Culture Psychology

Relationship formation is a universal developmental task for which humans are equipped with universal predispositions. The claim of attachment teory, that the emergence, the nature and the consequences of attachment are equally universal has been challenged by cultural and cross cultural research. In this presentation, the prevaling attachment conception is discussed as an adaptation to Western middle class psychology, where psychological autonomy is the motor of development. An alternative is presented with the case of the rural Cameroonian Nso who have a physical conception of attachment, i.e. reliability of physical care and body contact, integrated in a multiple caregiving system. The necessity to recognize culture specific solutions of universal developmental tasks is discussed.

The present commentary explores the implicit and explicit role of power in shaping what is remembered and why. By addressing the three papers in this section it argues for the need to more openly consider how power relations, particularly asymmetrical power relations, come to shape the construction of memory. Implications of acknowledging power in memory studies are discussed.

Psychologists have typically narrated their discipline’s history so as to glorify an experimental method, which analyzes the mind independently of cultural and historical factors. In line with Jahoda’s sociocultural sensitivity to psychology, this article critically interrogates the plausibility for this vision of psychology as cut off from wider social processes, and offers an alternative based on a re-appropriation of concepts and methods from psychology’s past that highlight cultural processes. This approach is illustrated with a study of how people remember history narratives on the basis of cultural resources taken over from social groups they belong to, and which thus embed them within a stream of history. Both psychologists’ narratives of their discipline and people’s everyday memory of history are shown to be motivated toward the justification of particular visions of social reality.

The past has never been as relevant for the present as it is in today's Post-truth world. Not just because many of our political leaders are promising to bring us back to a past that never existed -the Great America of Trump, the Lost Empire of Farage or the French Resistance of Le Pen -but because it seems more and more likely that they are bringing us back to the past as it actually happened -a past where populism successfully brought nationalist leaders to power. In this context, it seems particularly crucial to understand how we relate to our history, how we learn from it and the consequences it may have for the world we live in. These are the questions this special issue explores by adopting a cultural psychological perspective on collective memory -the lay representations of history -and proposing both theoretical and empirical contributions. In this editorial, we will try to first make the case for the political and social importance of collective memory. Second, we will argue why theoretical discussions -not just empirical research -are necessary to tackle these issues. Third, we will discuss the role we believe, cultural psychology should play in the current context and the dangers of turning it into a field disconnected from social and political realities. Finally, we will present the contents of this issue and how we hope it tackles some of the problems raised in this editorial.

Since the Second World War, the dominating paradigm of societal development has focused on economic growth. While economic growth has improved the quality of human life in a variety of ways, we posit that the identification of economic growth as the primary societal goal is culture-blind because preferences for developmental pathways likely vary between societies. We argue that the cultural diversity of developmental goals and the pathways leading to these goals could be reflected in a culturally sensitive approach to assessing societal development. For the vast majority of post-materialistic societies, it is an urgent necessity to prepare culturally sensitive compasses on how to develop next, and to start conceptualizing growth in a more nuanced and culturally responsive way. Furthermore, we propose that cultural sensitivity in measuring societal growth could also be applied to existing development indicators (e.g. the Human Development Index). We call for cultural researchers, in ...

Over a long professional lifetime, Ragnar Rommetveit contributed to numerous disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, reflecting discussions in global social science and his own unending quest to understand social and individual life. His remarkable career and impact can be outlined in terms of four main phases. The first involved general social psychology in the 1950s and was reflected in Social Norms and Roles (1953/1955). In the second phase during the 1960s and 1970s, he focused on language-related psycholinguistic research leading to publications such as his 1968 volume Words, Meanings and Messages. The third phase came in the 1970s and 1980s and was motivated by his critique of formal linguistics and resulted in his short, magisterial 1974 volume On Message Structure. The fourth phase between 1980 and 2010 focused on “dialogism,” giving rise to works such as his 1992 article “Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communicat...

Horace Romano Harr e, or for most people just Rom Harr e, passed away on 17 October 2019 at the age of 91. Professor Harr e was an extraordinarily prolific writer and a modern polyhistor publishing within such diverse disciplines as history and philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and chemistry, linguistics, philosophy of psychology, psychology itself and social psychology. He even wrote a global history of philosophy. Rom Harr e was born in the city Apiti in the region of Manawatu, New Zealand, in 1927. Graduating from the then University of New Zealand (now University of Auckland) in chemical engineering and mathematics (BSc) in 1948 and with a MA in philosophy (1952), he did his post-grad work in the mid-1950s reading for a BPhil at the University College, Oxford, with JL Austin as supervisor. Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s was a powerhouse of philosophy. Besides Austin, there were Alfred J Ayer, Gilbert Ryle, Friedrich Waismann, PF Strawson, Michael Dummett and Elisabeth Anscombe who all emphasised the analysis of ordinary language as a means to knowledge. This 'approach' later served as the philosophical background of Harr e's ethogenic perspective and development of discursive psychology and positioning theory. Upon finishing in philosophy, Harr e became lecturer at the University of Leicester from 1957 to 1959. In 1960, he succeeded Friedrich Waismann as lecturer in the philosophy of science at Oxford, and five years later was elected fellow of Linacre College, also at Oxford. Harr e soon became a main proponent of scientific realism. However, he developed already in the 1960s an interest in psychology, following Michael Argyle's seminars. This spurred the idea and development of a postpositivist and post-experimental conception of psychology, combining the

The general problem this research approaches is the observation that, in Western cultures, Human occupies a central place and is identified with the cosmological wholeness-a worldview which is in tune with the paradigm of massive abuses that are practiced against animals who 1 are exploited by industry worldwide and with the environmental catastrophe we witness nowadays. Departing from that problem, this paper presents and discusses the Western notion indicated above, comparing it with the notion of Yanomami indigenous people about human's place in the universe. We use a dialogical methodology pertinent to semiotic-cultural constructivism in psychology, focusing on the relationship between "human" and non-human animal in the two mentioned cultures, through the analysis of two creation myths: The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew-Christian Bible; and The Falling Sky: Words from a Yanomami Shaman, a set of narratives from indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa. Results show that Western and Amerindian narratives present mostly opposite conceptions concerning the relationships between "humanity" and animality and that meanings for "human" and "animal" differ essentially in both. From the tension with Amerindian cosmology and its relationship with nonhuman animal, we call into question the ethno-anthropocentrism that is present in Western psychology since its birth. Given that psychology lays its foundations on a worldview that presupposes a strict split between nature and

The authors derive evidence on guilt, shame and embarrassment from (a) Chinese and Japanese cultural data on expressions of emotion, (b) empirical studies of losing face, and (c) multilingual-multicultural clinical experiences. A scheme that has transcultural applicability is proposed for differentiating guilt, shame and embarrassment. The evidence supports the conclusion that these three emotions are marked by qualitatively different attributes. Probes into emotional life serve to reveal aspects of face and self. Face defined both as self presented to others, and as self perceived by others, mirrors the duality of self. Two methodological issues are discussed: what is meant by ‘private experience’; and the need for an extended conception of selfhood.

The psychological concept of attachment is constantly evolving. Approximately 70 years after attachment theory was first introduced by John Bowlby in the late 1940s, the notion of attachment is still in flux with continually changing ideas of what it means to be a good parent. One path along which attachment as a concept is moving from academia to everyday life is the philosophy of attachment parenting which was first established in the US by William and Martha Sears. Ideas about attachment theory and attachment parenting are frequently accompanied by critical comments on “Western” cultures. This critical perspective on modernity, individualism, and autonomy is portrayed in the first part of this article. The second part traces attachment as a concept transferred to Turkey. Rather than studying academic work on attachment in Turkey, this article focuses on popularized versions of attachment theory which gain ground as part of the parenting philosophy of attachment parenting. This ar...

Prolepsis – or the narrative manoeuver consisting of narrating or evoking a future event in advance – is a concept borrowed from literary theory that has been used in Psychology for studying the contribution of culture and meaning to development. Cole applies the notion of prolepsis to upbringing insofar as parents’ imagined goals vis-à-vis their offspring guide their educational childrearing, thus channelling the child’s present towards the parents’ imagined future. This view coincides with cultural psychology in that humans are considered as future-oriented beings, constructing cultural tools that mediate the way we interpret the world and act within it. Drawing from this theoretical framework, this paper applies the notion of prolepsis to collective memory in order to examine how imagined futures are brought into the present by means of particular ways of reconstructing the past, thus mobilizing collectives towards certain political goals. Along these lines, the narrative, pragma...

School mealtimes in England are highly orchestrated practices that have a specific temporal order of when and how the meal should be eaten. At the same time, the social conditions of the mealtime offer children opportunities for emergent interactions. In this study, we examine children's non-legitimate voices and the dynamic conflictual nature of children's interactions that are no longer fully governed by the established school mealtime order. To illustrate these ideas, data are drawn from the 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the first author in a primary school in South West England. The analyses address how children use the school mealtime chronotope as a resource to experiment and challenge predefined rules. Our findings illustrate how children transcend the edges of acceptability and probe social order to form their own social critique and uncovering what is not easily explainable or changeable. As an implication we underline the potential for researching children's socialisation as part of expanding discussions on the significance of school mealtimes.

This paper examines the role of interpretations of historical events when discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by those with a lived experience of it. The research literature relating to representations of collective memory and perceived intractable conflict is presented before discussing how a theoretical lens of dialogicality, through exploring the role of themata, can add to the discussion. Open-ended depth interviews with both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis revealed historical narratives without any direct questioning concerning this. Subsequent thematic analysis demonstrated the significance of these to justify and legitimise their positioning frameworks in relation to both their own and the others group's perspectives. The subsequent discussion examines how the quoted examples of perceived interpretations of the past can offer an understanding of foundational themes that remain omnipresent, yet not exclusive. Social representations of collective memories can play a significant role in the discussion of protracted conflict where frozen representations of the past can act as barriers to change, yet as will be discussed, resistance to them can lead to new perspectives that herald a shift away from a perceived intractability towards an alternative, more collaboratively imagined future.

This paper discusses the connection between social constructionism and universals in the generation of mind. It proposes a new concept of Cultural Construction, distinct from social construction, and suggests that the latter succumbs to a Paradox of Sociality in which a socially constructed mind is non-social. Cultural construction avoids this paradox, and is best explained by an approach that roots learning in flexible evolutionary dispositions to possess culture. It also offers a novel perspective on traditional and more recent social constructionist accounts of psychological universals (e.g. omniculture) and has different implications for the prospects of reducing conflict in inter-cultural encounters.

This study explored oral academic discourse socialization experiences of doctoral students at an English-medium tertiary institution in Northern Cyprus. It was a qualitative study involving audio-recording of a graduate class oral academic discourse and conducting interviews with the graduate candidates. Analysis of the oral academic discourse data showed that through participation in academic discussions the students negotiated their knowledge, constructed identity and agency. Analysis of the interview data also suggested the graduate candidates’ identity and agency co-construction as well as the novelty of the graduate candidates’ challenging socialization experiences over their academic studies in the graduate context. Overall, the study seemed to indicate that the participants’ socialization experiences facilitated their academic learning and development of academic discourse competence. The results of the present study are discussed in relation to the pertinent research to date.

During his studies at Moscow University and thereafter, Lev S. Vygotsky's (1896-1934) interests focused mostly on the scholarly study of literary and theatre criticism. Shakespeare's Hamlet served as a leitmotiv to understand the specificity of the arts within western culture: through analysis of the structural particularities of Hamlet, he provided a model for an understanding of how the mind functions during interactions with artworks and reconstructed the internal activity caused by art. His thoughts on the visual arts are few, but fragments are found in his seminal work entitled Psychology of Art (1926). Here, he showed the function of catharsis, the main concept of his theory of aesthetic experience. This paper presents a translation of Vygotsky's essay published in 1926, dedicated to the art of Alexandr Bykhovsky (1888-1978), a companion since his Gomel period (1919-1924). The significance of this essay is twofold. First, it represents a concise and lasting testimony to the creativity of an important Russian artist; second, the essay goes beyond formal analysis of the artwork. Instead, Vygotsky's analysis explains the phenomenon of aesthetic experience as the viewer and the artwork interact and transform each other. The paper is preceded by a note on the contextual and biographical settings in which both Vygotsky and Bykhovsky worked.

This paper proposes a sociocultural psychology approach to ageing in the lifecourse. It proposes to consider sociogenetic, microgenetic and ontogenetic transformations when studying older age. On this basis, it considers that older people's lives have two specificities: a longer life experience, and a unique view of historical transformation. The paper calls for a closer understanding of the specific and evolving conditions of ageing, and for more inclusion of older citizens in public debate and policy making. Ageing of the population is a major challenge from most countries in Europe, the USA and some Asian countries. The issue of age has mainly been addressed in terms of health, cognitive decline, socioeconomic and housing challenges, and more recently, in terms of exclusion and marginalization. However, for complex historical and cultural reasons, ageing is rarely understood in terms of learning and development. Interestingly, psychological research has long reflected common sense representations of age: childhood is meant to be a period of play, then learning; adulthood is characterized by working; and older age is defined by retirement. These representations also express or guide institutional arrangements: states invest in schools, professional support, and retirement homes. But what if we questioned these long-held assumptions: what if adulthood was also about playing, and more importantly, if old age was also about learning? In this paper, we start with the assumption that considering people over 65 in our societies as simply "retired" and "ageing" is a social, theoretical and, most importantly, ethical impasse. We believe that, in a context where medical progress and social conditions allows for people aged 60 to 65 (average formal retirement age) to live 15 to 20 years more (according to Eurostat), it is of foremost importance to redefine what is at stake during these years. People cannot be simply considered to be "ageing" for a quarter of their lives-imagine, in symmetry, if the whole literature on childhood and youth would simply be summarized by "growing up"! In this paper, we pose the first basis of a reconceptualization of "old age" in terms of learning and development. As part of a research group called AGILE-Ages for learning and growth: Sociocultural perspectives-we therefore have attempted to define a new theoretical frame, which allows accounting for learning and development in people growing older. In order to do so, we sketch a new theoretical frame to approach the development of the person with older age. We propose to apprehend ageing as part of three mutually dependent streams of processes: the sociocultural transformations that guide ageing; the course of life of the ageing person; and the day-today situations in which more or less old people meet and interact, in specific material and social settings. Doing so, we not only show the continuity of learning and development in people with older age, but we also try to highlight the specific modes of learning and experiencing that only being aged may bring about. We hope that our approach to ageing can allow us to transform and develop our practices and institutions, so as to establish more adequate relations to people who are characterized by being temporarily older than us-while we soon will be as old as them.

This article is a continuous dialogue on memory triggered by Brockmeier's article (2010). I drift away from the conventionalisation of the archive as a spatial metaphor for memory in order to consider the greater possibility of 'time' for conceptualising memory. The concept of time is central to understanding the nature of human experience as a process in which a constant flux of change in organism, cultural and social practices is observed. Two categories of time have been explored, firstly Aristotelian, physical time for an experimental paradigm and secondly, the way in which we experience time in terms of autobiographical memory. The second category of time is discussed, drawing on Augustine and Bergson amongst others. Bergson's notion of duration has been considered as a promising concept for a better understanding of autobiographical memory. Psychological phenomena such as autobiographical memory should embrace not only spatial dimension, but also a temporal dimension, in which a constant flow of irreversible time, where multiplicity, momentarily, dynamic stability and becoming and emergence of novelty can be observed.

This research seeks to investigate the senses and meanings that gifted students and their families and teachers have in relation to social and emotional aspects of their development in the school context. This research takes a qualitative and exploratory approach. Participants in this research are five gifted students, five families (one representative from each family) and four teachers, three from the regular classroom and one from the resource room.Data collection took place through semi-structured interviews and observations made with gifted students, their families and their teachers. It is concluded that there is a need for personal and material investment in the education of students with high potential as well as support for their families, but this support does not always occur on a regular basis and when it does occur, teaching staff are not sufficiently well prepared to deal with this demand.

This research seeks to investigate the senses and meanings that gifted students and their families and teachers have in relation to social and emotional aspects of their development in the school context. This research takes a qualitative and exploratory approach. Participants in this research are five gifted students, five families (one representative from each family) and four teachers, three from the regular classroom and one from the resource room.Data collection took place through semi-structured interviews and observations made with gifted students, their families and their teachers. It is concluded that there is a need for personal and material investment in the education of students with high potential as well as support for their families, but this support does not always occur on a regular basis and when it does occur, teaching staff are not sufficiently well prepared to deal with this demand.

Like any other scientific endeavor, cultural psychology, in its diverse manifestations, has been molded into an epistemological frame of reference, which has been unfolding for the last 2,500 years. However, it should be among the main methodological issues of any field concerned with culture to make this frame visible and to assess its impact on the discipline's theory and research practice. We believe media theory to hold a particular potential for this self-reflexive process. Despite its strong epistemological relation to many of the socio-genetic and socio-cultural concepts conveyed in this journal, media theory has gone largely, and surprisingly, unnoticed. In this paper, we recall media theory's main tenets and unfold them in an illustrative reflection on the co-evolution of writing systems and mentalities. While so doing, some of the theoretical and methodological formats inherited by Western science, and thus also by psychology, emerge: its strong tendency towards abstraction, unilinear causal chains and the separation of subject and object, among others.

This article analyzes the negotiation of taboo surrounding grief after the suicide of a loved one. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork with a support group and individual interviews with its members. While the topic of taboo was prominent at group meetings, the same group members tended to claim in the interviews that they had not experienced it. To explore the issue of taboo, beyond affirmation or denial of its existence, we analyzed how the bereaved navigated the topic of suicide in language using Werner's psychological theory of metaphor, which argues that metaphors arise to circumvent explicit reference to tabooed subjects. Members of the grief group clearly developed different strategies of metaphorical and other linguistic rephrasing to deal with the topics of death and suicide. Additionally, their language use differed depending on the person's attitude toward the suicide, whether he or she was alone or with other group members, as well as whether the general public was being framed as an out-group.

Psychologists have typically narrated their discipline’s history so as to glorify an experimental method, which analyzes the mind independently of cultural and historical factors. In line with Jahoda’s sociocultural sensitivity to psychology, this article critically interrogates the plausibility for this vision of psychology as cut off from wider social processes, and offers an alternative based on a re-appropriation of concepts and methods from psychology’s past that highlight cultural processes. This approach is illustrated with a study of how people remember history narratives on the basis of cultural resources taken over from social groups they belong to, and which thus embed them within a stream of history. Both psychologists’ narratives of their discipline and people’s everyday memory of history are shown to be motivated toward the justification of particular visions of social reality.

In this article, we focus on Arendt’s ideas about the relationship between thinking, dialogue and friendship to make the argument that friendship, although undertheorised in its relationship to thinking in social psychology, is a productive concept that captures something important about the argumentative and dialogical character of thinking (both on one’s own, and with other people). We work through Arendt’s ideas and discuss them in relation to social psychological theorising to consider how the concept of friendship can deepen our understanding and analyses of the relationalities that underpin thinking. We specify that whilst thinking in existing social psychological accounts may be read as adversarial in nature (e.g. through a focus on its oppositional character), the relationship between thinking and friendship has been an important idea underlying the perspectives presented in such works. Distinguishing between thinking as friends and thinking in groups, we suggest that there ...

The dominance of high-income countries in ‘generalised’ evidence-making is increasingly recognised as a barrier to advancing understandings of social change processes in international development. Building more equitable and collaborative institutionalised relationships with localities is therefore emphasised. This paper details how a dialogical case study of evidence-making in international development was developed through the single-case ethnography of a youth sexual behaviour change and empowerment intervention in Tanzania. It illustrates how dialogical theorising was applied in both data collection and analyses towards advancing understandings of the ethical and dynamic Self–Other interdependencies through which evidence is made and communicated. The analyses highlight the performativity of monitoring and evaluation activities: how networks of relations perform the logic of rigid predictability that underpins the design and funding of international development interventions. Th...

How does the culturally organized space participate in the construction of the person? Departing from short descriptions of funerary rites from Fon (Name of the people located in the south of Benin) and Adjatado (Name of the Adja people located in the village of Tado, in southeastern Benin) cultures in Benin, Africa, the present article proposes to articulate the concept of cultural area with notions from a semiotic-cultural approach in psychology. The paper continues with a discussion on the notion of cultural area, originally constructed in the field of ethnological and geographical studies, then presents the Adjatado cultural area. Afterward, some notions from cultural psychology, such as the action field (Boesch 1995) and personal and collective culture (Valsiner 2012), will be focused, showing how psychological processes related to the construction of the person in the Adjatado region are embraced in diverse aspects of the cultural area. Therefore, the concept of cultural area may help to understand the transmission and maintenance of socially shared values through tradition, addressing how a tradition's spatiality guides personal and collective culture, and consequently, the construction of the person.

Chinese psychologists present important considerations on the individualism-collectivism dichotomy, which has become a dominant reference in cross-cultural studies since the 80s. They observe that cross-cultural psychology has failed to define the concepts of collectivism and individualism in a precise manner, making it difficult to measure accurately intercultural differences. I argue that culture is a fundamental dimension of human experience. It guides us by means of verbal and nonverbal semiotic resources, actions, and personal aspirations. It also offers us symbolic resources for reflecting on these actions and aspirations, thus constituting points of view, relatively singular ways of being and of acting, either reflectively or not. The points of view that develop from different cultural traditions establish horizons that define the limits and propose the ways for people to inhabit the world with others. Furthermore, the conceptions that emerge from each culturally grounded poi...

Palestinian youth is challenged by multiple discourses in the process of constitution of its identity. This discursive multiplicity, characteristic of contemporary global societies, is confronted with personal life experiences, giving meaning to primarily nebulous affective impacts in the social environment. Starting from a semiotic—cultural perspective in cultural psychology one can establish a link between the notion of master narrative used by Hammack (2010) and the notion of myth—using the conception of ideology as a bridge that articulates both. Antinomies in the self-biographic narratives presented and discussed by Hammack (2010) support the master narrative of Palestinian identity and enter into interactions with other psychological identities of the interviewed youngsters, such as their religious tradition and secular education. Symbolic elements that are brought to the identity-making process by the diverse narratives are to be seen as resources for the comprehension of lif...

Luria has long been one of the most influential authors in cognitive neurosciences, in particular in neuropsychology. New scientific advances and clinical observations have confirmed many of his proposals and hypotheses. In this paper one of his major ideas is analyzed: the influence of cultural factors on human cognition. The systemic-dynamic Lurian analysis of brain activity is based on Vygotsky's concept of higher mental functions, which are social in origin and complex and dynamic in their structure. Higher mental functions are based on a complex system of operations and means both external and internal. Living conditions and hence cultural characteristics have dramatically changed during the last half century with the development of new media and new virtual ways of communication. Review of contemporary developments supporting the appropriateness and usefulness of these concepts is presented. It is finally concluded that Luria is one of the major founders of contemporary neuropsychology not only from the clinical point of view, but also from the cultural perspective. His influence has continued undiminished during the 21st century.

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This article explores imagined selfhood, mobility and futurities through creative practice in ethnography. Globalisation allows people with varying socioeconomic and geographical backgrounds to imagine themselves with more possibilities. How can creative practice such as improvisation in ethnofictions, storytelling and participatory animation be applied in ethnographic research to explore the imaginary realm of selfhood and expectations on being elsewhere? Drawing on fieldwork on migration from

If you visit Dr. Margaret Trawick's home page at the University of Massey, New Zealand, there are two photographs on display. One is of Trawick herself. The other is a photograph of one of the primary respondents in her study on love in a Tamil family. The inscription below that photograph reads 'In Memory of Pullavar S.R. Themozhiyar, 1938-1998'. Trawick lived with Themozhiyar's family and used them as sources for her book Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. The book was researched in three phases, in 1975, 1980 and then in 1984. First published in 1990, the book was awarded the 1992 Coomaraswamy award for significant scholarly work on South Asia. Oxford University Press, India brought out an Indian edition in 1996. Trawick's meeting with Themozhiyar, or Ayya, as he is also known in the book, was a serendipitous one. She was in Tamil Nadu researching concepts of the human body in South India. Ayya was introduced to her as a 'Tamil scholar who made his living by lecturing at religious gatherings about Saiva literature' (p. 41). Ayya introduced Trawick to the epic poem Tirukkovaiyar by Manikkavacakar. This was a love poem, which talked of the love of a man and a woman, and also spoke of the

Inconsistency between the expressed support for resource-conservation ideas and behaviours has emphasised the need to develop a better understanding of the psychosocial processes through which formal laws (reified universe) also become informal norms (consensual universe). Experimental paradigms of the sociocognitive approach to social norms are able to assess if cultural change fostered by the legal/reified universe have been incorporated by society to the level of influencing, and being expected, in interpersonal communications. This article proposes to combine elements from the social representations theory and the sociocognitive approach to social norms in a diagnose proposal for cultural change (appropriation and consensualisation dimensions). Through a self-presentation paradigm, results of Study 1 show that conservation beliefs and behaviours are indeed used in interpersonal contexts in order to be well-seen; yet this informal valorisation is context-dependant. In Study 2 a hetero-evaluation paradigm was used. Results show that conservation beliefs are socially valued and crucial for people to be positively seen (appropriation). Yet the expression of conservation behaviours is not required (consensualisation). Overall, these results show that conservation beliefs and behaviours have become informal norms in Portugal. Still, this valorisation is not yet homogeneous; it partially tolerates belief-behaviour inconsistency, a typical dynamic of emancipated representations.

There exists a fundamental convergence between some major trends of modern epistemology as outlined, for instance, by Filmer Northrop and Henry Margenauand the theories actually developed within sciences of the human mind where two types of thoughtone implicit and, the other, explicittend to refer to two different lines of development. Moreover, these theories can find in the psychology of Lev Vygotsky some seminal hypotheses of a major importance. In order to highlight this convergence, we parallel the role played by structured conceptual systems in Vygotsky's conception of intellectual development and Northrop's epistemology. We show how these conceptual systems account for the notion of causality and can explain the success of scientific thought, i.e. its possible match with the real world, while this match falsely justified an overall biological model of intellectual development in Jean Piaget's work. We conclude that dual process theorists should no longer neglect cognitive tools, and especially conceptual systems, which underpin the awareness and mastery of thought that are characteristic of type 2 processes. This whole analysis leads us to maintain that human psychology is not characterized in the first instance by a need to act, but a quest for meaning. Keywords Dual process theory-Historical-cultural Psychology-Epistemology-Conceptual systems-Human development-Vygotsky The present analysis aims at deriving teachings on human rationality from the profound convergence of certain important trends in modern epistemology, cognitive psychology and the historical-cultural psychology of Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky is a leading precursor of dualist theories since he studied human thought as being the result of interaction between two different lines of development: one ancient, associated with animal development, and the other recent, associated with man's social development. To begin with, we will establish a bridge, based on some assumptions of evolutionary psychology, between dualist theories in cognitive psychology and Vygotsky's psychology. Secondly, we will bring closer Vygotsky's conception of human tools of reasoning and certain major currents of modern epistemology, by showing the role played by structured conceptual systems in Vygotsky's theory of intellectual development and Northrop's epistemology. The synthesis we propose parallels the dual conceptions of the human mind with the dual conceptions of the formation of concepts, bringing into opposition concepts whose meaning is derived directly from experience of the outside world and concepts whose meaning is mediatized by the relationships of concepts with other concepts. Thirdly, we show how this conceptual dualism accounts for logical thinking and the notion of causality and, moreover, explains the possible match of formal scientific models with the phenomenal worldi.e. the rationality of reality. These epistemological reflections will allow us to divert some major teachings toward the analysis of human psychology. They lead us to maintain that the need to understand is an essential, if not the most essential, dimension of human thought, and to open up future research paths to dual process theorists. 1 Vygotsky and the duality of human thought According to dual-process theories in psychology, human thought processes develop along two distinct and complementary types of processes, one (type 1) fast, effortless, automatic, contextualized and non-conscious, the other (type 2) slow, effortful, controlled, decontextualized and conscious or reflective. These two types of processes are imputed to two different evolutionary lines. The first, which is shared with animals, is evolutionary old, directed towards action (pragmatic) and undemanding of working memory, whereas the second is distinctively human, evolutionary recent, logical and demanding of working memory (Evans 2009). These distinctions do not necessarily support the hypothesis of the existence of two systems of thought. On the contrary, the two types of processes tend to operate jointly. We may, as Frankish (2009) suggests, assume that they refer to two levels of thought provided, we add, that we consider type 2 processes potential impact on type 1 processes, in human development. These processes are linked to two kinds of learning, the first implicit and associative, the other one explicit and rule-based. Finally, the second type of processes is described as supporting human rationality, by controlling cognitive simulations or "mental models" and, more generally, hypothetical reasoning.

More and more institutions from different sectors are promoting and using short study trips as a way of learning. This paper focuses on what learning during this particular activity setting might be about by analyzing experiences from two study trips that Lithuanian and Polish educators made to Norway to explore and learn from Norwegian early childhood education and care practices. The results provide insight into the activities of and reflections on study trips in which teachers, researchers, and administrators from different countries participated. As the dialectics between the home countries and the visited country were clearly articulated by the participants of the study trips, we decided to analyze the results in a cultural-historical theoretical framework that "embraces" the cultural and institutional heritage of all the countries. We tracked the qualities of learning that took place at the intersection of theoretical and situated learning and regarded (a) comparing-as situating oneself in relation to "the new", (b) understanding-situating oneself in the visited context and trying to understand the "new" practices from the local perspective, and (c) reflecting on conditions for situating the "other" practices in the home country; which allowed considering the possibility of change making. Our conclusions prompted a discussion about the power-knowledge relationships identified during this particular activity setting.

Luis C. Moll, Puerto Rican by birth, is one of the most prominent researchers in Latino education in the United States. His avant-garde works on Hispanic children's linguistic development and bilingual literacy are well known and renowned for their implications in the research on the impact of culture and education on human development. He is also one of the most notable advocates of Vygotskian theory in the Hispanic world, and his labor in this field has played an important role as a meeting point between United States' and Hispanic scholars. This interview examines his formation as a researcher: the intention is to provide an account of his educational and human trajectory, as well as to relate those projects he is involved in at the moment and that can be considered the result of such trajectory.

The professional life of Vladimir Petrovich Zinchenko (1931–2014) is presented from an American perspective. Three themes are highlighted: a) an enduring quest to find some degree of freedom in human action, including his own, b) a deep appreciation of his intellectual genealogy, and c) an abiding generosity toward students and colleagues. Particular episodes of Zinchenko’s life as a scholar are examined from this perspective, with special emphasis given to some of the struggles he encountered in an intellectual atmosphere charged by Marxist-Leninist ideology during the Soviet years.

Professor Peeter Tulviste (1945–2017) was a leading figure in the study of psychology and the history of psychology, whose life and scholarship went through several unexpected phases. Building on the writings of L.S. Vygotsky, A.R. Luria, and others, he was driven by a quest to understand others’ worldviews. Over his lifetime he was led him to see how such views can differ in ways that extend even beyond theoretical claims about how human mental life is situated in cultural, institutional, and historical contexts. He never lost his fascination with these issues and approached them with lifelong cosmopolitan leanings. At the same time, his commitment as an Estonian patriot grew stronger over the course of his career. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tulviste was able to travel to other countries, opening up new venues for cosmopolitan explorations, but it was also a time that made open, frank discussions of national identity possible. In his continuing scholarly research, as we...

Individualist and collectivist cultural frameworks have been the dominant research paradigm in cross-cultural studies despite evidence of conceptual and measurement problems with collectivism. We propose a new theoretical framework of psychological functioning in Chinese societies that captures some of the useful elements of collectivism without its drawbacks. The relational orientation framework takes into account the variety of relations in an individual’s social and cultural environment. The model comprises a structural–relational factor grounded in sociological structuration theory and relational orientation characteristics, and a rational–relational factor that captures important aspects of agency based on social exchange theory. We discuss the framework’s role in providing an alternative to methodological individualism for research in Chinese societies.

Over a long professional lifetime, Ragnar Rommetveit contributed to numerous disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, reflecting discussions in global social science and his own unending quest to understand social and individual life. His remarkable career and impact can be outlined in terms of four main phases. The first involved general social psychology in the 1950s and was reflected in Social Norms and Roles (1953/1955). In the second phase during the 1960s and 1970s, he focused on language-related psycholinguistic research leading to publications such as his 1968 volume Words, Meanings and Messages. The third phase came in the 1970s and 1980s and was motivated by his critique of formal linguistics and resulted in his short, magisterial 1974 volume On Message Structure. The fourth phase between 1980 and 2010 focused on “dialogism,” giving rise to works such as his 1992 article “Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communicat...

This study addresses learner acculturation in the English Preparatory School of Eastern Mediterranean University in Famagusta, Northern Cyprus, and it examines the role of learners’ social and cultural identities conveyed through teaching English in a foreign language context. Qualitative research using in-depth interviews with 10 participants of Turkish, Azeri, Uygur (China) origin, and Palestinian students, was employed to gain a nuanced understanding of how the acculturation process is experienced, and what role cultural and motivational factors play. The findings of this study reveal that participants are closely aligned with their home cultures, and thus have little motive to distance themselves and integrate into the host culture. Although Turkish students have more motivation to integrate with the host culture, the results reveal that all students involved in the acculturation process display a separation strategy, and therefore find themselves facing difficulty integrating t...

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New meanings can be produced through messages coming from outside a group (e.g. other cultures, experts and active minorities), but can also be created by creatively using social tools one already possesses by belonging to a society. The two pathways of creativity are related and opposing processes: the former 'makes the unfamiliar familiar', whereas the latter 'makes the familiar unfamiliar'. Both utilize the existing 'field of representations' as super-ordinate meanings to (re)situate and therefore understand some object, activity or event. Representations are schematized in and with a context, through discourse, in such a way that both the representation and the context are transformed.

The psychological concept of attachment is constantly evolving. Approximately 70 years after attachment theory was first introduced by John Bowlby in the late 1940s, the notion of attachment is still in flux with continually changing ideas of what it means to be a good parent. One path along which attachment as a concept is moving from academia to everyday life is the philosophy of attachment parenting which was first established in the US by William and Martha Sears. Ideas about attachment theory and attachment parenting are frequently accompanied by critical comments on "Western" cultures. This critical perspective on modernity, individualism, and autonomy is portrayed in the first part of this article. The second part traces attachment as a concept transferred to Turkey. Rather than studying academic work on attachment in Turkey, this article focuses on popularized versions of attachment theory which gain ground as part of the parenting philosophy of attachment parenting. This article analyzes parents' blogs, websites, self-help books, fieldwork protocols, and interviews with parenting trainers and parents themselves. It focuses on how popular scientific use of attachment parenting in Turkey is accompanied by discussions of cultural identity, cultural values, and belonging. The article shows that attachment theory and parenting are used in quite diverse ways to comment on Turkish (parenting) culture, ranging from anglophile readings to more conservative appropriations of attachment theory as Anatolian education. These forms of popularizing attachment theory challenge the sociological concept of psychologization.