Unification Of Psychology Research Articles

A Guide to Wilberland: Some Common Misunderstandings of the Critics of Ken Wilber and His Work on Transpersonal Theory Prior to 1995

This article substantiates the importance of Ken Wilber and his work on transpersonal theory to the psychology and spirituality of human development over the past 23 years. Wilber and his work, prior to 1995, continue to attract ardent controversy, particularly outside of the field of transpersonal psychology. The focus of this article is directed to the identification of a few common pervasive misunderstandings based on recent critiques from writers in psychology. Although Wilber's critical style is at times unnecessarily arrogant, the evidence indicates that the critics' interpretations are not often substantiated and tend to become explicitly or implicitly polemical. This trend is the opposite effect of Wilber's stated intentions of his unifying spectrum psychology. This article is divided into three parts: First is Wilber's actual intentions; second, his major theses; and third, his critical style, with a number of summary hypotheses provided for further study to explain the conflicts between Wilber and his critics.

Personality and experimental psychology: The unification of psychology and the possibility of a paradigm.

It is suggested that the scientific status of psychology is put in danger by the lack of paradigms in many of its fields, and by the failure to achieve unification, psychology is breaking up into many different disciplines. One important cause was suggested by Lee Cronbach in his 1957 presidential address to the American Psychological Association: the continuing failure of the two scientific disciplines of psychology-the experimental and the correlational-to come together and mutually support each other. Personality study in particular has suffered from this disunity, and the debates about the number of major dimensions of personality illustrate the absurdity of the situation. Examples are given to show that by combining methods and theories typical of these two disciplines, one can put forward paradigms that would be impossible without such unification. Such a paradigm is suggested for personality and intelligence.

Personality and experimental psychology: The unification of psychology and the possibility of a paradigm.

Personality and experimental psychology: The unification of psychology and the possibility of a paradigm.

A Unified Psychology of Sensation Seeking

A Unified Psychology of Sensation Seeking

Unity and Diversity of Psychology

Factors both internal and external to psychology are working for both unity and diversity of psychology. Table 1 gives examples of the four kinds of factors, and the article examines each of these examples. It also attempts to evaluate some of the costs and benefits of both unity and diversity. Possible courses of action are considered.

Unity of Psychology: A Cross-Cultural Point of View

To broadly communicate our view of the unity of psychology, the standpoint of recognized cross-cultural and diverse national psychologists is reviewed. Unity is analyzed internationally in terms of: (a) educational programme contents; (b) levels of training; (c) applications; (d) politics; (e) statutory objectives; and (f) theoretical models. Neither practical nor theoretical issues need disrupt this unity. Dans une perspective générale sur le problème posé, les points de vue de psychologues spécialistes des problèmes inter-culturels et appartenant à différents pays sont passés en revue. L'unité est analysée dans un cadre international en terme: (a) de programmes pédagogiques; (b) de niveaux de formation; (c) des applications; (d) des aspects politiques; (e) des objectifs statutaires; et (f) des modèles théoriques. Aucun problème théorique ou pratique ne devrait compromettre cette unité.

The Unity or Diversity of Psychology: Concluding Remarks

Abstract I am impressed and a bit surprised by the similarities in the views of Professors LCvy-Leboyer, Rosenzweig, Ardila, Ritchie and Sabourin, and Diaz-Guerrero, each of whom sees unity in psychology (as I do) but each of whom also sees considerable diversity (which I do not).

Toward the Unification of Psychology and Philosophy

Toward the Unification of Psychology and Philosophy

Lost Ideas: The Lewin which was not Assimilated into America

When Kurt Lewin attempted to transplant his German psychology into American soil, he found that some ideas flourished, some whithered, and others were lost through modification. Concepts such as the Zeigarnik affect and level of aspiration were easily assimilated, but Schwarz's «action units» and Birenbaum's work on the forgetting of intentions never took hold, and Dembo's work on regression took on a completely different meaning. Most important, Lewin's original method (best seen as a type of experimental phenomenology) became modified into the «statistical experimentation» familiar to contemporary social psychology. This paper resurrects some of Lewin's lost ideas and methodology in the hope that the current soil may be more conducive to their growth. I hope that some of these ideas can flourish again because psychology appears to be in danger of splitting into two disciplines. One of these uses the approach of natural science, thinking in terms of objective stimuli and responses which exist in a «real» world which exists apart from persons. Behavior is determined by these conditions —as they interact with the states of the organismand, consequently, there is no personal freedom or responsibility. Hence we may formulate abstract conceptualizations which will enable us to predict and control behavior. The other discipline uses a more subjective, clinical approach and thinks in terms of personal interpretations, with as many «realities» as there are persons. Since persons give meaning to the world, they are at least potentially responsible for their behavior. We cannot especify abstractions which will hold for ah persons but only «loolcing rules» which may or may not be applicable to the case at hand. Is there any way to reconcile these two disciplines, to maintain the unity of psychology? Lewin's basic approach is part of a tradition which offers an alternative to the split, a view of psychology as a unique science, a way to objectively study our subjectivity. The key explanatory concept in the scientific psychology of Lewin's day was the associative bond, the mechanical linkage between two ideas that was the equivalent of the S-R bonds making a comeback in contemporary psychology. Computer models of behavior are, essentially, sophisticated elaborations of this

Unifying psychology: A European view

In this article the vital importance of attempts at unifying psychology is emphasized, the obstacles are analyzed, and an initial strategy is proposed for the treatment of minor “schisms” as well as the primordial one between Krantz's “‘humanistic’ and ‘scientific’ systems of knowing.” The analysis leads to the conclusion that in a unified scientia of psychology—that is, science and humanities—defining can no longer be viewed as a largely discretional activity that is committed solely within the group of believers in a particular school of thought or theory. It follows that the two neglected arts of (1) designing theory-free, verbal, mantle definitions of broadly used concept terms, and (2) reaching general agreement on their meaning must be (re-) learned. The author contends that the tools are available, in part developed by himself. The crucial problem is that of how to raise a tangible motivation, and funding, for the required, pedestrain, concerted action.

Notes on John Wettersten's unification of psychology, methodology, and pedagogy

Notes on John Wettersten's unification of psychology, methodology, and pedagogy

Unification in Psychology: My Way! Our Way! No Way!

Unification in Psychology: My Way! Our Way! No Way!

Do we really want the unification of psychology? A response to Krantz

David Krantz’ analysis of attempts to unify psychology is an appropriate blend of the objective and the personal. It ought to be a personal concern of anyone claiming membership in the discipline that what is called psychology is a mass of contradictions, and that too many of those contradictions approach the absurd in form and content. Myself, I have discontinued membership in APA; I remain a member of the Association for Behavior Analysis. But very recently, I have come to see an increasingly major part of psychology as an unaware branch of the entertainment industry. (I value professional entertainment as an exceptionally admirable, high-level class of human behavior.) One result of psychology’s failure to acknowledge its function as entertainment is bad management, compared with professional entertainment. That explains a lot about APA. Another result is that there is a minority of members who in fact want not to entertain but to know (scientists), or to help (practitioners), or to help better by knowing more, especially about helping (applied scientists); I suspect that these people eventually will see the unreality of their membership in the entertainment industry, and then will define themselves as something else (as some emerging cognitive scientists are doing, just as Krantz says, and as some behavior analysts have done, just as he said about 20 years ago.) That explains a lot about the proliferation of small alternative APAs. Interestingly, seeing much of psychology in the paradigm of professional entertainment dissolves correspondingly much of my former irritation with its disunity, its contradictions, and its too frequent embrace of the absurd: Self-contradictory forms of entertainment are natural and desirable. Personally, I value their existence mainly because I value pluralistic societies, which may be the only kind that will tolerate me: I am safer when different people can and are expected to buy radically different forms of anything, especially entertainment. A very large fraction of psychologists sell time regularly to people who use it to tell Their Story; that kind of psychologist is trained to evoke from them one of the more interesting of the possible variations of Their Story, and to be a very gratifying audience. One form of entertainment is to hire someone to entertain you; another is to hire someone to let you entertain them. (None of this denies that the process may also help the buyer.) A constant and probably expanding variety of paradigms of entertainment seems natural, too, not as a Kuhnian crisis needing resolution, but as a steady *Commentary on D. Krantz (1987) Psychology’s search for unity, Vol. 5, No. 3,

Psychology's search for unity

Arguments for unifying psychology's disparate elements are examined in relation to the actualities of scientific practice. These arguments are often based on such implicit unexamined assumptions as: (1) psychology resembles physics conceptually and historically; (2) there is an underlying rational order to knowledge which will define and justify the direction unification will take; (3) there is a knowable reality independent of our perceptions; (4) the outcome of unification will resemble a harmonious family working for the common good of “knowledge” and “truth.” While these assumptions have plausibility, it is argued that alternative views have equally legitimate claims and if we accept them, the possibility of unifying psychology becomes more problematic. Psychology's desire for unification appears parallel to a similar yearning within society that seeks to counteract the fragmentation of social life and consciousness that characterizes modernity.

Psychological contributions to the study of leisure—Part one

This is the first part of a two-part ‘state-of-the-art’ review on the psychology of leisure. The second part will be appearing in the next issue of the journal (Volume 6, Number 1). The review surveys contributions to the psychology of leisure and points to directions which psychological work on leisure might take in the future. In this first part, a discussion of the conceptualization of leisure is followed by a review of research and theory on motivations and needs; satisfactions; leisure as a state of mind; individual differences; and a comment on the lack, in the field, of any unified psychology of leisure. Part two will cover implications and applications (including work, non-work and leisure); leisure identities; and future directions for the psychology of leisure.

Some Comments About Unity in Psychology

This paper attempts to clarify aspects of an earlier argument in favor of theoretical pluralism in psychology. The paper begins by accepting that psychology is currently pluralistic. It then discusses the fallible nature of scientific knowledge and points out that fallibilism is not incompatible with unity of the kind found in physics and chemistry. Later, the paper considers the diverse nature of physical and chemical phenomena and argues that the diversity of psychological phenomena is no ground for abandoning hope for a unified psychology. The paper concludes that pluralism indicates only that psychology is currently protoscientific in status and not that it must in principle always lack the unity of the more advanced sciences.

The Popper/Kuhn debate: truth and two faces of relativism.

This paper argues: (1) that analysis of the issues upon which Popper and Kuhn have been thought to differ - the possibility of conclusive falsification, the incommensurability of theories, and the existence of normal science - reveals no appreciable difference at all; (2) that the basic point of disagreement concerns the role of truth in scientific inquiry, i.e. whether or not truth should be considered the regulative ideal of science; (3) that confusion concerning these issues results from a paradigm shift in epistemology; and (4) that Popper's epistemology proves more attractive than Kuhn's for unification in psychology.

Review of "The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction by Stuart K. Card, Thomas P. Moran and Alan Newell", Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1983.

This is a book that is intended not just to be read but to be used-through discussion, study, and prolonged reflection. The major concern of the book is, as the title implies, how humans interact with computers. The authors construct an empirically based cognitive theory of a skilled human-computer interaction and apply it to the specific problem of text editing. They do not simply inform readers of the problems, they provide solutions to the problems and describe a methodology for unifying psychology and computer science. A few years ago Ben Shneiderman [1] listed the computer science topics relevant to human-factors research. <u>The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction</u> tells the student how to actually perform human-factors research. It discusses the processes involved, the techniques to use, and the methods to follow.

The invention of wisdom: from the discovery of audial psychophysics to Plato's politics

Analysis of the mathological musicology in the basic wisdom literatures of several ancient cultures indicates that wisdom derived from the discovery that the human brain's perception of harmony, the vibration nodules of the monochord, and mathematical ratios all possessed homologous structures. Plato developed this into a general audial ontology unifying psychology, physics and mathematics into a Natural Law science that produced the structure of his political dialogues. Platonic form is shown to have a sciential foundation in a phenomenological realism that is compatible with the neo-Pythagoreanism appearing today in physics and biology.

Animals and the Unity of Psychology

By ‘the unity of psychology’ I mean something one might also express by saying that the psychology of human beings is part of the psychology of animals generally.Perhaps there are several different ways of trying to trace out the ramifications of the idea that psychology is one. A central consideration, I think, is likely to be some sort of principle of continuity up and down the scale of nature. The idea would be that up and down the scale of animated or ensouled things (‘psyched up’ beings, empsucha) there are always psychological continuities, never any strict discontinuity. If human beings can get angry, can want to get ahead in life, can see an illusion, can develop an Oedipus complex, then so can some lower animal do either the very same thing, something similar, or at least something analogous.