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.

Beauty of the Back

Abstract: The chapter will cover the poetic sentiment created by human meaning-makers as they experience, present, and represent the body on the side that is directly non-observable by the self, but constantly accessible to the others. Various relations between the hair and the skin, hiding and displaying of both as ways of presenting of the human back, will be analyzed on the basis of the painting Le Chignon by French artist Eva Gonzales (b 1849–d. 1883).

Generalization from Single Instances

Abstract: Generalization from single cases to generic processes that make these cases possible has a time-honored tradition in science. Astrophysical generalizations are based on unique cases of self-organizing systems: galaxies, planetary systems, and single planets or comets. General biological principles—such as those of immunology (where one needs to explain the emergence of immunity toward ever-new viruses)—have to be applicable to each and every, known or not-yet-known, case. Explaining the role of Ivan Pavlov’s findings in physiology to lay audiences of his time (1920s), Lev Vygotsky emphasized that Pavlov’s experimental work with (few) dogs was not about dogs as a species, nor about their salivation, nor about a particular dog. Chronicle and fiction writers and portrait and landscape painters who all have left surviving records all provide us with culturally encoded evidence that can be usable in psychological investigation. The evidence from these literary sources needs to be considered as equal to direct recording of evidence from living research participants. All our generic notions—Self, patriotism, love, justice, etc.—are hyper-generalized signs of field-like kind. While ontologically these are nonexisting objects, functionally they are signs that regulate our ongoing lives in dramatic ways that sometimes lead to their end.

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.