Showing papers by "Jaan Valsiner published in 2012"

Cultural Psychology of Human Values

Abstract: The book provides conceptual and theoretical elaborations on human values from a cultural psychological approach. The authors illustrate their original contributions with empirical data, allowing for productive discussion on the topic of ontogenesis of values from a historical-cultural perspective.

Making sense of infinite uniqueness : the emerging system of idiographic science

Abstract: YIS has been thought as an annual series of volumes collecting contributes aimed at developing the integration of idiographic and nomothetic approaches in psychological and more in general social science. At the beginning, 3 years ago, we got an agreement with an Italian publisher (FGP - Firera Publishing Group) interested in the scientific project and therefore willing to help the start up of this scientific enterprise. After publishing the first volume (YIS 2008- yet published in 2009 - the Volume is freely available on the FPG's website) we have had many positive feedbacks and signals of interests, as well as several submissions, from many parts of the world . This has provided an acceleration of the following issues - Above all, this led us to realize that it was time to give an editorial collocation to YIS that can be more consistent with the interest it has raised and that can ulteriorly raise. FPG does not put constraint on this perspective, being aware and agreed of the necessity of a worldwide context for the YIS's development. Moreover, there are no constraints in the possibility of going on in using the label "YIS", starting from Volume 4 The Series addresses a quite large potential public - students and researchers interested to theoretical and methodological development of psychology and, more in general, social science. Persons engaged with qualitative, dynamic informed models of analysis will find YIS a precious tool as well as a context enabling to develop a worlwide network of practices and cultures of research. The first three volumes' TOC witness how large and constantly increasing is the interest around the scientific project.

Rehearsing renewal of identity: Reconceptualization on the move.

Abstract: The self is both stable and ever in motion and it is shaped by a person’s telling of stories – to oneself and to others. In fact, the telling of a life story is an act that allows the creation of a stable, yet changing, image of oneself. From this metaphor of people as storytellers (Bruner, 1990; McAdams, 1993; Sarbin, 1986), we have been developing a research program that tracks the emergence of novelties in people’s lives, trying to figure out the transformation process of self-narratives (see Goncalves, Matos & Santos, 2009; Goncalves, Mendes, Cruz, A. Ribeiro, Angus & Greenberg, 2011). For this purpose we created a coding system – the Innovative Moment Coding System (Goncalves, Ribeiro, Mendes, Matos, & Santos, 2011) – that allows the tracking of novelties, which emerge in discourse, called innovative moments (or IMs). IMs are exceptions to a dominant selfnarrative. Whereas the dominant self-narrative is the rule (of behaving, feeling, thinking), IMs are the exceptions (like new actions, feelings, thoughts or intentions, for example). According to this model of narrative change (Goncalves et al., 2009) the expansion of

The eternal return to the issue of “primitive thought”:: Lev Vygotsky and N. Marr looking at L. Lévy-Bruhl

Abstract: In this article, L. Vygotsky’s and N. Marr’s ideas on thinking and language are analyzed in the light of their reflections about L. Levy-Bruhl’s theories of “primitive thought”. Not only were Levy-Bruhl’s ideas and facts related in his books used by both Vygotsky and Marr to constitute theoretical grounds and important conclusions of their theories, but the French anthropologist often served as an author of common interest between Vygotsky and Marr. This tendency was particularly evident in their reflections on a “crisis” in psychology and linguistics in the first third of the 20 th century, on a “diffuse” nature of primitive thought and language and on verbal and gesture languages.