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.

The Pandemic Atmos-Fear

Abstract: Abstract. Psychology has been challenged by its own terminological limitations, in which phenomena of large-scale, field-like kind force us to innovate with our theoretical tools. Phenomena with global impacts – epidemics, pandemics, famines, and the like – remain on the periphery of psychology’s theoretical efforts. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is no different. Like previous pandemics, it reveals the difficulty of dealing with phenomena on a global scale and understanding the inherent organization of the cloud-like phenomena. Psychological research has mainly focused on individual traumatic experiences, impacts, and consequences. Less attention has been paid to how people in different societies make meaning of these changes in everyday life. Psychologically, people want to control the pandemic, while in reality we simply escape from it. All of the measures instituted in response to it are escape-oriented, not glorious accounts of winning a war on the invisible enemy. Theoretically, we learn from the current experience the relevance of how humans escalate and circumvent the proliferation of the panic of fear through building and demolishing borders in mind and society. We all are living in a sort of atmos-fear, a culturally cultivated state of affective limbo that is easy to trigger and difficult to modulate. How do human beings deal with this core issue of feeling safe/unsafe, and how does it affect individual and collective conduct? This paper attempts to demonstrate how the COVID-19 example can theoretically illuminate new perspectives of international psychology that will become increasingly more crucial in a future where global events are likely to recur.

Frames of Reference

Abstract: Frames of reference are meta-cognitive models through which researchers reconstruct the phenomena into intelligible explanatory narratives. These frames guide the actions of the researchers by giving them general orientation of how to look at the complex phenomena. They belong to the class of meta-codes (general assumptions) with theory building. Of the four, intra-systemic and inter-systemic reference frames are context-free. Comparisons that are made do not include any relation of the systems involved with their contexts. Yet we know that all biological, psychological, and social systems are open systems—they depend in their existence upon the exchange relation with their environment. They are profoundly context bound. Two other reference frames fit here. The individual-ecological frame entails the look at the ongoing exchange relations of the organism with the environment. The individual-socioecological frame is an extension of the individual-ecological frame as it adds to its structure the role of external guidance by goal-oriented others. The self-model of George Herbert Mead is presented as an example.

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.