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.

¿Qué tienen de natural los contextos naturales? Construcción cultural del desarrollo humano y su estudio

Abstract: espanolEl tema del empleo de contextos naturales para el estudio del desarrollo humano es crucial para la innovacion teorica dentro de la psicologia evolutiva Se afirma que la oposicion entre contextos naturales y contextos de laboratorio es un artefacto construido culturalmente Todos los contextos de laboratorio (o cualquier otro contexto creado especialmente) son versiones de los contextos naturalistas que permiten a los estudiosos del desarrollo acceder a los procesos redundantes del desarrollo que estan limitados por las condiciones de transaccion entre persona y entorno EnglishThe issue of using natural contexts to study human development is crucial for theoretical innovation within developmental psychology It is argued that the opposing natural versus laboratory contexts is a culturally constructed artifact All laboratory (or any other specially set-up contexts) are versions of the naturalistic contexts, within which developmentalists can access the redundant processes of development that are constrained by conditions in the person-environment transaction

Dialectics of Influence: How Agency Works

Abstract: Dialectical perspectives have had an ambiguous history in European thought in the past two centuries. Having become established in the late eighteenth century by J. G. Fichte and G. W. Hegel as a philosophical system, the dialectical perspective episodically entered into other sciences (psychology, sociology) while being “politically kidnapped” in the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1980s. The result has been uneven development of basic ideas of change and development in the conceptual repertoires of the biological, social, and human sciences. It is time to bring back this venerable tradition of thought to the center of the construction efforts of new perspectives in the social sciences of the twenty-first century. In this article, we outline the core of the dialectical ideas as these are centrally relevant for a new synthesis of developmental psychology and traditionally systemic but non-developmental theoretical domains such as psychoanalysis. We use one of the concepts from psychoanalysis that has proven to be productive in all of human psychology—the notion of ego-defense mechanisms—and re-conceptualize them as self-construction mechanisms. We thus make a basic psychoanalytic concept developmental—self-construction is a process where the Ego uses its agentive power in different dynamic and dialectical transformation of the various societal influences. It creates a synthetic set of personal-cultural tools for anticipatory actions towards future challenges when these occur. The human agency functions in pre-defending the Ego in relation to undesired influences and dialectical self-construction mechanism occupy a central place in this eternal fight for feeling oneself as a meaningfully whole person in the middle of constantly new life-course experiences.

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.