literature. Two extreme examples are Damasio's (1994) Descartes' Error and Wilson's (2002) Strangers to Ourselves. These two much-cited books contrast the "great" philosopher's naive mistakes with recent research on, respectively, the relation among emotions, reason, and the brain (Damasio) and the adaptive functions of unconscious processes (Wilson). Both authors do that without referring to either Descartes's voluminous works on physiology and psychology or the extensive historical research on his works. This article shows that these distinguished scholars' influential books are historically very misleading. Contrary to what they claim, most of Descartes's many explanations of psychological phenomena are embodied. He was in particular engaged in understanding the relation among emotions, reason, and the brain. According to the models of understanding Descartes put forward in the 1640s, the author argues that Descartes's Vision would have been an appropriate title for Damasio's book. Wilson contrasts throughout his book new insights from recent research on the adaptive unconscious with the familiar caricature of Descartes's views in the psychological literature. The author shows that Descartes, in fact, to a large extent anticipated Wilson's argumentation for the necessity of the adaptive unconscious. He concludes that Descartes should be considered the pioneer behind many of the models of understanding presented in Wilson's book. The author substantiates his conclusions by explicitly contrasting the argumentation and views in Descartes's own writings with Damasio's and Wilson's many incorrect claims. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The behavioral, experiential and conceptual dimensions of psychological phenomena: Body, soul and spirit

Abstract Psychological phenomena can be described on different levels of analysis: on an experiential level (e.g., what is it like to be attentive); and on a behavioral level (e.g., how does it become evident that someone is attentive). In the following, we outline how the widely prevalent focus on exclusively behavioral characteristics is insufficient and how our understanding of psychological phenomena can be enriched by taking the qualitative dimension of experience into consideration. We then scrutinize components of this experiential realm and report how it provides the stage for a third level: conceptual insight (e.g., what types or phases of attention can be distinguished). We subsequently look at the history of science and relate the behavioral aspect to the material realm (the realm of the body); the experiential aspect to what has been historically referred to as the soul realm; and the conceptual aspect to what has been historically referred to as the spirit realm. Finally, we add a first-person trial to delineate these concepts further and scrutinize them in light of contemporary theory-building.

Implementing an Intercultural Psychology Undergraduate Unit: Approach, Strategies, and Outcomes

The relative absence of Indigenous and multicultural perspectives in core undergraduate psychology curriculum is said to hamper the preparation of students for engaging with culturally diverse communities. An intercultural unit that includes perspectives on Australia's history of race relations, Indigenous issues, and migration as the basis from which to research and practise intercultural psychology was introduced into the psychology undergraduate syllabus at Victoria University. This article describes the unit framework, structure, and evaluation of the unit. Content analysis of survey data showed that students appeared to develop greater critical awareness of psychological perspectives on cultural and social diversity. Although many students reported positive learning and an increased awareness of cultural matters, there were also student responses that suggested dissatisfaction or disengagement from what was being taught. These responses are consistent with the dynamics of learning about self and other, and of dominance and subjugation. It is argued that promoting an understanding of psychological phenomena as socially, culturally, and historically embedded is important in preparing students to be culturally safe and respectful mental health practitioners.

Scientific Biography, Cognitive Deficits, and Laboratory Practice: James McKeen Cattell and Early American Experimental Psychology, 1880–1904

Despite widespread interest in individual life histories, few biographies of scientists make use of insights derived from psychology, another discipline that studies people, their thoughts, and their actions. This essay argues that recent theoretical work in psychology and tools developed for clinical psychological practice can help biographical historians of science create and present fuller portraits of their subjects' characters and temperaments and more nuanced analyses of how these traits helped shape their subjects' scientific work. To illustrate this thesis, the essay examines the early career of James McKeen Cattell--an influential late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experimental psychologist--through a lens offered by psychology and argues that Cattell's actual laboratory practices derived from an "accommodation" to a long-standing "cognitive deficit." These practices in turn enabled Cattell to achieve more precise experimental results than could any of his contemporaries; and their students readily adopted them, along with their behavioral implications. The essay concludes that, in some ways, American psychology's early twentieth-century move toward a behavioral understanding of psychological phenomena can be traced to Cattell's personal cognitive deficit. It closes by reviewing several "remaining general questions" that this thesis suggests.

Benchmarking in service marketing – a longitudinal analysis of the customer

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the temporal development of the customers' psychological state, described by a multitude of constructs, throughout the whole decision‐making process in a service context in order to derive ideas for customer‐focused benchmarking.Design/methodology/approachA combination of qualitative and quantitative data contributes to a better understanding of psychological phenomena during purchase decision making. The present longitudinal study investigates the consumers' psychological state during the decision‐making process considering services in tourism industry applying the diary method. Qualitative in‐depth investigation of individual case studies provides further information for interpreting the results of quantitative analyses which aim at measuring constructs such as perceived risk, cognitive dissonance (CD), satisfaction and arousal on a higher level of abstraction.FindingsFindings show that qualitative and quantitative data not only complement one another but also their interaction provides additional information about the individual consumer decision‐making process. As the longitudinal quantitative analysis shows that CD does not completely dissolve over time and significantly influences the level of satisfaction, complaint behaviour and word‐of‐mouth, additional qualitative data help interpret these findings and derive more effective marketing implications.Research limitations/implicationsImplications for the marketing‐mix of service companies in general and travel agencies in particular are derived. The paper underlines the potential of innovational methodological approaches in marketing research.Originality/valueThe paper introduces a longitudinal mixed‐method approach to collect customer‐focused information relevant for benchmarking purposes of service companies. It contributes to scientific knowledge of decision making in general and CD in particular.

Editorial: Contemporary Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology

There have been many recent developments in the way that psychologists collect information and how data are analysed. This special issue of The Irish Journal of Psychology provides an overview of some contemporary research methods, design issues, and statistical models that have been used in psychological research. This collection is comprised of eight articles written by researchers from the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Collectively the papers represent a snapshot of current methodological and statistical techniques that provide psychologists with the opportunity to test complex hypotheses and explore their data in a manner that advances our understanding of psychological phenomena.

Quantitative research as an interpretive enterprise: The mostly unacknowledged role of interpretation in research efforts and suggestions for explicitly interpretive quantitative investigations

Many critics of positivism in psychology oppose the use of quantitative research methods. The author first argues that a premise accepted by both critics and supporters of quantitative research is mistaken. Contrary to what many critics and supporters alike believe, interpretation plays key, unacknowledged roles in how quantitative methods are actually employed. The author then argues that a hermeneutic perspective based on practices leads to the view that our understanding of psychological phenomena is irreducibly interpretive and also leads to recognizing that quantitative research can make a unique contribution to inquiry. In the final section of the article, the author offers suggestions about how to conduct explicitly interpretive quantitative investigations. These suggestions are based on the view that although the influence of positivism is not all-constraining (and, therefore, interpretation typically does enter into quantitative methods as they are actually employed), commitments to positivism do constrain how quantitative researchers pursue their work. As part of marking out a different critical viewpoint on positivism, the author attempts to identify what is really involved in going beyond a modernist approach.

Moving toward Culture-Inclusive Theories of Emotion

After a brief summary of the target article, this commentary touches on dangers of ethnocentricity in the study of psychological phenomena, a co-constructive metatheory for emotion-cognition relationships, and dangers of universality in the study of psychological phenomena. Cultural bias does present a problem in research. However, it is not clear that this bias can be avoided by a move to conceptual primitives as a means of searching for universals in emotion. Perhaps studies of emotion would be better served by considering emotion as obtaining from social co-constructive processes. Finally, it is not clear what the 'discovery' of universality provides to our understanding of psychological phenomena. While searches for universality may yield interesting findings, the pronouncement of universality does not.

Smedslundian Suburbs in the City of Language: The Case of Embarrassment

(1991). Smedslundian Suburbs in the City of Language: The Case of Embarrassment. Psychological Inquiry: Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 358-361.

The Nature and Role of Comparative Psychology in the Teaching of Psychology

This article describes a comparative psychology course that attempts to demonstrate the power of the comparative method for a complete understanding of psychological phenomena typically taught from a human-oriented perspective. A description of methodological goals and the traditional roles of comparative psychology precede the course description. These include research strategies for relating group differences to specific processes and for inferring the evolutionary and developmental histories of behavior.

The Problem of Recall

P. P. Blonsky was a pioneer Soviet psychologist whose influence on the history of psychology in the USSR has been virtually ignored by Westerners. His Essays on scientific psychology, which was published just after the revolution, contained the notion that developmental analysis was a prerequisite to a full understanding of psychological phenomena. This general view was cited by L. S. Vygotsky as the cornerstone of Marxist psychology.

Conditional Recall and Bias in Memory Experiments

The use of recall measures conditionalized on other performance introduces the possibility of bias due to item and/or subject selection. Several possible cases are considered. While conditional recall measures are not impossible to interpret, there are restrictions that must be observed. Progress in the understanding of psychological phenomena usually results from the innovation of new analytic procedures that more clearly throw the phenomenon in question into focus. Most theories of verbal learning are concerned with processes presumed to act on the storage and retrieval of the individual verbal unit, while data analysis still most often depends upon gross measures of list acquisition, retention, and transfer. These measures may be quite insensitive to the processes of major theoretical interest, since performance is typically averaged across list items and subjects. A common means of conducting a more fine grained analysis is to conditionalize recall on some other performance measure. That is, the individual items are classified according to some performance criterion, then the items in the various classes are compared on some other performance criterion. For example, the subjects may be given a recognition test for the stimulus terms on a list of paired associates and then asked to recall a response to the stimuli (Martin, 1967a). The probability of a correct recall is then measured only for items for which correct recognition occurs.