Jaan Valsiner

Bio: Jaan Valsiner is an academic researcher from Aalborg University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Cultural psychology & Dialogical self. The author has an hindex of 55, co-authored 384 publications receiving 12659 citations. Previous affiliations of Jaan Valsiner include University of Luxembourg & University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Epilogue: Different Perspectives on Individual-Based Generalizations in Psychology

Abstract: The role of the individual subject in scientific psychology has always been a controversial issue in psychology. Throughout the aim of the present volume was to analyze some of the theoretical and methodological sides of that issue, and to bring together psychologists from different fields who have attempted to work out research techniques that are based on individual subjects. The contributors to this book emphasized different aspects of the role of the individual subject, and suggested various ways of constructing basic knowledge in our discipline on the basis of individual subjects’ data. These ways ranged from an emphasis on the integration of idiographic and nomothetic research approaches (Walsch-burger, Grossmann) to the separation of the two approaches, depending on whether the given field is aimed at explanation of the generalized (individual) system, or a population of such systems (chapters by Cairns, Valsiner, Thorngate). Furthermore, the contributors expressed widely different opinions on the role of statistical methodologies in the study of individual subjects—ranging from the innovative use of traditional methods (Walschburger, Thoman, and Rogoff & Gauvain) to the need for devising novel methodology (Dywan & Segalowitz and Mace & Kratochwill), and further to the need for preserving the integrity of the psychological phenomena, whatever methods are being used (Cairns, Ginsburg, Valsiner). Going beyond ordinary single-case statistical methodology, Thorn-gate and Carroll outlined a strategy for comparison of hypotheses that can be applied to individual subjects. Grossmann and Franck outlined the historical side of the issue of inference from individual subjects. The issue that is of concern to the contributors to the present volume has been in the center of attention of psychologists and philosophers in the past. It has been discussed; psychologists have fought over it to prove their claim for the scientific nature of their points of view (e.g., Allport, 1940, 1946; Holt, 1962; Skaggs, 1945, and others, discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 in this volume)—and after a while the whole issue was abandoned as a topic, until another generation of psychologists picked it up again. Such episodic interest in the role of the individual subject in psychology illustrates how psychologists’ social environment guides scientists in their efforts to explain psychological phenomena (Buss, 1978; Flanagan, 1981; Gergen, 1973, 1982). Unfortunately, the issue itself has remained unsolved, and much dispute around it has facilitated selective forgetting of what had been actually said by our predecessors (see Grossmann’s chapter for details).

Social Consumption of Cannibals

Abstract: Gustav Jahoda’s new book provides a rich historical review of how Europeans have presented the images of the others to themselves over the last three centuries. These presentations come in various forms— monstrous body images, childor animal-like descriptions of the character, or presumptions of the habits of eating other humans. Yet all of these varied presentations can be seen as meaningful regulators of the distance between Europeans and the others. The other persons— savages—are real for the presenters, yet the relationship of the different Europeans to those savages varied immensely. How it varied was surely built upon existing ideologies. Thus, Jahoda describes the ways in which the inhabitants of the Canary Islands were depicted in the 14th century. The savages found there

Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. The emergence of learning activity as a historical form of human learning 3. The zone of proximal development as the basic category of expansive research 4. The instruments of expansion 5. Toward an expansive methodology 6. Epilogue.

Remembering. A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge (University Press) 1964.

Abstract: Part I. Experimental Studies: 2. Experiment in psychology 3. Experiments on perceiving III Experiments on imaging 4-8. Experiments on remembering: (a) The method of description (b) The method of repeated reproduction (c) The method of picture writing (d) The method of serial reproduction (e) The method of serial reproduction picture material 9. Perceiving, recognizing, remembering 10. A theory of remembering 11. Images and their functions 12. Meaning Part II. Remembering as a Study in Social Psychology: 13. Social psychology 14. Social psychology and the matter of recall 15. Social psychology and the manner of recall 16. Conventionalism 17. The notion of a collective unconscious 18. The basis of social recall 19. A summary and some conclusions.

Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again

Abstract: From the Publisher: The old opposition of matter versus mind stubbornly persists in the way we study mind and brain. In treating cognition as problem solving, Andy Clark suggests, we may often abstract too far from the very body and world in which our brains evolved to guide us. Whereas the mental has been treated as a realm that is distinct from the body and the world, Clark forcefully attests that a key to understanding brains is to see them as controllers of embodied activity. From this paradigm shift he advances the construction of a cognitive science of the embodied mind.