Contextual Social Psychology

This compelling book offers insight into the advantages of contextual social psychology, applying these analyses to critical topics such as prejudice, far-right voting patterns, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact.

This groundbreaking book shows how we can build a better understanding of people by merging psychology with the social sciences. It is part of a trilogy that offers a new way of doing psychology focusing on people’s social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than internal and individualistic attributions. Putting the ‘social’ properly back into psychology, Bernard Guerin turns psychology inside out to offer a more integrated way of thinking about and researching people. Going back 60 years of psychology’s history to the ‘cognitive revolution’, Guerin argues that psychology made a mistake, and demonstrates in fascinating new ways how to instead fully contextualize the topics of psychology and merge with the social sciences. Covering perception, emotion, language, thinking, and social behaviour, the book seeks to guide readers to observe how behaviours are shaped by their social, cultural, economic, patriarchal, colonized, historical, and other contexts. Our brain, neurophysiology, and body are still involved as important interfaces, but human actions do not originate inside of people so we will never fi nd the answers in our neurophysiology. Replacing the internal origins of behaviour with external social contextual analyses, the book even argues that thinking is not done by you ‘in your head’ but arises from our external social, cultural, and discursive worlds. Offering a refreshing new approach to better understand how humans operate in their social, cultural, economic, discursive, and societal worlds, rather than inside their heads, and how we might have to rethink our approaches to neuropsychology as well, this is fascinating reading for students in psychology and the social sciences.

This innovative work argues that a psychological framework of disability is an essential part of developing a more cohesive disability movement. Presenting conceptual ideas which describe psychological dynamics confronting disabled people in an exclusionary and prejudiced world, this volume is an important contribution to the literature. It will interest students and researchers of disability studies.

Based on twenty years of research on the social regulation of academic performances, this book offers theoretical and empirical arguments in favour of the inclusion of the social dimension of human beings as essential for their cognitive activities. We all engage in social interactions, compare ourselves with other people, belong to social groups, and are the object of a myriad of categorisations. Not only do such social experiences affect cognition, but they actually determine its form and its content. Several experiments indeed reveal that cognitive performance depends on the relationship between the individual and the social context in which cognition takes place. And this relationship is not forged directly by features of the situation, but rather by personal construals of these features (most notably social comparison). This fact alone justifies granting the individual's social experiences a psychological status and it further strengthens the key idea of this book, namely that the social context only exists through the intervention of cognitive processes of contextualization (producing a "cognitive context of the self") such as those involved in autobiographical memory. A "social psychology of cognition" is suggested, in which the fashionable distinction between cognition and social cognition makes no sense. From this innovative perspective it is indeed more the social nature of the individual rather than that of the object to be processed that defines the social nature of cognition. Well-known phenomena such as social facilitation and social loafing as well as established educational practices are also re-examined from this perspective.

Why do we protest? What compels us to participate in crowd violence? Can gender discrimination in the workplace be explained in psychological terms? From terrorist attacks to political uprisings, the social problems that have shaped the beginning of the new millenium can be explained using the theories and application of social psychology. Social Psychology of Social Problems does just that, with top international experts examining real-life issues. The book takes the view that if a problem and its origins can be understood, then perhaps it can be prevented from happening again. Social Psychology of Social Problems is required reading for students and practitioners of psychology, social policy and international relations. Provocative and challenging, it will be an essential resource for those who are seeking a deeper understanding of how social psychology can explain our complex world.

This Brief introduces two empirically grounded models of situated mental phenomena: contextual social cognition (the collection of psychological processes underlying context-dependent social behavior) and action-language coupling (the integration of ongoing actions with movement-related verbal information). It combines behavioral, neuroscientific, and neuropsychiatric perspectives to forge a novel view of contextual influences on active, multi-domain processes. Chapters highlight the models' translational potential for the clinical field by focusing on diseases compromising social cognition (mainly illustrated by behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia) and motor skills (crucially, Parkinson’s disease). A final chapter sets forth metatheoretical considerations regarding intercognition, the constant binding of processes triggered by environmental and body-internal sources, which confers a sensus communis to our experience. In addition, the book includes two commentaries written by external peers pondering on advantages and limits of the proposal. Contextual Cognition will be of interest to students, teachers, and researchers from the fields of cognitive science, neurology, psychiatry, neuroscience, psychology, behavioral science, linguistics, and philosophy.

This exceptional book emphasizes uniquely designed interventions for individual counseling, group work, and community counseling that consider clients as individuals within the contexts of families, cultural groups, workplaces, and communities. Part I describes the theoretical research base and major tenets of the ecological perspective and its applications to counseling practice. In Part II, experts who have used the ecological perspective in their work discuss its usefulness in various applications, including counseling diverse clients with specific life challenges; assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning; and in schools, substance abuse programs, faith-based communities, and counselor training programs. *Requests for digital versions from ACA can be found on www.wiley.com. *To purchase print copies, please visit the ACA website *Reproduction requests for material from books published by ACA should be directed to [email protected].

Cookie White Stephan and Walter G. Stephan This is a book about the two social psychologies-psychological social psychology and sociological social psychology--written by social psychologists from both disciplines. It focuses on the benefits and costs of interchange between psychological social psychology and sociological social psychology, with the ultimate goal of encouraging interaction among scholars in the two disciplines. The primary questions addressed are: What do the two disciplines have to offer each other? What are the barriers to fruitful interchange? How can these barriers be overcome? In this introductory chapter we will first examine some historical reasons for the lack of interchange between the two social psychologies. Then we will provide a brief preview of the chapters to follow. The Development of the Two Social Psychologies The beginning of concern with the "social animal" can be traced to the ancient Greeks. However, social psychology's formal beginning is usually dated from Norman Triplett's 1897 publication of his findings on the effects of competition or from the publication in 1908 of two books including the words "Social Psychology" in their titles, one by the psychologist William McDougall and the other by the sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross. Thus, from its inception, social psychology was already divided into two distinct academic units, housed in the disciplines of sociology and psychology.

"Individually and collectively, the pieces balance cross-cultural psychology′s interest in the large scale community with psychology′s traditional emphasis on small groups, interpersonal processes, and individual thought, feeling, and action. The chapters range in topic, in level of analysis, and in emphasis on theory and application, but they harmonize to map the field - identifying where it has been and how it might develop. The central theme is that culture and individual psychology are inseparable and that understanding both will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior than either perspective in isolation. The book delivers: It offers important insights on the commonalties, universality, and uniqueness of human behavior. The book is dedicated to Harry C. Triandis and is truly a tribute to his work." — John F. Dovidio, Department of Psychology, Colgate University "In this book, cross-cultural psychologists from around the world honor the discipline′s founding father, Harry C. Triandis. The book has become a perfect overview of the state of the art in cross-cultural psychology." — Geert Hofstede, Tilburg University, The Netherlands "The past 10 years or so have seen a sharp increase in the number of college and university courses throughout the world that focus on culture as a powerful force that shapes the thought and behavior of all humans. It would be most difficult to organize and teach one of these courses without mentioning Triandis′s influence numerous times. I am extremely pleased that this book has been added to the cross-cultural literature." — from the Foreword by Walter J. Lonner, Western Washington State University This book celebrates Harry Triandis′s overall contribution to culture and social psychology in general, and his most original and significant contribution to this area, the concept of subjective culture. In this volume, top cross-cultural researchers who are deeply familiar with Triandis′s work critically examine the concept of subjective culture from a number of perspectives and extend it in many new directions of basic and applied social psychology. The result is an up-to-date examination of various topics and areas of social psychology from the unique perspective of subjective culture. One significant feature of this book is an attempt at framing and situating the concept of subjective culture within the current theoretical discourse on culture and psychology. Social Psychology and Cultural Context is the first survey of social psychology to integrate cross-cultural issues. This book not only utilizes several variants of the construct of subjective culture but also reflects the current state of affairs in the social domain of cross-cultural psychology. Written by world-renowned specialists, the chapters reflect valuable insights to students and researchers in both cross-cultural and social psychology.

"The Sociocultural Turn In Psychology addresses a variety of ways in which, in contemporary psychology, there has been a trend toward viewing both mind and self as fundamentally constituted by cultural context and human interaction. A variety of books on topics like herme-neutics and psychological theory or cultural psychology have been published, but no book has attempted to bring together these diverse yet related approaches to the sociocultural origins and basis of mind and self."---Jaan Valsiner, editor, Culture & Psychology The Sociocultural Turn In Psychology treats psychological subjects, such as the mind and the self, as processes that are constituted, or "made up," within specific social and cultural practices. In other words, though one's distinct psychology is anchored by an embodied, biological existence, sociocultural interactions are integral to the evolution of the person. Only in the past two decades has the sociocultural turn truly established itself within disciplinary and professional psychology. Providing advanced students and practitioners with a definitive understanding of these theories, Suzanne R. Kirschner and Jack Martin, former presidents of the American Psychological Association's Division of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, assemble a collection of essays that describes the discursive, hermeneutic, dialogical, and activity approaches of sociocultural psychology. Each contribution recognizes psychology as a human science and supports the individual's potential for agency and freedom. At the same time, they differ in their understanding of a person's psychological functioning and the best way to study it. Ultimately the sociocultural turn offers an alternative to overly biological or interiorized theories of the self, emphasizing instead the formation and transformation of our minds in relation to others and the world. "This book is urgently needed in psychology. The title phrase `sociocultural turn' has an important meaning because it connotes that a full `turn' is required. For too long, psychologists have resisted such a turn by attempting to add cultural sensitivity to culturally insensitive ideas, such as Western research, theory, and practice. Fortunately, this book has assembled a Who's Who of scholars who not only make the full sociocultural turn but describe practically how other psychologists can and should as well."---Brent D. Slife, Brigham Young University, author of Critical Thinking About Psychology: Hidden Assumptions and Plausible Alternatives