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.

Deep Feelings in Actions: Where Cultural Psychology Matters

Abstract: These conclusive remarks bring the chapters of the volume together into a theoretical exploration of the integration between cultural psychology and Dialogical Self Theory. Since the nature of cultural psychologies is mainly developmental, and the notion of I-position suggests a location in time, the text describes an attempt to put the I-position into movement, as a vector. This vectorial interpretation can lead to further explorations of the depth of experiences, in the vertical movements of felt intensities that sometimes transcend the capacity of language, calling in for silence-phenomena.

A semiotic approach to creativity: Resources for re-contextualization

Abstract: Creativity is the process of emergence of an alternative trajectory of human conduct, unfolding within irreversible time, mediated by signs. The theory of semiotic dynamics of human conduct situates the moment of emergence of novelty in the creation of sign hierarchies that either guide the person into previously known trajectory of feeling, thinking, and acting, or into a new trajectory not experienced before. This emergence is initiated by the person who strives in some direction, and utilizes signs as regulators and catalysts for bringing about innovative moments in one’s experience. Semiotic catalysis at the bifurcation point of the trajectories sets up the uncertainty of emergence of the new on the basis of past experience. Catalytic signs are field-like in their nature and occur in sign complexes that make possible the direction of affective meanings into variable pathways. Such sign fields can be observed to be encoded into symbolic resources—iconic images or re-narrated myth stories of memorable scenes that are set up to be maintained over generations and guide renewal of meaningful understandings of the world.

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.