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As Lise and Michael Wallach (2001) demonstrate, much social psychological research is gratuitous because, so often, experiments in that discipline merely confirm a set of unfalsifiable presuppositions. In spite of that major flaw, however, social psychological research may make important contributions, by revealing the effectiveness of manipulations that may be either stronger or weaker than common sense suggests, by helping us understand real-life phenomena, and by showing how desired ends may be achieved by practical means. My only quibble with the paper concerns the Wallachs' ideas about the status and functioning of psychological concepts. If they assume, as they sometimes seem to, that concepts are identities with independent existence apart from observation, I take exception. Social psychological phenomena should be treated as expressions of more general principles of a very general psychology that begins with empirical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying theories from sociology and social psychology concerned with the intersection of culture and cognition to in-depth interviews, this paper empirically explores the Norwegian majority population’s perceptions of cultural diversities using a dual-process (DP) methodological and analytic approach. Globalization has produced a mix of new anxieties, opportunities, and curiosities, leaving most people juggling conflicting objectives of self-preservation and selfrealization, and making cognitive self-regulation and behavioural flexibility valorized skills of contemporary life. Instead of identifying xenophobic and cosmopolitan attitudes at opposite ends of a spectrum, the current paper argues in line with current research and theory in studies of DP cognition that they commonly co-exist, albeit in separate automatic and discursive cognitive systems, within the same individual. As a result, people’s perceptions of cultural and ethnic diversities tend to be ambivalent and contextually malleable – for example, in cases where their deep dispositions appear incompatible with their own self-concept or dominant cultural expectations. Most centrally, the current research proposes concrete strategies to elicit responses from both cognitive systems in the context of interpretive interviews. Secondly, the paper proposes clues that help to identify from which cognitive system interviewees’ conflicting cosmopolitan and xenophobic attitudes originate, thereby enabling researchers to further delineate the specific characteristics of these attitudes, including the mode of cultural learning through which they form, their flexibility or robustness to change, their role in behaviour motivation, and the extent to which they are conscious and controllable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent was Greta Thunberg a 'polarizing figure' on Facebook, in the period when she received the most extensive media attention? The paper analyses seven months of discussion concerning Thunberg and her message of intergenerational climate justice, using all relevant posts on public Facebook pages in Germany, Sweden, and the UK. We find that there are many similarities in the attitudes expressed and topics discussed on Facebook in the three countries; however, there are also some striking differences in the levels of polarisation. This comparative study provides evidence that the level of polarisation around these topics on Facebook is very low in Sweden and the UK, but high in Germany. In Germany, a group of political actors stand out as particularly polarising, and, in contrast to the other two countries, the topic of intergeneration justice, the core of Thunberg's message, is almost absent from the German Facebook discourse. The study shows that Thunberg was not in general a polarising figure in the three European countries and that neither the affordances offered by the platform nor features of her person, message, or activism explain the observed polarisation around Thunberg on Facebook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidently, Wälder's analysis of mass psychosis and its impact on the individual undoubtedly both deepened and extended Freud's original understanding of mass psychology. (Freud, SE 18: 134) However, Freud added that 'this kind of I differentiating grade in the ego i as a I first step i in an I analysis of the ego i must gradually establish its justification in the most various regions of psychology' (Freud, SE 18, 1920: 132 italics mine). Keywords: mass psychology; mass behaviour; mass psychosis; Robert Wälder; Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego EN mass psychology mass behaviour mass psychosis Robert Wälder Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 342 352 11 11/01/22 20220901 NES 220901 Introduction Freud's approach to mass psychology builds on the analysis of the individual ego. Foulkes and Wälder In his autobiographical notes, Foulkes recollected "the many hours" he spent discussing the latest advances of psychoanalytic theory with his friend and colleague Robert Wälder in Vienna in the late 1920s ([16]: 120), namely Freud's paper on I Beyond the pleasure principle i ([18]) and most probably also I Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego i ([19]). [Extracted from the article]

On the occasion of recent centenaries of revolutions in Europe (1917, 1918–19), this article examines, within a general theme of different forms of relationships between revolution and psychology, two types of theories. First, this paper analyses Western theories that, while developing under conditions of a missed or lost revolution in Germany, argued for radical social change by referring to Marxism and psychoanalysis as necessary theoretical tools (Frankfurt School and Wilhelm Reich). Second, this paper analyses the influence of the October Revolution on the development of the psychological theory of Lev Vygotsky in the Soviet Union. In sum, psychology under the conditions of missed or lost revolution was conceptualized as a psychology of the unconscious, of the repression of human needs. Psychology under the conditions of accomplished revolution was conceptualized as a historical social psychology of self-mastery of human beings as social beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Psychiatry's evidence-, implementation-, and treatment-gaps. Aims: The aim of this study is to uncover current trends and gaps in psychiatric research. Understanding where psychiatric research is going and where there might be blind spots is important to better align it with global mental health challenges and with service users' needs. Method: 10 top-ranking scientific journals (highest impact factors) in psychiatry were identified for 3 years (1999, 2009, 2019) using Clarivate Analytics. Metadata of all papers published by these journals in the index years were downloaded, and the relevance and relatedness of terms from all titles and abstracts were computed and visualized using VOSviewer. Results: In 1999, prominent themes included schizophrenia and novel antipsychotics as well as research on families. Ten and 20 years later, neurobiological research, especially genetic and animal studies, had gained importance. Social and psychological themes were less present across all three time points. Conclusions: In high-ranking psychiatric journals, neurobiological research appears to gain importance while social themes are under-represented. In view of challenges such as implementation gaps, marginalization of people with severe mental illness and mental health risks through social inequality, there seems to be a dissociation between research and patient needs. We suggest a systems approach to bring together different kinds of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a life-course approach to investigate how and why migrants' feelings of belonging change between childhood and young adulthood. Drawing on 24 in-depth retrospective interviews with young Romanian migrants who moved to Italy as children, the paper shows how young migrants' belonging is shaped by the nature of social relations and by the level of acceptance or exclusion expressed by others in the receiving and origin countries, under specific institutional and socioeconomic contexts. Overall, the study demonstrates how life-course methodologies are an essential tool to capture the dynamic, changing nature of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This paper reports on an experiment conducted with 174 Flemish children in three age groups, namely first, third and fifth year of primary school, aiming to assess the social meaning children associate with English-sourced lexemes in Belgian Dutch. Method: The children were presented with 2 versions of a cartoon hero developed specifically for this study: Sterrenman, who only uses Dutch words, and Starman, who uses English alternatives for 17 content words in the cartoon's script. Relying on extensive pretesting, we adapted standard designs and instrumentation from social psychology (the matched guise technique) and language acquisition research to gauge the children's appreciation of the two heroes, their understanding of the English and Dutch vocabulary used in the script, and their level of language awareness. Findings: The key findings are: rather than an incremental increase in favorable social meaning for English from the first to the third age group under scrutiny, we see a decline of the prestige of Dutch in the oldest age group; the children's level of language awareness, receptive vocabulary knowledge and age seem associated with their overall appreciation of Sterrenman and Starman; working with children from various age groups inevitably entails methodological risks. Originality: This is a first and hence exploratory study on the acquisition of the social meaning of English lexemes by EL2 children and their ensuing progressing bilingualism. Implications: Overall, the study helps us contribute to both the recent socio-pragmatic turn in anglicism research and to the upcoming field of developmental sociolinguistics, revealing the transition points in children's acquisition of the social meaning of contact-induced variation and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument advanced in this paper is that the motivation to punish relies on punishment producing a kind of solidarity that allows individuals to pursue emotional release together with a sense of belonging, without having to question or address why it is that they felt alienated and insecure in the first place. This raises the possibility that the reason why we believe punishment to be useful, and why we are motivated to punish, is because we derive pleasure from the utility of punishment. Simply stated, punishment pleases. It then analyses the relationship between punishment and solidarity to investigate why and how punishment pleases. We argue that the pleasure of punishment is directly linked to the specific kind of solidarity that punishment produces, which we call hostile solidarity. The paper explores the links between punishment and identity in order to examine the allure of hostile solidarity and then draws implications from this perspective and sets out an agenda for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the Corpus of the Canon of Western Literature (Version 1.0), accompanied by a demonstration of its potential uses. The canon of western literature has been an important construct in the study of literature, long standing and long contested. It has been argued to represent many of the greatest works produced in the history of western literature. This corpus operationalizes the western canon based on Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994). The paper describes the development of the corpus, its organization and source material. Corpus procedures are applied to the corpus, such as word frequency analysis, lemmatization and keyness, to demonstrate its potential uses in culturomics and corpus stylistics, two interdisciplinary fields between the traditional and digital humanities, and the linguistic and literary approaches to literature. Culturomics is the study of culture and social psychology via the investigation of corpora of literature as cultural artefacts, while corpus stylistics is the application of corpus linguistics to traditional literary scholarship. The corpus introduced in this paper is open source and freely available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to present the project of cultural psychology formulated by Florian Znaniecki, a Polish philosopher, sociologist and pioneer of social psychology. His view of cultural psychology was connected with the concept of social psychology and was founded on the assumption of culturalism and the theory of cultural actions. Znaniecki's cultural psychology represents the antipositivistic turning in the social sciences and the humanities and is opposite to the naturalistically oriented psychology. His proposition is also an attempt to go beyond the individualistic or antiindividualistic perspective in the cultural psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we approach Feminism & Psychology 's 30th anniversary, we reflect on and explore what makes the journal distinctive – its emphasis on critical feminist psychology. In this article and the accompanying Virtual Special Issue, we outline five methodological considerations that we believe are at the heart of critical feminist scholarship: 1) the politics of asking questions; 2) attention to language/discourse; 3) reflexivity; 4) representation and intersectionality; and 5) mobilizing research for social change. We then draw across a set of 15 articles published in the archives of Feminism & Psychology that showcase one or more of these key features and demonstrate the 'doing' of critical feminist psychology. These articles are housed on the journal's website, as is an additional paper developed for students or those in a position of learning, which explores central ideas and debates that have culminated in critical feminist psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual harassment has received unprecedented attention in recent years. Within academia, it has a particularly reflexive relationship with the human sciences in which sexual harassment can be both an object of research and a problematic behavior amongst those engaged in that research. This paper offers a partial history in which these two are brought together as a common object of social psychology's culture of sexual harassment. Here we follow Haraway in using culture to capture the sense-making that psychologists do through and to the side of their formal knowledge production practices. Our history is multi-sited and draws together (1) the use of sexual harassment as an experimental technique, (2) feminist activism and research which made sexual harassment an object of knowledge in social psychology, and (3) oral history accounts of sexual harassment amongst social psychologists. By reading these contexts against each other, we provide a thick description of how sexual harassment initiates women and men into cultures of control in experimental social psychology and highlight the ethical-epistemological dilemma inherent in disciplinary practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that xenophobia in South Africa is entangled in discourses of liberation struggle, which are often used to justify anti-foreigner violence. We first examine some existing academic explanations for xenophobia, namely internalised racism, poverty/inequality, nationalism, and township and informal settlement politics. To avoid deterministically explaining xenophobia as 'caused' by any of these factors, however, we introduce a concept from social psychology, the concept of 'working models of contact'. These are common frames of reference in which contact between groups is understood in terms of shared meanings and values. Xenophobic violence is not caused but instantiated in ways that are explained and justified according to particular understandings of the meaning of the 'citizen-foreigner' relationship. We then review three case studies of xenophobic violence whose perpetrators constructed a model of contact in which African 'foreigners' were undermining the struggles of South Africans in various socio-economic contexts. We also examine three cases where xenophobic violence was actively discouraged by invoking an inclusive rather than divisive form of struggle discourse. Thus the nature of the struggle itself becomes contested. We conclude by considering some dilemmatic implications that our analysis provokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prolepsis – or the narrative manoeuver consisting of narrating or evoking a future event in advance – is a concept borrowed from literary theory that has been used in Psychology for studying the contribution of culture and meaning to development. Cole applies the notion of prolepsis to upbringing insofar as parents’ imagined goals vis-à-vis their offspring guide their educational childrearing, thus channelling the child’s present towards the parents’ imagined future. This view coincides with cultural psychology in that humans are considered as future-oriented beings, constructing cultural tools that mediate the way we interpret the world and act within it. Drawing from this theoretical framework, this paper applies the notion of prolepsis to collective memory in order to examine how imagined futures are brought into the present by means of particular ways of reconstructing the past, thus mobilizing collectives towards certain political goals. Along these lines, the narrative, pragmatic and normative dimensions of collective memory are discussed. The paper concludes with some reflections on the role of politics of imagination in promoting different ways of relating past, present and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my rejoinder, I show how Brock’s and Burman’s replies to my article (Araujo, 2017) are based on a series of misunderstandings and misattributions. First, I argue that Brock ignores crucial passages of my article and my related book, and show not only that he misunderstands Wundt’s position on the introspective method, but also that his claim, according to which there is nothing new in my approach, lacks substance. Second, I argue that Burman’s text fails to make contact with the substantive thrust of my paper, and that his appeal to contextualism is vague and does not address the substantive questions I raise. Finally, I conclude that Brock’s rejection of my proposal, as well as his misunderstandings and misattributions, derives from a kind of methodological dogmatism, against which the best medicine is methodological pluralism, and that Burman’s worries are unjustified and can be avoided by a careful reading of my paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why should anyone care about long-dead 19th-century scientists’ thoughts about the differences between women and men? And what does such a paper have to say to our contemporary concerns? I believe that knowledge of this history is invaluable to the health and progress of feminist psychology. This history, when viewed through an intersectional lens, can give us insight into the complex way in which values can constrict research questions and methods, can narrow and oversimplify what counts as “data,” and can be used as a regressive instrument to shore up the sociocultural status quo. In this paper I first briefly review the context in which “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women” (hereinafter Functionalism/Darwinism) was written. Then I examine what the addition of an intersectionality perspective to that work adds to our understanding of the history of the psychology of women and gender. I focus on the intersection of gender and race (and briefly touch on social class) because these were critical to 19th-century scientific justifications for existing status and power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Freud and contemporary cognitive/social psychologists differ with regards to various traditions, vocabularies, methods, and areas of application, they agree in their criticism of the use of introspection as a means of inquiring about the mind. They share not only a strong outlook against introspection but both go so far as to make some outright arguments against introspection. Very briefly, it seems that both of these approaches conceive of introspection and the data stemming from it as hindrances to the construction of a science of mind. After presenting the theoretical assumptions and methodological underpinnings of contemporary cognitive/social psychology and Freud’s psychoanalysis, this article will compare them so as to highlight their differences and commonalities. The paper will conclude by arguing that both approaches appear to reject introspection as a method of inquiry because each understands psychology to be a natural science that is free from subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social psychological literature on social change has focused on how groups overcome oppression and inequality. In this paper, we investigate an alternative strategy that groups employ for social change—the emulation of successful outgroups. We propose that lower status group members will be likely to employ a learning strategy when they perceive the status relations as legitimate (i.e., fair system) and unstable (i.e., own position is improvable). In Study 1 (Romanian undergraduate students, N = 31), we manipulated status legitimacy, while in Study 2 (British undergraduate participants, N = 94), we manipulated legitimacy and stability orthogonally. Overall, when they perceived status hierarchies as legitimate and unstable, participants exhibited higher admiration for the higher status outgroup, higher support for learning-related help (e.g., transfer of know-how, training) from the outgroup and had the most positive attitudes toward intergroup help. We propose that social change sometimes occurs gradually, through help and learning from successful models, and this paper offers insight into such gradual social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the study of crowds provides important lessons for social psychology in four key areas. First, it reveals the political influences which shaped and continue to shape the questions we ask and the answers we provide. Second, it demonstrates the importance of a methodological strategy which attends to real-world phenomena and the ability of theory to make sense of them. Third, it generates new theoretical insights and conceptual paradigms which have relevance to social psychology in general. Fourth, it provides new insights into the way that the social relations which constitute everyday social reality are created, consolidated, and changed. In sum, I suggest that the crowd is uniquely fertile ground in which to investigate the subject matter of social psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disagreement between numerically larger (majority) and smaller (minority) factions in groups is both common and consequential. For these reasons, there is a long tradition of social psychological interest in the causes and consequences of such disagreement. Early work focused on minority members’ movement toward the majority (majority influence) and majority members’ (negative) perceptions and evaluations of those who refused to move. Later work focused on similarities and differences between majority influence and its mirror opposite, minority influence, and on majority members’ (sometimes relatively positive) perceptions and evaluations of minority members. This paper summarizes current knowledge on these topics and suggests promising avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guidelines on psychosocial interventions in postconflict areas commonly mention that interventions should be based on local needs and be built on culture-specific expertise. This paper is based on a dissociative cult, the Kiyang-yang (KYY), in Guinea Bissau. In a previous article, we used a refined definition of the concept of idiom of distress to analyze the dissociative behavior displayed in KYY as a symbolic language addressing politically dangerous truths. This paper uses the concept of “collective trauma processing” to analyze how the idiom offered the local population a pathway to mitigate the consequences of protracted and widespread political violence. The paper first argues that the field of psychotraumatology lacks a comprehensive ecological theory on trauma. Moreover, within clinical psychology and psychiatry, little attention is paid to local cultural healing mechanisms addressing traumatic stress. This paper is an effort to study such mechanisms in their own right. To compare trauma processing mechanisms across the globe, we propose to analyze trauma processing mechanisms with the help of a comprehensive model discerning five ontological dimensions that are considered to be involved in suffering and are addressed in healing approaches. Our paper describes similarities and differences between psychological healing traditions and collective trauma processing within the West African context of Guinea Bissau. We will illustrate how the KYY movement uses the idiom of dissociation as both a collective expression of distress and as a vehicle to process social suffering and traumatic stress as a circular phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Honor is implicated in a variety of social psychological processes, including morality, male violence, sexuality and gender, in-group identification, responses to devaluation, and biculturalism. The papers in this Special Issue illustrate the importance of honor in these and other social-psychological processes. In addition, these papers expand and deepen our understanding of honor by presenting research on honor in a diverse array of groups (e.g., the military, law enforcement), relationship contexts (e.g., family relations, romantic relations) and countries (e.g., Afghanistan, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Switzerland). Taken together, the contributions to this Special Issue show honor to be a multifaceted construct that is a core concern of individuals and groups across cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we understand the broad history to which we belong? What meaning do we give to it and what role does it have in our lives? This paper proposes to approach collective memory from the perspective of the subject, adopting a developmental perspective to explore how people build specific relations and representations of the historical past. Building on the literature on collective remembering and on life-course studies, it conceptualises memory an as oriented, culturally mediated and dialogical action with a developmental history, embodied in ‘trajectories of remembering’. This conception is applied to the life trajectory of Alain, a 44-year-old Belgian journalist, with a particular interest in the social and intersubjective dimensions of collective remembering. From this analysis, it will be concluded that people's relation to history is the product of the different positions they assume through time. The study of these successive experiences and their integration can thus shed new lights on how we relate to history and give it meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights three features of a cultural or sociocultural notion of remembering and forgetting: mnemonic artifacts, the sign-mediated or semiotic fabric of memories, and the inherently social and cultural nature of individual remembering. The gist of the paper is concerned with the third feature, outlining the interwovenness of individual and collective (or social or cultural) memories. To explain this argument, a case study is presented that draws on a key work of modern art, Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The young ladies of Avignon), unfolding its multi-layered history of individual and collective memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of interpretations of historical events when discussing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, by those with a lived experience of it. The research literature relating to representations of collective memory and perceived intractable conflict is presented before discussing how a theoretical lens of dialogicality, through exploring the role of themata, can add to the discussion. Open-ended depth interviews with both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis revealed historical narratives without any direct questioning concerning this. Subsequent thematic analysis demonstrated the significance of these to justify and legitimise their positioning frameworks in relation to both their own and the others group's perspectives. The subsequent discussion examines how the quoted examples of perceived interpretations of the past can offer an understanding of foundational themes that remain omnipresent, yet not exclusive. Social representations of collective memories can play a significant role in the discussion of protracted conflict where frozen representations of the past can act as barriers to change, yet as will be discussed, resistance to them can lead to new perspectives that herald a shift away from a perceived intractability towards an alternative, more collaboratively imagined future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the attempts of psychologists in South Africa to “Africanize” the discipline. Beginning with a brief history of psychology on the continent, it contextualizes the call for an African psychology by outlining the state of the broader discipline in post-apartheid South Africa as well as the emergence of Afrocentric psychology in the United States. The article interrogates further the notion of an “African worldview” and suggests that Afrocentric psychologists remain beholden to Eurocentric audiences—the result of their continued marginalization by a Eurocentric discipline. Drawing on Fanon’s image of a Manichean psychology, the paper argues that African psychology—instead of organizing itself around cultural questions—must commit itself to a psychological analysis of the violence that exemplifies life in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I highlight key differences between a discourse analytic approach to women’s accounts of abortion and that taken by the growing body of research that seeks to explore and measure women’s experiences of abortion stigma. Drawing on critical analyses of the conceptualisation of stigma in other fields of healthcare, I suggest that research on abortion stigma often risks reifying it by failing to consider how identities are continually re-negotiated through language-use. In contrast, by attending to language as a form of social action, discursive psychology makes it possible to emphasise speakers’ capacity to construct “untroubled” (i.e. non-stigmatised) identities, while acknowledging that this process is constrained by the contexts in which talk takes place. My analysis applies these insights to interviews with women concerning their experiences of having an abortion in England. I highlight three forms of discursive work through which women navigate “trouble” in their accounts of abortion, and critically consider the resources available for meaning-making within this particular context of talk. In doing so, I aim to provoke reflection about the discursive frameworks through which women’s accounts of abortion are solicited and explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a psychology of individuation, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of series, event, sense, and individuation to develop a way of thinking human experience that is non-reductionist and processual. Deleuze’s writing produces a conceptualization of life as multiple, novel, and yet inherently linked to the past. The desire for such an undertaking comes from the need to avoid capturing experience according to theories that prioritize one factor over others, and in doing so define psychological life as a set of intrinsic properties. Understanding individuals as the products of individuating processes introduces a philosophy of change that, although not entirely “pure,” can still be novel. A psychology of individuation potentially allows for the extraction of a virtual realm of sense that is “in between” forms of language and materiality, and which allows novelty to emerge in our social worlds. The paper concludes by discussing the potential moral benefits of conceptualizing psychological life as produced through processes of individuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Group researchers have long been interested in how group members respond to deviance, defined as the violation of prescriptive norms about how members should think, feel, or act. Valuable perspectives on reaction to deviance have been offered by scholars in several disciplines, including social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and sociology. Most of the theoretical and empirical work on reaction to deviance assumes that this behavior has negative consequences for group welfare and hence elicits efforts designed to reduce or eliminate it, including the threat or use of punishment. However, there is increasing interest in the other side of the coin, namely cases in which deviance has positive consequences for group welfare and hence is tolerated or even celebrated. In addition, researchers are also devoting increased attention to the causes of deviance, that is, the reasons why some group members choose to violate prescriptive norms even though doing so may elicit punishment. The papers in this Special Issue, which investigate deviance in a wide range of situations, illustrate cutting-edge work on each of these themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that elaborating Winnicott’s idea of “potential space” can provide a conceptual approach to psychotherapy across the cultural divide. The first part of the paper discusses the general problematic of intercultural psychotherapy. This is illustrated with an account of therapeutic work with Ethiopian Jews who have migrated to Israel. There is a significant gap between the Ethiopian cultural codes relevant to psychotherapy and those of the Israeli therapist, who is usually trained in the Western psychotherapeutic tradition. A meaningful and effective therapeutic process can take place if psychotherapist and client cocreate a “mutual creative space.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses 41 qualitative interviews with utilitarian cyclists in Charleston South Carolina to explore their understanding of cycling-related risks. The utilitarian cyclists list a number of risks related to motorist behaviour, such as cars passing too closely, which make them feel unsafe. Thirty-nine out of 41 of the respondents reveal the sentiment that often the risky behaviour of motorists is part of an anti-bicycle culture. This paper concludes that cyclists, in their attempt to make sense of these risks, perceive that the anti- bicycle culture is based on a system of exclusion in which drivers are insiders who belong on the road and treat cyclists as outsiders who do not belong. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a feminist Foucauldian analysis of women’s interpretations of images of women in post-feminist advertising. Building on Ros Gill’s analysis of post-feminist advertising images of women, and more specifically the figure of ‘the midriff ’, the paper presents an analysis of focus group discussions with seven young women who were asked to discuss ‘midriff’ advertising images. Whilst participants sometimes construed these images positively as ‘sexy’ and independent, midriff figures were more frequently constituted negatively as ‘bimbos’ and/or ‘slutty’ ‘sex objects’ whose seeming independence was achieved through or limited only to attracting men. In interpreting midriff figures negatively, participants, we suggest, constituted the midriff as other; as different and distant from themselves and ‘normal’ women. Where occasionally participants interpreted images more favourably, the midriff figure was, in contrast, constituted as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ and as being about ‘what she likes, not what he likes’. Participants did not identify themselves or their arguments as feminist. Nevertheless, they articulated critiques of these images which often converged significantly with critical feminist analyses. Our analysis suggests, therefore, that young women read these images in complex ways. These complexities of interpretation, we argue, should be central in understanding the relationships between women, bodies and post-feminist images of women’s bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Individuals suffering from depressive symptoms tend to be dissatisfied with their romantic relationships, but information is lacking about the mechanisms that link depressive symptoms to relationship quality. This paper evaluates the role of relational uncertainty via an actor-partner interdependence model. Self-report data from 170 romantic partners (N = 85 dyads) revealed that depressive symptoms exerted actor effects, but not partner effects, on relationship quality and relational uncertainty. Moreover, relational uncertainty exerted actor and partner effects on relationship quality. The association between depressive symptoms and relationship quality was mediated by actor effects of self, partner, and relationship uncertainty for women and self uncertainty for men. The paper concludes by discussing how these findings advance scholarship on both relational uncertainty and depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavior is rational to the extent that it optimizes actions, beliefs, and information collection subject to various constraints. It is intelligible to the extent that it makes sense to an interpreter. The two concepts are connected because interpretation ordinarily proceeds on the assumption that others would do what we do under the same circumstances, mutatis mutandis. And because we of necessity understand our own behavior as being as rational as possible given the constraints we face, we must interpret the behavior of others in the same way. This paper develops the concepts of rationality and intelligibility, and applies them to the problem of interpretation. It does so by relying upon Jon Elster's recent work upon the same concepts. Like Elster, moreover, this paper concerns both the interpretation of real behavior and that of fictional characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the intersection between Marxism and psychology, focusing on 'critical' approaches that have emerged in the discipline in the last 15 years. The paper traces the way that elements of Marxism that are diametrically opposed, and in some cases dialectically opposed, to mainstream psychology are evaded, misrepresented or systematically distorted by ostensibly 'critical' psychologies in the English-speaking world. Elements of Marxist analysis—the human being as an ensemble of social relations, the materiality of the family, private property and the state, surplus value and cultural capital, alienation and exploitation and ideological mystification-are contrasted with the standard disciplinary notions of the psychological subject, society, utilitarian transparency, unhealthy experience and false beliefs. Specifications of the position of the researcher in Marxism—standpoint, reflexive location, class consciousness, institutional space and social revolution—are set against the dominant notions in mainstream psychology of neutrality, rationalism, individual enlightenment, scientific knowledge and adaptation and amelioration. Change in Marxism—as permanent change, an engagement with relatively enduring structures, theoretical practice, materialist dialectics and prefigurative politics—is pitted against the standard procedures of ratification, pragmatism, empiricism, positivism and the drawing up of blueprints. This analysis of the discipline and its 'critical' variants is designed to clear the way for revolutionary Marxist work in and against the domain of psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss the importance of examining the impact of our common-sense making on the development of academic psychological constructs. In the process, I shall review the history of social psychology in understanding differences and similarities in the ways in which attitudes and social representations have been theorized. After a concise review of each of these two concepts, I examine the points of connection and tension between them, with particular reference to the dialectic of the social and the psychological. This highlights the influence of dominant constructions of the individual within the discipline of social psychology itself and on recent research in attitude theory in particular. The paper discusses how social psychologists have used, have been constrained by, and have developed particular social representations of the individual and of 'attitudes' themselves in the reified realm of academic psychology. By way of a conclusion, the example of racism is drawn on to reveal the conceptual and political consequences of theorizing either racist attitudes or racializing representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Bion`s Affect Theory, in relation to the recent disclosure of systematic abuse in State-funded childcare institutions in Ireland. Exploring Meltzer `s development of Bion `s early work the paper describes the wider cultural and historical circumstances in which children and carers came to enter the physically and emotionally claustrophobic environment of the claustrum, in which a lack of knowledge could lead to hurting. The aim is to increase our understanding of how individual and group dynamics can lead to people becoming dehumanized under certain forms of state organization; and the importance of developing and maintaining knowledgeable, reflective and accountable systems of care and management, aware of the ever present risk of boundary violation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to outline an agenda for critiques of psychiatry and other mainstream ideologies of mental health for the 21st century. While the heyday of anti-psychiatry was the period from the 1960s to the 1970s, new critiques of psychiatry, clinical psychology and psycho- therapy continued to emerge throughout the last two decades of the 20th century. Some of these - not least those that emerged from the mental health service users' movement - echoed the themes of earlier critics such as R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz by questioning the legitimacy of diagnoses and therapeutic interventions. Others focused on anti-racist and/or feminist perspectives. This paper suggests that, in the wake of developments in biological psychiatry and socio-biology as well as clinical advances in psychopharmacology and the rise of Evidence Based Psychiatry, critical psychiatry has a new role. This role is less adversarial than that of the so-called anti-psychiatry of the 1960s and 1970s and less concerned with challenging basic assumptions about the causes of mental distress. The critical psychiatry of the 21st century can best serve the interests of service users by ensuring that service users' rights to autonomy, fairness and freedom of choice are not overlooked due to a preoccupation with the science of Evidence Based Psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a micro-historical analysis of unpublished drafts of S.H. Foulkes – intended to be part of his 'Theory Book' on group analysis – together with a comprehensive new historical reading of Norbert Elias's published writings relevant to group analysis, focusing on two lost roots of the theory of group analysis: (1) Elias's discovery of the simultaneous-interdependent process of 'Individualization and Socialization', and (2) Foulkes's innovative conception of the 'mind as a multi-personal phenomenon'. This analysis forms the main argument of this paper – that the theory of group analysis 'takes interrelational individuals (in the plural) seriously', not the reified concept of 'The Individual' nor the abstract concept of 'The Group'. It is proposed that Foulkes's conception of the individual's mind 'as a multi-personal phenomenon' is compatible, albeit, preceded Mitchell's 'relational' conception of 'multiple selves'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'culture', as used in anthropology and related fields, has been under continual and mounting criticism for several decades. This paper argues that while this concept needs indeed to be scrutinized and problematized, we are nonetheless much better off with it than without it. By rejecting it, we would jeopardize, in particular, the vital interests of immigrants, refugees and other crossers of cultural boundaries, who need to learn about cultural differences to be able to flourish, or even survive (socially), in a new environment. Drawing on autobiographical cross-cultural literature, the paper shows how the experience of transcultural lives and transcultural 'selves' vindicates the 'culture' concept, despite its limitations, and how this experience points to a need for cross-cultural education, rather than for the abandonment of the concept of 'culture(s)'. At the same time, the paper shows how the results of linguistic semantics and pragmatics, and especially those of the so-called 'natural semantic-metalanguage' (NSM) theory developed by the author and colleagues, allow us to better identify different cultural assumptions, values and understandings associated with different languages and to articulate different 'cultural scripts' in a way which would reflect the perspective of cultural insiders while being intelligible to outsiders. It also shows how the theory of 'cultural scripts', which is an offshoot of the NSM theory of language and thought, helps to refine the 'culture' concept and to make it more theoretically viable and more workable in practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the extent to which the clinical subject, in postcolonial clinical encounters, is able to speak, and be heard, through and beyond the structures of clinical theory and practice. The paper aligns itself theoretically with the project of Subaltern Studies, and particularly the work of Spivak, in her quest 'to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman'. It is concerned specifically with the complexity of learning to speak to the muted clinical subject of postcolonial Africa. It argues that this task is bedevilled by representations of Otherness (black, woman, illiterate, poor, rural) in clinical theory that speak for, but seldom engage in dialogue with, the clinical subject. Multivocal texts available in narrative therapy projects present an interesting challenge to conventional authorial ownership. More broadly, subaltern psychology, as a theoretical direction, offers an opportunity to understand ways in which muting occurs, and to work actively against professional deafness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are the relations among nations inevitably conflictual? Neorealism and neoliberalism share the rationalist assumption that states are self-regarding, but debate over whether states pursue relative or absolute gains. Scholars focusing on identity have recently joined the controversy. Wendt (1992) has argued against the realists that conflict is not the inevitable product of anarchy. Drawing on social psychology to defend realism, Mercer (1995) has countered that conflict is `an inescapable feature of … interstate relations'. This paper argues that international identity dynamics do not inexorably lead to competition, let alone conflict. Mercer's pessimism is unwarranted. Drawing on social identity theory (SIT), it argues that intergroup conflict is a highly contingent outcome, and that social psychology provides insights into when the realists are right, and when the liberals are. Utilizing examples from Sino-American relations, the paper also seeks to contribute to the stalemated debate in the China field between optimists and pessimists over the existence of a `China threat'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of social representations is one of the most vigorous areas in social psychology. Far from constituting a homogeneous body of knowledge, the theory consists of several analytical perspectives, including the structural approach. In this paper I propose that most of the assumptions of the structural approach applied to social representations or the central core theory are grounded in traditional conceptions of social cognition and mental representations, which are at variance with the general theory. The fact that one can view the structural approach embedded within associative networks and schema models makes it similar to most theories of attitude structure. Since the structural approach has remained within a mentalist social cognition paradigm, this paper proposes to move it towards a theory of social cognition that reflects the sociocultural conditions of creation and transformation of thought, and then emphasizes the communicative and ideological components of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the hypothesis that the type of social impairment observed in children with autism is evidence of an underlying malfunction in their 'Theory of Mind', resulting in 'mindblindness'. To establish this point, the paper takes up two interesting ideas in the Theory of Mind literature, purged of their Cartesianism: first, that the study of autism does indeed provide us with critical insights into the development of social understanding and empathy; and, second, that no meaningful distinction can be drawn between a child's interpersonal and intrapersonal development. The paper seeks to show how the ability to understand someone else's thoughts and emotions is a product of endless co-regulated interactions in which the child's own emotions and sense of self develop. The reason why children with autism so frequently exhibit impaired social relatedness is because basic biological challenges—such as sensory over- and under-reactivity—inhibit their ability to engage in these co-regulated interactive experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by problematizing the 'taken for granted' status of Newtonian linear time at the heart of (social) psychology. Borrowing from Adam, the paper makes a distinction between an 'events in time' and 'time in events' approach to social psychology. It argues that a 'time in events' approach helps to reveal the importance of multiple times for social psychological theories and practices. To demonstrate this approach, it considers some of the multiple times that are relevant for analysing the concept of 'identity'. It also explores the multiple times of the research encounter. In doing so, it suggests that traditional dichotomies in social psychology between synchronic and diachronic methods, and between experimental and qualitative methods, can be dissolved by this focus on the temporal. The paper concludes with some observations about the importance of time for thinking about social psychology as a knowledge-producing practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contact hypothesis states that regular interaction between members of different groups reduces prejudice, providing it occurs under favourable conditions. This paper discusses an implied but neglected aspect of the hypothesis, namely its interconnectedness with the spatial organization of intergroup relations. The first section analyses the limited ways in which the spatiality of contact has been conceived in past research. Offering an alternative perspective, the paper then outlines a framework for exploring the relationship between contact and processes of boundary regulation (see Sibley, 1995). As a developing theme, the paper emphasizes the need to devise social psychological theory that is adequate to the spatial dimension of group processes. This will require a shift away from a conception of social space as an inert background to social life towards a conception of social space as a meaningful and dynamic production that constitutes our collective relations and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With this issue, Culture & Psychology adds a new thematic rubric to its previously established ones ('From Theory to Practice' and 'Investigation into Ideas'). The goal of this new rubric is to bring to the attention of our contemporary readership some selected papers that have been published in the past, and largely forgotten. Yet these papers may contain ideas that are relevant for the state of affairs of the given area of inquiry in its present state, and may help in the advancement of future ideas. Each of these 'old' articles will be furnished with commentaries that build the bridge between the old and the new perspectives - critically examining what of the older contribution is useful for the present and the future. The first example of this new feature includes a paper by George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), published for the first time in the International Journal of Ethics in 1930. The paper - 'The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in Their American Setting' - includes a number of insights into US society in its historical divergence from from British society. The first contemporary commentary, that by noted historian Peter Stearns, provides a critical analysis of Mead's ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a framework for analyzing scientists' efforts to construct 'do-able' research problems. A problem is 'doable' when scientists can align tasks to three levels of work organization - experiment, laboratory, and social world. Articulation is the planning and coordination needed to align levels. The framework is used to analyze data from a study of basic cancer research. Its usefulness is illustrated by a case study of oncogenic antibody research in a biotechnology company. The paper discusses the role of modularity and standardized packages of tasks in facilitating 'doability'. The findings suggest that attention to articulation work in the training and work processes of scientists, and to the conditions affecting alignment of levels of work organization, is necessary if doable problems are to be constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medicolegal expertise raises many issues of sociological and political concern, some of which are discussed here in relation to the insanity defence and the plea of diminished responsibility. The paper describes the social process of attributing a crime either to punishable conduct or to mental abnormality in terms of voluntarist and mechanist accounts of motivation. This description explains some current difficulties. But the paper then criticizes logical and empirical shortcomings in this description and therefore reformulates mechanism and voluntarism as terms within a common scheme for classifying causes. It is then possible to analyze structural reasons for the difficulties facing psychiatric expertise and for the general failure to achieve a coherent theory of responsibility. The paper concludes by suggesting how a social psychology of causal attribution might link the intellectual process of classifying conduct with the social distribution of power and authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]