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In this article we use a social representational perspective on a large sample of European students to consider the interplay between pacifist attitudes and representations of World War I (WWI). WWI gave rise to pacifist movements across the globe. Across 10 European countries (N = 1,347 undergraduate students), we invited participants to report the first 5 words that came to their mind when thinking about this event and measured their level of pacifism. Analyses of the reported words revealed the presence of seven lexical classes corresponding to 2 main perspectives on WWI. The first main perspective was characterized by "analytical" representations of the war, with a focus on the places and actors of WWI. The second perspective highlighted negative emotions and appraisals associated with war. Overall, we found that the pacifist attitudes we analyzed were associated with a view of the conflict in terms of negatively valanced words, both at the emotional level and in terms of concrete consequences. Conversely lower pacifist attitudes were linked with an emphasis upon weapons. The present results help fill a gap in the literature on attitudes toward peace and war by evidencing their interplay with the way individuals view war. These findings allow us to establish a connection between mainstream, individualcentered approach to attitudes relying on individual premises and social representation theory. Moreover, in line with historical scholarship, these results suggest that a common interpretational framework underlies a view of the conflict associated with the pacifist wave that emerged 100 years ago and current pacifist attitudes. Finally, the present study is the first large scale psychology study of the social representations of the Great War.

Nella sua Vorschule der Aesthetik, del 1876, Gustav Theodor Fechner sviluppa uno nuovo ed empirico approccio all’estetica detto "dal basso". Cio significa che egli non deriva l’essenza della "bellezza" da un ideale obiettivo ma usa un metodo induttivo: indaga quali elementari caratteristiche formali degli oggetti (per esempio le proporzioni) hanno indotto o intensificato giudizi estetici positivi. Nelle sue lezioni viennesi sull’estetica (1885-1886), Franz Brentano critica questo elementarismo: sostiene che la costituzione dell’estetica "dal basso" non implica necessariamente di cominciare dagli elementi formali di un oggetto percepito. Anche l’impatto spontaneo di una struttura complessa come un’opera d’arte puo essere inteso come un atto elementare di percezione e non richiede necessariamente un atto riflessivo "dall’alto". Nella maggior parte di questi argomenti "olistici", Carl Stumpf segue il suo maestro Franz Brentano. Brentano e Stumpf concordano anche nella loro concezione dell’estetica come disciplina "pratica". Benche Brentano and Stumpf favoriscano entrambi un approccio induttivo del fenomeno estetico, ci sono alcune differenze terminologiche, che potranno essere ricondotte a differenze nelle loro concezioni del giudizio estetico.

COST Action IS1205 “Social psychological dynamics of historical representations in the enlarged European Union”.

The present study examines current social representations associated with the origins of the Great War, a major event that has profoundly affected Europe. A survey conducted in 20 European countries (N = 1906 students in social sciences) shows a high consensus: The outbreak of the war is attributed to the warring nations’ leaders while the responsibility of the populations is minimized. Building on the concept of social representation of history (Liu and Hilton, 2005), we suggest that the social representations of the Great War fulfill social psychological functions in contemporary Europe. We suggest that WWI may function as a charter for European integration. Their content also suggests a desire to distinguish a positively valued ingroup ("the people") from powerful elites, construed as an outgroup., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline was initiated by Alexander G. Baumgarten, who conceived it as a science of the lower faculties of experience or the study of sensual perception in general. This perspective changed, however, just one generation later, when aesthetics was defined in the narrower sense of a theory of beauty and the fine arts. Kant opposed the application of the term “aesthetics” to a critique of taste and suggested giving up this use of the term and applying it solely to transcendental aesthetics, as a true science, or employing it “partly in a transcendental, partly in a psychological signification”. In this sense, it was employed by H.D. Zschokke, still in the eighteenth century, but was systematically developed by G.T. Fechner in his Vorschule der Aesthetik in 1876. Based on Fechner’s concept of aesthetics as an empirical discipline, psychological aesthetics found extensive application in experimental psychology at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, but also strong opposition from the part of traditional philosophical aesthetics. At that time, the theory of Einfuhlung (empathy) had been developed as the dominating theoretical fundament of psychological aesthetics. In the course of the twentieth century, different paradigmatic approaches were proposed, which for the most part reflected paradigmatic turns of psychology in general (e.g. phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, cognitive psychology).

Gustav Theodor Fechners „Vorschule der Aesthetik“ (1876) gilt als Grundungsschrift der psychologisch-empirischen Asthetik. Fechner selbst hat diese Bezeichnung allerdings nicht explizit verwendet. Es ging ihm nicht um die Grundung einer neuen Disziplin, sondern um die Einfuhrung einer aus seiner Sicht vernachlassigten „Behandlungsweise“ des Asthetischen, die er als „empirische“ von der „philosophischen“ abgrenzte (ebd., S. 2) und die er im Rahmen eines umfassenden Verstandnisses von Gegenstand und Methode der Asthetik fur unverzichtbar hielt. Die Einbettung dieses Fachgebiets in die Philosophie hat er – im Unterschied zu spateren Exponenten der „psychologischen Asthetik“ – nie in Frage gestellt. Fur ihn wie auch fur seinen 30 Jahre jungeren Leipziger Kollegen Wilhelm Wundt gehorten empirische Methoden und eine induktive Vorgehensweise selbstverstandlich zum Repertoire der Philosophie, auch wenn dies manche ihrer Fachkollegen anders sahen.

The development of psychological aesthetics in the second half of the nineteenth century was closely connected with the theory of aesthetic empathy (Einfuhlung). While aesthetics as a philosophical discipline focused on a rather normative understanding of beauty and a theory of art, the empirical approach in aesthetics in the tradition of Gustav Th. Fechner was primarily interested in categorising and explaining the variety of phenomena of aesthetic experience. In this context, the theory of empathy obtained a pivotal role as a basic concept for explaining aesthetic perception in art and beyond. Allesch discusses the relevant authors of psychological aesthetics, among them the English writer Vernon Lee, and explores the reasons why empathy theory lost influence in the course of the twentieth century.

In 1925, the German biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch published a booklet entitled The Crisis in Psychology. It was originally published in English and was based on lectures given at various universities in China, Japan and the USA. The ‘‘crisis’’ in psychology of that time, in Driesch’s opinion, lies in the necessity to decide about ‘‘the road which psychology is to follow in the future’’. This necessity refers to five ‘‘critical points’’, namely (1) to develop the theory of psychic elements to a theory of meaning by phenomenological analysis, (2) the overcoming of association theory, (3) to acknowledge that the unconscious is a fact and a ‘‘normal’’ aspect of mental life, (4) to reject ‘‘psychomechanical parallelism’’ or any other epiphenomenalistic solution of the mind-body problem, and (5) the extension of psychical research to new facts as described by parapsychology, for instance. Driesch saw close parallels between the development of modern psychology and that of biology, namely in a theoretical shift from ‘‘sum-concepts’’ like association and mechanics, to ‘‘totality-concepts’’ like soul and entelechy. The German translation of 1926 was entitled Grundprobleme der Psychologie (Fundamental Problems of Psychology) while ‘‘the crisis in psychology’’ forms just the subtitle of this book. This underlines that Driesch’s argumentation—in contrast to that of Buehler—dealt with ontological questions rather than with paradigms.

Background in the psychology of music The historical development of the psychology of music largely followed that of psychology in general. In the 20th century it adopted the research methods and interests of cognitive psychology and more recently has turned to new interdisciplinary connections with psychobiology and the neurosciences. There remains, however, a certain inadequacy regarding work in the psychology of music and cultural psychology and as well of interpretative research aimed at interpreting the role of music in those processes, processes Bruner called “the nature and cultural shaping of meaning-making, and the central place it plays in human action”. Background in historical musicology and cultural anthropology Historical musicology and cultural anthropology maintain that experiencing and understanding music represents a process fundamentally dependent upon cultural context. This begs the question as to how cultural context influences social and individual representations of music in the sense that a particular “style of aesthetic experience” typifies a historical period. Although this is a genuine psychological question, it cannot be answered by a psychology which is restricted to “ahistorical” explanations of information processing. Thus from a cultural anthropological perspective there is strong interest in any kind of “cultural psychology” which is able to conceptualise the dynamic interactions between culturally determined “social representations” of music and the individual mind. Goals We argue for a “cultural turn” in the psychology of music. Following developments within psychology, research over recent decades in the psychology of music has concentrated on neuro-cognition while cultural aspects have been underestimated — as they continue to be in psychology in general. Conclusions An important task for an interdisciplinary framework that wishes to include the cultural sciences and psychology should be to review recent cultural psychological theories to assess their implications for a psychological theory of music. As examples we use Ernst E. Boesch's Symbolic Action Theory which explicitly refers to the role of aesthetic experience in cultural contexts and Alfred Lang's “semiotic ecology” which provides an appropriate model for conceptualising the complex relations between the development of cultural patterns and the development of related individual representations.

Meine Uberlegungen zu diesem Thema gehen zunachst davon aus, dass Religion und Musik gleichermasen Kulturtatbestande sind. Dies schliest weiter gehende, etwa theologische Interpretationen des Begriffs Religion nicht aus, bindet sie aber in den Kontext dieser Uberlegungen bewusst nicht ein. Zugleich verweisen diese kulturellen Tatbestande auf menschliche Erfahrungsmoglichkeiten, die ihren Ausdruck in jenen Formen religioser Riten und Praktiken sowie musikalischen Ausdrucksformen und ‘Werken’ gefunden haben, die wir als ‘Musik’ bzw. ‘Religion’ im Sinne von kulturellen Tatbestanden beschreiben konnen.

Musik ist ein selbstverstandlicher und doch auch wieder kein selbstverstandlicher Gegenstand psychologischer Forschung. Die Selbstverstandlichkeit liegt darin begrundet, das musikalische Formen neben allen Aspekten, die ihnen die systematische Musikwissenschaft sonst noch abzugewinnen vermag, wesentlich mit Erkennen und Wiedererkennen, mit dem Gedachtnis, mit Emotionen, mit Einstellungen und Vorurteilen und vielem anderem mehr zu tun haben, womit sich die Psychologie beschaftigt.

The first international psychology congresses reflect the beginnings of scientific psychology. The first congress was devoted to physiological psychology. There were many papers in the area of psychophysiology and more attention was paid to experimental method and to physiological instruments.