The Perils of a Public Intellectual

In 1939 George W. Hartmann was Chairman of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and a prominent activist-scholar. By the end of World War II, his teaching career and psychological health lay in ruin, and he never reestablished his influence as a psychopolitical expert. Thisarticle traces the rise and fall of Hartmann's career and its unique mixture of Gestalt psychology, socialism, and anti-Communism. Unpublished correspondence, family papers, and files from the FBI and other intelligence agencies are used to recreate Hartmann's political personae—including Socialist electoral candidate, chairman of Peace Now, and leader of the War Resisters League. His life as a public intellectual is used to reflect upon the nature of psychological expertise at midcentury.     

The topic of subjectivity in psychology: Contradictions,paths and new alternatives

This paper draws a picture of how topics related to subjectivity have appeared in different psychological theories, such as psychoanalysis, Gestalt and post‐structuralist approaches, discussing in depth a specific proposition from a cultural‐historical standpoint. I argue that, in most of these theories, subjectivity has been used to refer to specific processes and phenomena without advancing a more general theory about it. The way in which subjectivity was treated within the Cartesian/Enlightenment tradition, taken together with the individualistic tradition of psychology, led critical psychological theories to reject the concept. In this way, such critical theories have omitted the heuristic value of subjectivity to study processes that can neither be exhausted by language, nor by discourse. A new proposal of subjectivity is highlighted, based on the cultural‐historical tradition in psychology. From this perspective, subjectivity is defined by units of emotions and symbolical processes generated throughout human experience. On the basis of such definition, I discuss how institutionalized orders can be subverted by subjective productions that represent new social pathways. Far from being a remnant of Modernity, in this way subjectivity is defined as a human production, capable of transcending the apparent objective limits of human existence.     

VII. Foster children: The Jewish home finding society and the institute for Juvenile research 1

Although there is a body of literature that applies Gestalt therapy techniques to clinical practice, little has been written about the use of Gestalt therapy theory as a comprehensive framework for social work practice as a whole. Gestalt therapy theory unifies social work's ecological and strength perspectives and is highly consonant with the core values of the profession. Four major theoretical aspects of Gestalt therapy that are highly applicable to social work practice are described: field theory, “I-Thou” relationship, creative adjustment, and the phenomenological perspective. Case examples are provided to demonstrate a Gestalt approach to social work practice.     

Working Between Worlds: Qualitative Methods and Social Psychology

We invite social psychologists in the United States to join with psychologists in other countries and with researchers in other disciplines to include qualitative approaches in their research repertory. Several classic studies in social psychology used field-based qualitative approaches, yet in recent decades, these ways of working have been on the margins of American social psychology. We explore what a qualitative stance offers and entails, giving examples from our own and others' research. The relentless attention that qualitative workers have given to issues of bias, subjectivity, and research ethics prompts us to consider how such issues are always present in research, regardless of its methods.     

Social psychology and neoliberalism: A critical commentary on McDonald,Gough, Wearing,and Deville (2017)

McDonald, Gough, Wearing, and Deville (2017) call for the discipline of social psychology to investigate issues of neoliberalism, consumption and self‐identity more seriously. We make two contributions in relation to their analysis. First, we highlight some current issues associated with neoliberalism as a concept that leave us in doubt regarding the analytical usefulness of the term. Due to its imprecision and over‐extension, predominant association with the left who use it pejoratively, and altered economic circumstances, we are increasingly skeptical of neoliberalism's analytical validity to social psychology. Second, we also stress the importance of interdisciplinarity, but suggest that empirical insights from mainstream social psychology have much to offer social scientists concerned with how current economic developments impact upon self‐identity and social behaviour. We conclude by pointing out that a greater openness to heterodoxy within and between critical and mainstream strands and the wider social sciences are required if social psychologists are going to make more persuasive impacts to the study and resistance of market logic.     

Guanxilization or categorization： psychological mechanisms contributing to the formation of the Chinese concept of ＂us＂

中国社会心理学在面对急速的社会变迁中,需要以变迁与文化的视角来选择研究问题,而中国社会文化中群己关系的社会心理机制,即“我们”概念的形成机制及其转换的可能与条件,正是一个体现着双重视角的基本问题。对这一问题的探讨不仅有助于解释社会凝聚力、群体行动的逻辑,讨论国家与个人、社会与个人、类别与个人的关系;也有助于培植社会转型时期的社会心理资源和社会支持系统,从而促进社会合作。与以往单～机制的分析框架不同,通过对两个个案的讨论,研究提出了一个新的分析框架,即：中国人“我们’概念是在社会情境的启动和价值取向等因素影响之下,经由相互交织的“关系化”与“类别化”双重过程形成的。     

Ageism: Prejudice Against Our Feared Future Self

For decades, researchers have discovered much about how humans automatically categorize others in social perception. Some categorizations—race, gender, and age—are so automatic that they are termed "primitive categories." As we categorize, we often develop stereotypes about the categories. Researchers know much about racism and sexism, but comparatively little about prejudicing and stereotyping based on age. The articles in this issue highlight the current empirical and theoretical work by researchers in gerontology, psychology, communication, and related fields on understanding the origins and consequences of stereotyping and prejudicing against older adults. With the aging baby boomer demographic, it is especially timely for researchers to work to understand how society can shed its institutionalized ageism and promote respect for elders.     

Social Influence: Representation, Imagination and Facts

Studies on social influence bring us to fear that influence may alienate us and turn us into an agent of the will and desire of the other. This fear relies on a representation of the relationship of influence: it would be an asymmetrical relationship involving two basically opposite and complementary entities, the source (who has a desire, a will, a power or, failing that, a technique) and the target (who is subjected, subordinate). If some experiments in social psychology demonstrate the effectiveness of some techniques of influence and manipulation, they must however be analysed in detail. Many experiments and theories show that influence is not basically nonreciprocal. These works are neglected because they are too different from the imaginary representation of influence that dominates both social psychology and common sense.     

Towards a sonic ecology of urban life: ethnography of sound perception in Cairo

ABSTRACT

This study on sound perception in Cairo uses a methodological procedure described in a previous issue of this journal [11(3)]. The procedure involves equipping inhabitants of Cairo, the Egyptian capital, with binaural microphones that record the surrounding urban sounds during one of their daily journeys (without the researcher). Participants later describe and comment on the sounds while listening to the recording. Analysis of this material allowed us first to establish an organized lexicon in categories. We identified a structured “natural language of sounds”. The data obtained reveal covert categories that describe three key domains of urban life: the active city, the city in movement, and the relational city. A principal finding is that sound perception systematically relates sounds to their origin, i.e. both the source and its social situation. This socialization of sound led us to the notion of “sound constructs” as products of an immediate socialization of the perception of sound. Experiment clarifies how perception operates in Cairo, notably through territory differentiation using sonic saliences and soundmarks. Finally, we propose a “sonic ecology” of the city: how residents collectively experience the sound dimensions of their urban territory, navigate between very different territories, recognize them and respond to them.     

Strawberry feel forever: understanding metaphor as sensorimotor dynamics

ABSTRACT

Metaphor is a useful way of explaining how to do things. The literature on metaphor in the learning of physical skill has generally explicated its efficacy by examining its actionable directives for motor enactment. And yet from the perspectives of phenomenological philosophy, ecological psychology, and enactivism, action is immanently intertwined with perception, so that models of metaphor-based learning should foreground the role of sensory activity modulating motor behavior. As such, metaphor is retheorized as a sensorial constraint one imaginarily projects into one’s action–perception phenomenological landscape. I present two metaphors from an instructional video on cello technique. Whereas these metaphors are couched in action language (what one should do), their potential impact, I argue, lies in emergent goal sensations (what one should feel). These explorative sensorimotor accommodations may, in turn, bring forth yet new scopes of latent sensations coupled to unanticipated performance possibilities, which suggest further modifying and calibrating enactment in the target domain. Attending to, achieving, and maintaining emergent intermediary goal sensations regulates instrumented action by forging new affordances that bring forth new motor coordination. As teacher and student co-imagine images for action, they should attend to sensory perceptions. And the same goes for scholars of metaphor.     

Abstracts of master's theses July 1969: Smith college school for social work

In this article, the author describes a possibly unfamiliar unconscious, namely the unconscious that arises from how our brains have evolved. That unconscious is active in sense perceptions, in many verbal and nonverbal aspects of language, and from our brains' propensity to posit instant explanations independent of relevant information. All of the sources used in the exposition are readily available to persons without any formal knowledge of sense perception, evolutionary psychology, linguistics, or neuroscience. As the narrative proceeds, applications to social work knowledge are presented.     

How I am Constructing Culture‐inclusive Theories of Social‐psychological Process in our Age of Globalization

Accepting Cole's the premise that, “cultural‐inclusive psychology has been … an elusive goal” (1996, pp. 7–8) but one worth striving to attain, I first set out to identify my domain of interest and competence as an intellectual. Deciding it to be social interaction between individuals, I then searched out theoretical approaches to this domain that encompassed as many approaches to this trans‐historical concern that have emerged from cultural traditions bequeathing us their legacies. Doing this search comprehensively required me to move outside my Judeo‐Christian, Greco‐Roman, Renaissance heritage and its international diffusion via the European Empires since the 1500's, embodied most recently the American dominance of intellectual discourse since the Second World War. In my case, this journey has taken me in to Chinese culture and psychology where I have worked towards integrating the Chinese worldview and its psychological measures into the discipline of social psychology. Striving for a more inclusive culture‐view, I am now using multi‐cultural data bases to transcend this two‐cultural focus and incorporate wider measures of cultural variation into our theorizing and empirical validation of universal models for social interaction. This paper describes my current procedures for such culture‐mapping.     

对"美"的现象学还原

用胡塞尔现象学还原的方法,将审美活动中人的"内知觉"从遮蔽我们的"物"知觉中剥离,澄清"经验"是一切审美活动、情感体验的直接对象,在此基础上,进一步区分科学态度与审美态度、超验体验与审美体验.     

北京话里的特殊量词

汉语方言里的量词 ,大都可以视为其所在方言的特征词 ,体现不同方言之间词汇上的区别特征[1] 。另外 ,作为名词的“陪衬”[2 ] ,量词往往属于常用、多义、相对活跃的词类。因此 ,一种方言里的量词还能为我们探究此种方言的特点与变异提供材料和线索 ,包括语言现象背后的社会、文化、心理等诸多因素。北京话有自己的量词系统 ,其中一部分已经与普通话重合 ,另一部分则与普通话、现代汉语的书面语有很多不同 ,可以看作北京话里的特殊量词     

More than a Theory: A New Map of Social Thought

In this article we revisit two different temporal phases related to the publication of Serge Moscovici's book La Psychanalyse, son image et son public, and we examine two key concepts of the theory: cognitive polyphasia and anchoring. The first phase, initiated by the Durkheimian circle, gives us an opportunity to retrieve traces of the intellectual debate about collective psychology and reconsider this debate in today's light. The second, more recent phase, is inspired by classical and modern research in the field of social representation, and it serves us as a basis for a new hypothesis about anchoring. We suggest that the traditional concept of familiarisation attributed to anchoring can also have an opposite significance: it can transmit and guarantee the non‐familiar and so establish strangeness. Finally, we argue that social representations are more than a simple theory, just like the symbol is always more than what it symbolizes.     

Learning to smell: on the shifting modalities of experience

ABSTRACT

How can one learn to perceive? The study of an expert training shows how olfactory learning combines two operations and modalities of experience: firstly, it rests upon doubt and the questioning of perception to turn its undisputable evidence into a changing plurality. Secondly, perception is reconstructed and stabilized according to a set of chosen constraints, thanks to a perpetual control and reworking of the inadequate perceptions.

This analysis brings us to reconsider the interpretation of the notion of “attention”. Trainees focusing on their perception do not make it more salient, precise and detailed, as per the representational interpretation of perception. They question it. In so doing, they foster a surge of “shades” and make it plural and variable. Attention denotes here a process of perceptual destabilization, through doubt.

Additionally, in the cases studied, the reflexivity that enables learning shows deconstructive aspects: through doubt, the surrounding world turns from self-evident to changing and plural. This does not fit the usual constructive character of reflexivity, as in “mind-” or “self-building” processes, for instance. At the core of the learning process, the shifting modalities of perception seem to open the door to a larger variety of understandings of reflexivity and their correlative selves.     

Certain Aspects of the Study of Social History (Historical Social Psychology)

One of the scholarly disciplines, the utilization of whose method and subject matter would, in our opinion, offer very fruitful prospects for historical research, is social (societal) psychology. The subject matter of social psychology is dual. In the first place, its tasks include study of the conditioning of the individual's mentality by his membership in a society, class, or social group. Social psychology concerns itself with those aspects of the mental set and emotional behavior of man that take shape as a consequence of his life and activity in a group. In the second place, social psychology studies the behavior standards of groups and societies, the psychological reactions of groups or masses of people. We know that the emotional behavior of a group is not merely the sum of the emotions of the individuals comprising it. On the one hand, the mentality of the individual and its manifestation in the group are not analogous to the intellectual life of the individual in isolation.     

心理学文化意识演变中的反思与追问——兼论人类行为机制探究的新视角

文化、意识与行为的关系是心理学文化意识演变中的核心问题。通过对三者关系的不断反思与追问,得出：语言以及由诸符号所构成的神话、宗教、艺术、科学等文化形式是探究人类行为机制的新视角。     

Altruism and Volunteerism: The perceptions of altruism in four disciplines and their impact on the study of volunteerism

Although volunteering is the most organized and formal manner of altruism, the two subjects are rarely connected in literature. In this article reviewed is the egocentric approach that is found in four social disciplines: psychology, sociology, economics and socio-biology (evolutionism), and the way that studies on altruism are based on Utilitarian philosophy and on the homo economicus perception of man. All of the above have influenced the study of volunteerism: the research questions, the study areas, and the conclusions on the essence of volunteering. We then review a different approach based on Deontological philosophy: the alter-centric approach, already influencing the study of altruism. New directions of approaching and studying volunteerism are suggested.