Following a critical overview of the active ageing concept, a thematic decomposition of 42 transcribed interviews with British people aged 72 years and over indicates that active ageing is understood in relation to physical, cognitive, psychological and social factors, but that these co-exist in complex combinations. The notion of activity in active ageing is grasped in relation to an active/passive distinction which emphasizes the enhancement or diminishment of concrete powers of activity. A ‘challenge and response’ framework is suggested for future research on active ageing.

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Older people and 'active ageing': Subjective aspects of ageing actively.

In this paper, we explore some of the tensions involved in the process of engaging with embodiment research. Although a significant volume of discursive work on "the body" and its role in social relations now exists, there is little in the way of empirical research that moves the focus away from discourse alone to concentrate on other modalities, such as embodied feelings, sensations, and engagements with the world. We begin by briefly reviewing the turn to embodiment across the social sciences and the manner in which this has been taken up in psychology. We then outline our attempts as a research collective to develop methodologies and research activities that can produce meaningful data on embodied experience. The outcomes of one of these tasks are then described in detail, along with reflections on the difficulties and limitations that emerged. Finally, we attempt to conceptualize the challenge of researching embodiment by returning to the late 19th century psychology of John Dewey, which, we argue, neatly summarizes some of the problems to be addressed by any researchers engaged in the "turn to the body."

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Researching “experience”: Embodiment, methodology, process:

This article discusses contemporary social psychological approaches to (a) the social relations and appraisals associated with specific emotions; (b) other people’s impact on appraisal processes; (c) effects of emotion on other people; and (d) interpersonal emotion regulation. We argue that single-minded cognitive perspectives restrict our understanding of interpersonal and group-related emotional processes, and that new methodologies addressing real-time interpersonal and group processes present promising opportunities for future progress.

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Current Emotion Research in Social Psychology: Thinking About Emotions and Other People:

Discourse analysis in psychology provides a range of conceptual and methodological resources for thinking critically about the discipline of psychology. These conceptual and methodological resources also reorient researchers in the discipline away from a search for causes of behaviour inside the head of individuals to social contexts in which human beings construct and challenge what have been presented to them as “facts” about their nature or possibilities for change. It is for this reason that discourse analysis has sometimes even been treated as synonymous with critical psychology or has operated as a code word for politically progressive alternative approaches to subjectivity. This article organises the many different ways of doing discourse analysis into eight approaches at four different levels in which we move from the micro level of analysis to more social macro levels of work. This enables us also to review connections with critical psychological approaches and, more broadly, with dimensions of c...

Discourse Analysis: Dimensions of Critique in Psychology

The file associated with this record is under permanent embargo in accordance with the copyright of the publisher. The full text may be available in the links provided above. The author has chosen to make Chapter 1 - Introducing publicly available after the end of an embargo period set by the publisher. This can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/2381/33325

Feeling Bodies: Embodying Psychology

For many years, for many people social psychology has been deemed a discipline in crisis. Factions within the field have emerged as the field has struggled to find a new identity for what social psychology is. In spite of recent efforts to forge connections across these paradigmatical territories many academics remain locked in perpetual disagreement to this day.This new book proposes a way out of the crisis by letting go of the idea that psychology needs new foundations or a new identity, whether biological, discursive, or cognitive. The psychological is not narrowly confined to any one aspect of human experience; it is quite literally everywhere. Drawing on a range of influential thinkers including Michel Serres, Michel Foucault, AN Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, the book proposes a strong process-oriented approach to the psychological which studies events or occasions. Aspects of experience such as communication or embodiment are treated as thoroughly mediated – the product of multiple intersecting relationships between the biological, the psychic, and the social. The outcome is an image of a ‘mobile’ reflexively founded discipline which follows the psychological wherever it takes us, from the depths of embodiment to the complexities of modern global politics.The critically important new text is written in a way that is accessible for undergraduate students as well as more advanced readers and could be an exciting gateway into a new understanding of the rich, historical discipline of psychology

Stephen D. Brown

Papers

Psychology without Foundations: History, Philosophy and Psychosocial Theory