Showing papers in "Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science in 2008"

Quantitative and Qualitative Research: Beyond the Debate

Abstract: Psychology has been a highly quantitative field since its conception as a science. However, a qualitative approach to psychological research has gained increasing importance in the last decades, and an enduring debate between quantitative and qualitative approaches has arisen. The recently developed Mixed Methods Research (MMR) addresses this debate by aiming to integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches. This article outlines and discusses quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research approaches with specific reference to their (1) philosophical foundations (i.e. basic sets of beliefs that ground inquiry), (2) methodological assumptions (i.e. principles and formal conditions which guide scientific investigation), and (3) research methods (i.e. concrete procedures for data collection, analysis and interpretation). We conclude that MMR may reasonably overcome the limitation of purely quantitative and purely qualitative approaches at each of these levels, providing a fruitful context for a more comprehensive psychological research.

Social development: a psychobiological perspective.

Abstract: Social development from a psychobiological perspective is part of evolutionary biology. From a functional standpoint two major interrelated themes can be discerned in the evolution of behavior: Wanting (referring collectively to the vital needs of an organism) and Knowing (referring collectively to the organism’s knowledge or skill for meeting its vital needs). The social development of the immature primate involves the integration of these themes in two distinct but overlapping phases. In the initially most salient phase, the manifestations of wanting and knowing are focused on constructing an effective relationship with the mother (mother-directed). One of the most important achievements during this phase is the formation of an emotional attachment (probably based on a psychoneuroendocrine core) to a specific object in which elements of both wanting and knowing are intimately involved. The second phase becomes increasingly prominent as development proceeds. The salient manifestations of this phase are focused on relations with the world beyond the mother (other-directed), and involve a new integration of the motivational and emotional components of wanting and knowing, characterized by attraction to novelty, exploration, social interaction and acquisition of knowledge and skills in the contexts of foods, predators and other members of the species.

Variables in Psychology: A Critique of Quantitative Psychology

Abstract: Mind is hidden from direct observation; it can be studied only by observing behavior. Variables encode information about behaviors. There is no one-to-one correspondence between behaviors and mental events underlying the behaviors, however. In order to understand mind it would be necessary to understand exactly what information is represented in variables. This aim cannot be reached after variables are already encoded. Therefore, statistical data analysis can be very misleading in studies aimed at understanding mind that underlies behavior. In this article different kinds of information that can be represented in variables are described. It is shown how informational ambiguity of variables leads to problems of theoretically meaningful interpretation of the results of statistical data analysis procedures in terms of hidden mental processes. Reasons are provided why presence of dependence between variables does not imply causal relationship between events represented by variables and absence of dependence between variables cannot rule out the causal dependence of events represented by variables. It is concluded that variable-psychology has a very limited range of application for the development of a theory of mind-psychology.

Understanding the Role of Emotion in Sense-making. A Semiotic Psychoanalytic Oriented Perspective

Abstract: We propose a model of emotion grounded on Ignacio Matte Blanco’s theory of the unconscious. According to this conceptualization, emotion is a generalized representation of the social context actors are involved in. We discuss how this model can help to better understand the sensemaking processes. For this purpose we present a hierarchical model of sensemaking based on the distinction between significance—the content of the sign—and sense—the psychological value of the act of producing the sign in the given contingence of the social exchange. According to this model, emotion categorization produces the frame of sense regulating the interpretation of the sense of the signs, therefore creating the psychological value of the sensemaking.

“When Strangers Meet”: John Bowlby and Harry Harlow on Attachment Behavior

Abstract: From 1957 through the mid-1970s, John Bowlby, one of the founders of attachment theory, was in close personal and scientific contact with Harry Harlow. In constructing his new theory on the nature of the bond between children and their caregivers, Bowlby profited highly from Harlow’s experimental work with rhesus monkeys. Harlow in his turn was influenced and inspired by Bowlby’s new thinking. On the basis of the correspondence between Harlow and Bowlby, their mutual participation in scientific meetings, archival materials, and an analysis of their scholarly writings, both the personal relationship between John Bowlby and Harry Harlow and the cross-fertilization of their work are described.

The Power of the Word May Reside in the Power of Affect

Abstract: This commentary on Dan Shanahan's, A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain, basically agrees with an emotion-based view of the evolutionary and developmental basis of language acquisition. It provides a supplementary neuroscience perspective that is more deeply affective and epigenetic in the sense that all claims about neocortically-based language modules need to be tempered by the existing genetic evidence as well as the robust neuroscience evidence that the cortex resembles random-access-memory space, a tabula rasa upon which epigenetic and learning processes create functional networks. The transition from non-linguistic creatures to linguistic ones may have required the conjunction of social-affective brain mechanisms, morphological changes in the articulatory apparatus, an abundance of cross-modal cortical processing ability, and the initial urge to communicate in coordinate prosodic gestural and vocal ways, which may have been more poetic and musical than current propositional language. There may be no language instinct that is independent of these evolutionary pre-adaptations.

Voice: a pathway to consciousness as "social contact to oneself".

Abstract: Starting from a dialogical view of human communicative and cognitive processes, the notion and the phenomenon of voice by different authors is explored. Assuming its concreteness as perceivable event, a description of the phenomenon is then given in five key concepts: indexicality, intonation, body, imitation, and internalization. With regard to the transformation of the phenomenon to an interior experience, as suggested by the notion of voice as psychological position and by the term of inner voice, the concept of internalization is paid special attention to. The experienced voice of a significant other is understood as mechanism of internalization, allowing for the movement from other to self: a meaningful and embodied social form tied to another person. The course of reflection finally leads to considering consciousness in the perspective of voice. The voice of a communicating person is thought to be a powerful means for the emergence of an interior experience of self and other. And this experience is, in turn, linked to consciousness in its complex states.

Intersubjectivity as co-phenomenology: from the holism of meaning to the being-in-the-world-with-others.

Abstract: I outline in this paper a pragmatical approach to meaning. Meaning is defined as a phenomenologically experienced construal. As such, it is a dynamic object whose first evidence comes from the first person rather than the third one. At the same time, the approach assumes that meaning is not an individual creation, but rather an intersubjective one. Origins of meaning are also to be founded not ‘in the head’ of a cognitive system or subject, but in the intersubjective space contingently formed between a subject (S), an other (O) and a common object (R), which they talk about. Approaching this minimal communicative situation therefore requires realizing that the phenomenological dimension is always implied in any intersubjective encounter. The observed synchronized co-feeling among subjects, upon which language comprehension takes place, I call ‘co-phenomenology’. When analyzed in this way, intersubjectivity shows at the same time its social, phenomenological and biological dimensions.

Loneliness in Infancy: Harry Harlow, John Bowlby and Issues of Separation

Abstract: In this contribution, the authors give an overview of the different studies on the effect of separation and deprivation that drew the attention of many in the 1940s and 1950s. Both Harlow and Bowlby were exposed to and influenced by these different studies on the so called ‘hospitalization’ effect. The work of Bakwin, Goldfarb, Spitz, and others is discussed and attention is drawn to films that were used to support new ideas on the effects of maternal deprivation.

Rigorous Experiments on Monkey Love: An Account of Harry F. Harlow’s Role in the History of Attachment Theory

Abstract: On the basis of personal reminiscences an account is given of Harlow’s role in the development of attachment theory and key notions of attachment theory are being discussed. Among other things, it is related how Harlow arrived at his famous research with rhesus monkeys and how this made Harlow a highly relevant figure for attachment theorist Bowlby.

Moving beyond computational cognitivism: understanding intentionality, intersubjectivity and ecology of mind

Abstract: The emergence of the Cognitive Sciences, in the middle of the 20th Century, was initially based on an abstract model of the mind: the computer metaphor. The human mind was understood in analogy to the digital computer, as a rule-based, symbol processor. As a consequence, the human being was envisioned as logically–rationally guided, radically disembodied and isolated from culture. Over the last few decades, several disciplines, such as Biology, Mathematics, Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience, have begun to address the study of intentionality, intersubjectivity and natural cognition. Searching for a better understanding of these complex issues, a number of approaches have been developed with the promise of capturing the specific qualities of human cognition, radically omitted from a computationalist view of mind. Nevertheless, since these research programs are rather recent, concrete methodological designs and empirical approaches in the form of experimentally testable hypotheses are still scarce. This special issue brings together several perspectives in order to propose alternative research approaches in the topics of Intentionality, Intersubjectivity and Ecology of Mind. We believe it is necessary to discuss and advance towards explicit empirical frames in the form of actual experiments, specific predictions and formal models. The essays presented here constitute an attempt to move in this direction, with the specific aim of reconsidering the study of some forgotten properties of brain and mind.

Human Cognition in Context: On the Biologic, Cognitive and Social Reconsideration of Meaning as Making Sense of Action

Abstract: The aim of this special issue of IPBS has been to explore concrete and explicit alternatives to cognitivism. Indeed, in our editorial introduction we set out to give a brief survey of the numerous criticisms that have been made of understanding the mind this way (Ibanez and Cosmelli, Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences, 2008). Thus in what sense do the contributions here presented succeed in providing novel alternatives, moving into original and potentially generative domains of inquiry? While much remains to be done, we believe that they make significant headway in more than one sense. We do believe, however, that there is one locus that furnishes a convergence ground that is worth considering seriously: the problem of meaning. Meaning as making sense of contextualized action seems to cross the domains of intentionality, intersubjectivity and ecology of mind. The development of multilevel approaches, as the authors here exemplify, argues for a novel research agenda.

Attachment—Past and Present. But What About the Future?

Abstract: This essay acknowledges the seminal contribution of the founders of attachment theory and research as a paradigm shift in understanding the importance of the socioemotional foundation of developmental processes. However, it is surprising that attachment theory has been treated as a closed system by its students with remarkable resistance to change and further development of theory and methodology. Especially three dimensions are identified that would help to advance attachment theory as a valid conception also for the future. The context specificity of evolutionary theorizing, the different socialization goals and parenting strategies across cultures and the new insights in infant development need to be taken into consideration in order to develop a valid theory of socioemotional development as the culturally informed solution of universal developmental tasks.

Styles of Remembering and Types of Experience: An Experimental Investigation of Reconstructive Memory

Abstract: No one can access the original events to examine the veracity of a human experience in everyday situations. The present experiment was done to compare two conditions under which a participant remembered (1) her actual contact with the environment and (2) her indirect experience—information about another person’s direct experience that was communicated to her. Several differences in the forms of remembering such as narrative styles, way of describing and naming of object, motive for actions—were found to differ between those two conditions. Those differences were shown to disappear with repeated remembering occasions due to intrapersonal and interpersonal conventionalization. These results suggest that it is possible to examine the veracity of an experience based on forms of remembering, rather than on its content. Theoretical discussion links the present experiment to the study of memory and remembering from the perspective of Bartlett’s (Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932) schema theory.

Perception of Time and Causation Through the Kinesthesia of Intentional Action

Abstract: Perception is an intentional action through space in time by which the finite brain explores the infinite world. By acting, the brain thrusts its body into the future space–time of the world while predicting the sensory consequences. Through perceiving its actions and their results, it remembers its predictions, its actions, and their consequences. To perform these operations the brain, through chaotic dynamics, constructs and uses finite perceptual matrices of space–time and infers causation. Perceived time differs from world time in ways that are determined by the neural mechanisms of intentionality. In particular, perception of the self in action, through the mechanism of preafference, gives structure and content to the concepts of continuity, contiguity, duration, temporal order, cause, and effect. We expand our perceptual scales beyond kinesthesia by converting time into space by use of clocks and calendars. Remembered time differs from perceived time in being dependent on awareness, which makes it episodic, fragmentary, and subject to large variations in rates of time lapse in the flow of meanings. The attribution of causal agency to objects and events in the world results from the experience of temporal sequencing in the action–perception cycle: “I act” [cause] “I feel” [effect] during Piaget’s somatomotor phase in early human development.

A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain

Abstract: Linguistic theory since the Cognitive Revolution has followed one of the premises of that revolution by largely sidelining the issue of emotions and concentrating on those aspects of language that are more strictly cognitive. However, during the last two decades research in cognitive science, especially in neuropsychology, has begun to fill in the gaps left by the exclusion of emotions from cognitive research. This article proposes a model for applying the fruits of this new research in emotion to our understanding of language itself. Building on Karl Pribram`s integrated model of emotions and motivations, the presentation it offers a propositional explanation for how the emotions may have contributed to the emergence of symbolic formation and, ultimately, to every aspect of language from lexis to literature.

Theories of Attachment: The Long and Winding Road to an Integrative Developmental Science

Abstract: Although traditional accounts of attachment theory attempted to partition the organism's attachment and separation responses into those that were instinctive and those that were the result of the developmental environment, recent findings from epigenetics are indicating that no such partitioning is possible, even in principle. Rather than assuming the expression of a given behavioral trait is based on some set of instincts (as Bowlby and many of his colleagues did for attachment and separation responses), behavioral development is now seen as a self-organizing, probabilistic process in which pattern and order emerge and change as a result of ongoing co-actions among developmentally relevant components both internal (e.g., genes, hormones, neural networks) and external (e.g., temperature, diet, social interaction) to the organism. Exploring the specific prenatal and postnatal features of the mother-infant interaction system is providing a new appreciation of the complexity of the origins and maintenance of early attachment and its long-term consequences.

Narrative form and content in remembering.

Abstract: Narrative is the primary medium through which experience is represented, remembered and shared with others. It has the tendency to unify experience in an abstract linear form. The degree to which this is done is designated narrative form. Mori uses a multidimensional single case analysis to explore how the form of a narrative differs between an experience of real contact with the environment and an experience communicated by another or a ‘real’ experience repeated several times in conversation. I commend Mori’s experimental setup as modeling everyday life activities and for arriving at a theory that applies to all cases. However, I argue (using data from my own experiment on narrative and remembering) that the idiographic approach can be fruitfully supplemented with (1) an analysis of the sample as a whole and (2) narrative content in addition to form.

Communication and Cognition: The Social Beyond Language, Interaction and Culture

Abstract: Cognition theories describe the social with terms like language, interaction or culture, whose theoretical status has also been discussed in modern sociology. These concepts are not well-positioned to understand the emergence and autonomy of social orders. Sociological theory of self-referential systems can be useful to reconstruct the bottom-up process which contributes to the emergence of the social as communication as well as to describe the way in which society exerts downward causation upon cognitive phenomena. The core of this theory is the systemic category of meaning as a shared horizon for psychic and social systems.

Living Being and Speaking Being: Toward a Dialogical Approach to Intentionality

Abstract: One of the main goals of cognitive science is to shed light on human knowledge. This paper states that, if daily conversations, literature, and private thought, are proper expressions of human behavior, then cognitive sciences ought to elaborate a concept of knowledge suited to this kind of activities. I draw upon the notion of discourse in Bakhtin to specify the attributes of knowing needed to account for human behavior, whose manifestations in everyday life are not reduced to representing objects but essentially oriented toward responding to others. As a central aspect of knowledge, I focus on intentionality and offer a discussion about different aspects of it. Specifically, I examine the difference between intentionality as the faculty of representation (aboutness) and intentionality as the subjective positioning toward contextually relevant ideological perspectives (meaning).

Phenomenological Views on Intersubjectivity: Towards a Reinterpretation of Consciousness

Abstract: Intersubjectivity and consciousness are reinterpreted according to the dynamic and relational coordinates of lived experience. Consciousness is not just another property of the subject, but rather the condition itself of his/her own being-in-the-world. The different aspects of consciousness are the moments and movements which constitute its intentional structure. These structures lead us to reinterpret material embodiment, temporality, and intersubjectivity as the “complex” steps taken by consciousness, which in its movements does not turn inward, on itself like a transcendental, reasoning, and self-centred consciousness, but, on the contrary, as an embodied consciousness immersed in others and in the world.

The monkey as a psychological subject.

Abstract: Many species in long-term captivity have tried to kill time by playing friendly games with their warders. In the end, only rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) could tolerate the tedious hide-and-seek games that their human jailers prefer to play. In this article, written many years before the Stockholm syndrome was first described, the author relates how it was eventually discovered which species is most willing to contribute to the development of a genuinely scientific human psychology.

Everyday life reasoning, possible worlds and cultural processes.

Abstract: Discussing Faiciuc's paper, I first tackle the problem of fallacies in deductive reasoning showing how, in a possible world theory, non correct forms of reasoning can be useful strategies for discovery, providing these strategies remain at a hypothesis level. Secondly, everyday reasoning and its specificity in comparison to logical-normative one are analyzed. This topic stresses the notion of interpretation and, in this context, the role of the community and of cultural canons shared by the subject. From this point of view, reasoning does not occur, only, in the brain of a person but in everyday exchanges occurring between individuals and the history of their community.

Are there reasons to challenge a symbolic computationalist approach in explaining deductive reasoning

Abstract: The majority of the existing theories explaining deductive reasoning could be included in a classic computationalist approach of the cognitive processes. In fact, deductive reasoning could be seen to be the pinnacle of the symbolic computationalism, its last fortress to be defended in the face of new, dynamic, and ecological perspectives over cognition. But are there weak points in that position regarding deductive reasoning? What would be the reasons for which new perspectives could gain in credibility? What could be their most important tenets? The answers given to those questions in the paper include two main points. The first one is that the present empirical data could not sustain unambiguously one view over the other, that they are obtained in artificial experimental conditions, and that there are data that are not easily explainable using the traditional computationalist paradigm. The second one is that approaching the deductive reasoning from dynamic and ecological perspectives could have significant advantages. The most obvious one is the possibility to integrate more easily the research regarding the deductive reasoning with the results obtained in other domains of the psychology (especially in what respects the lower cognitive processes), in artificial intelligence or in neurophysiology. The reasons for that would be that such perspectives, as they are sketched in the paper, would imply, essentially, processes of second-order pattern formation and recognition (as it is the case for perception), embodied cognition, and dynamic processes as the brain ones are.

Consciousness as a process: from the loneliness of William James to the buzzing and booming voices of contemporary science.

Abstract: This Special Issue of IPBS brings the old metaphor of William James—consciousness as a “stream of thought”—to a contemporary critical inspection. It is demonstrated—based on materials of language (Panksepp 2008; Shanahan 2008), perception (Engelmann 2008) and dialogical self (Bertau 2008) that the classic river metaphor is an inadequate depiction of the multi-level psychological processes that are regulated by the affective systems of the brain and hierarchically integrated through dialogical and semiotic mechanisms.

From the terrible loneliness to the wonderful agreement of human beings.

Abstract: What would be the “terrible loneliness” and what would be the “wonderful agreement” in the present paper? The “terrible loneliness” is the only reality that a person perceives and/or thinks during the now going on. For the person, an enormous quantity of occurrences is in the present moment absent. A very small quantity of occurrences is present. The person is the only being in having this. And, this is only during a little moment. The person never thinks about his loneliness in this moment. On the contrary, he thinks he is plenty of people and full of occurrences. But, if he were thinking about reality, he would live in a terrible loneliness. How does he escape himself from this loneliness? He thinks that the probable occurrences are real occurrences. He may be right in a plenty of times. Going through what I call opening hypotheses—basic hypotheses and non-basic but important hypotheses—and going through what I call simply hypotheses he is able to sanction a wonderful agreement of human beings about the known parts of the Universe. However, they are hypotheses, not absolute realities.

Being human: experiencing and communicating.

Abstract: Haye’s article Living being and speaking being highlights a confusion that the traditional cognitive science has been making between cognition and representation, reducing semantics (meaning) to the syntax (computation with symbols). This traditional view cannot fully grasp the dependence of meaning on the relational context, opening space for the need to take into account the Bakhtinian notions of responsivity and addressivity to an other as defining features of the communicational social act. Socialized signs are conceived here as central tools to our relation to the world and to the others. We pursue some of the implications of this radical dialogical commitment specifying their implications to an ontological level of human beings: relationships are the ground for the depiction of human beings and otherness as a necessary complementarity of our own existence.

Self and other in communication and cognition : the role of auto-communication and intersubjectivity in autopoiesis of psychic systems

Abstract: By referring to Niklas Luhmann's theory of self-referential systems, Aldo Mascareno (2008, submitted for publication) gives an account of system-environment interrelatedness, explaining how social and individual constitute each other through the process of communication and co-creation of meanings. Two possible extensions to his account are discussed. Firstly, auto-communication within the system that happens without any external reference needs to be taken into account while describing the existence and constant re-creation of psychic systems. Secondly, in order for the system and environment or two systems to communicate, an imagined and temporary intersubjectivity between the two needs to be assumed.

The materiality of the abstraction voice.

Abstract: The comment on Bertau’s paper underlines the importance of the internally social character of the dialogical self, which is not trivial and can not be taken for granted. A consistent theory of this internal character demands specific theoretical means native to a tradition of Leibniz’ philosophy. In consequence the concept of dialogical self is presented as a non-empirical one based in an ethos. We, and not nature, are responsible for the modes of conceptualising.

The beyond must also be useful: the burden of alternative approaches.

Abstract: Advocates of many different approaches have, for years, attempted to usurp cognitive psychology’s dominance in the field of psychology Unfortunately, none of these approaches have yet made a convincing case that they could take cognitive psychology’s place Because of its explicit use of the mind-as-computer model, cognitivism gains a false sense of concreteness, and becomes pragmatically useful Because their models are implicit, alternatives, such as phenomenology, gain a false sense of ambiguity and lose their pragmatic potential In addition, alternative theories often alienate potential sympathizers through unnecessarily harsh criticism This leads to a professional attitude in which one must take sides, rather than an attitude that appreciates the benefits of diversity, and may lead to the emergence of other beneficial models If alternative approaches, such as Dr Flores-Gonzalez’s (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences, 2008), could push through to the point of immediate usefulness, and present themselves in a less adversarial way, they would be much better placed make meaningful contributions