The darkroom of the mind — what does neuropsychology now tell us about brands?

How does a brand live and die in the memory? Where does the concept of a relationship with a brand fit into mental activity? What are thoughts, emotions and feelings and do people have them about brands in any meaningful way? What should one think about such concepts as consciousness and the unconscious in relation to brands and brand messages? Is the way in which managers of brands codify them a reflection of reality? These are only some of the fundamental questions that should concern professionals involved with organisations and brands. This paper draws on scientific discoveries about the human brain to build on the empirical knowledge that leaders in organisations, marketers, academics and researchers have gained about brands over the last five decades. The first part of the paper highlights the inconsistencies that occur between what is found in the development and evaluation of brand strategy and what happens in ‘real life’. It suggests that the newly merged disciplines of neuroscience and cognitive psychology (called neuropsychology) offer the scientific basis for understanding how human beings create, store, recall and relate to brands in everyday life. The second part explains some of the most relevant neuropsychological discoveries about the brain in terms of the implications for brand marketing. The topics covered are: brain functions and structure; consciousness and the unconscious; memory and language. The paper concludes by thinking about the current practise of qualitative research and how it matches up to the findings of the new science. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Scientists in the Swamp: Narrowing the Language–Practice Gap in Community Psychology

As a confluence of unique values and activities, the collective practice of community psychology is difficult to characterize in a simple way. Increasingly, however, professional contexts are laden with pressure to define any practice—from library work to medical interventions—in the orderly, compact language of traditional science. This trend has historically been resisted in the field by those sensing a fundamental lack of fit between the fluid, emergent aspects of community psychological practice and the fixed, precise language of classic science. In response to this “language–practice gap,” some have attempted to adapt the traditional language of science to better fit the field's practice, while others have explored alternative languages of practice seemingly more indigenous to the messy “swamp” of actual communities. While the former effort leaves some theoretical contradictions intact, the latter tends to discount scientific identity entirely. This paper proposes a potential step forward by resituating questions of disciplinary language and identity within a current philosophical discourse where the nature of social science itself remains sharply contested. This suggests shifting attention away from “should we be a science?” to “what kind of science might we be after all?”; in turn, alternative languages may be re‐cast as legitimate contributors to a kind of science more authentic to human communities—even a viable “science in the swamp.” One such language–philosophical hermeneutics—is presented as a particularly valuable supplement to traditional science. Illustrations highlight ways that hermeneutics may advance the formal language of the field towards a closer fit of what actually happens in practice, while preserving and even bolstering the empirical rigor and scientific identity of the field.     

Use and Then Prove,or Prove and Then Use? Some Thoughts on the Ethics of Mental Health Professionals' Courtroom Involvement

Psychologists' courtroom involvement and testimony should not be dictated solely by what the judge or court allows but also require the application of personal or professional standards. This article explores various standards that might be used to determine whether psychological evidence is ready for courtroom application, whether or which evaluative procedures should be performed prior to courtroom use, and the potential tensions between personal validation or impression and formal scientific evidence. Although determining just how tough our professional standards ought to be involves complex issues, the field should take a strong stance against testimony that is based largely on personal validation and that lacks scientific support or conflicts with research evidence. Much of current testimony violates this minimal standard.     

Enhancement and ethics

Now suppose we could use genetic engineering, regenerative medicine or drugs --chemical enhancers, or reproductive technology or nanotechnology to produce healthier, fitter and more intelligent individuals, what should our reaction be? Would it be unethical to do so? Would it be ethical not to do so? Our question is this: If the goal of enhanced intelligence, increased powers and capacities and better health is something that we might strive to produce through education, including of course the more general health education of the community; why should we not produce these goals, if we can do so safely, through enhancement technologies or procedures? If these are legitimate aims of education could they be illegitimate as the aims of medical or life science, as opposed to educational science?     

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS AND HAS IT EVOLVED?

Research into consciousness has now become respectable, and much has been written about it. Is consciousness the exclusive property of human beings, or can it be found also in animals? Can machines become conscious? Is consciousness an illusion, and are all mental states ultimately reducible to the movement of molecules? If consciousness is other than matter, what connection does it have with matter? These and others like them are now serious scientific questions in the West. This article discusses consciousness within the frame of the following assertions: Consciousness has evolved from earlier states of awareness to be found in lower forms of life. The current scientific method is too restrictive for the study of conscience and its evolution. In particular classical logic leads scientists to ignore or reject consciousness as a legitimate field of study. Mind and matter, generalized as knowing and being, have equal status.     

Subjective science: Kenneth Spence's human learning research program

This article examines Kenneth Spence's human learning research from 1949 to 1967. His works show the conditioning field to be in turmoil over basic issues during this time. These issues included whether determinism should be accepted, how to interpret a psychological test score, what psychometric properties a test should have, and how to use theoretical constructs. Turmoil occurred because behaviors and events had different meanings and degrees of importance to different investigators. Thus, what appeared as "objective" scientific change in the conditioning field was really the adaptation of personal preferences in word meanings, research goals, and research methods. These issues also indicate disputes about definitions and purposes of scientific activity during Spence's era.     

Folk psychology as science

There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of action and the philosophy of science over folk psychological explanations of human action: do the (perhaps implicit) generalizations that underwrite such explanations purport to state contingent, empirically established connections between beliefs, desires, and actions, or do such generalizations serve rather to define, at least in part, what it is to have a belief or desire, or perform an action? This question has proven important because of certain traditional assumptions made about the role of law-statements in scientific explanations. According to this tradition, law-statements take the form of generalizations, and the laws we find in well-established sciences are contingent and empirical; as such, if the kinds of generalizations at work in folk psychological explanations of human action act like definitions, or state conceptual connections, then such generalizations could not play the kind of explanatory role we find in mature sciences. This paper argues that the aforementioned way of framing the debate reflects a still powerful but impoverished conception of the role laws play in scientific explanations, a conception that, moreover, cannot be reconciled with a good deal of actual scientific practice. When we update the philosophy of science, we find the concerns that are raised for folk psychological explanations largely evaporate or are found not to be specific to such explanations.     

GETTING UNDER MY SKIN: WILLIAM JAMES ON THE EMOTIONS, SOCIALITY, AND TRANSCENDENCE

“You are really getting under my skin!” This exclamation suggests a series of psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical questions: What is the nature and development of human emotion? How does emotion arise in social interaction? To what extent can interactive situations shape our embodied selves and intensify particular affective states? With these questions in mind, William James begins to investigate the character of emotions and to develop a model of what he terms the social self. James's studies of mimicry and his interest in phenomena now often investigated using biofeedback begin to explain how affective states develop and how it might be possible for something to “get under one's skin.” I situate these studies in the history of psychology between the psychological schools of structuralism and behaviorism. More important, I suggest continuity between James's Psychology and recent research on mirror neurons, reentrant mapping, and emotional mimicry in the fields of clinical psychology and cognitive neuroscience. This research supports and extends James's initial claims in regard to the creation of emotions and the life of the social self. I propose that James's work in the empirical sciences should be read as a prelude to his metaphysical works that speak of a coordination between embodied selves and wider environmental situations, and his psychological studies should be read as a prelude to his reflections on spiritual transcendence.     

The future of optimism

Recent theoretical discussions of optimism as an inherent aspect of human nature converge with empirical investigations of optimism as an individual difference to show that optimism can be a highly beneficial psychological characteristic linked to good mood, perseverance, achievement, and physical health. Questions remain about optimism as a research topic and more generally as a societal value. Is the meaning of optimism richer than its current conceptualization in cognitive terms? Are optimism and pessimism mutually exclusive? What is the relationship between optimism and reality, and what are the costs of optimistic beliefs that prove to be wrong? How can optimism be cultivated? How does optimism play itself out across different cultures? Optimism promises to be one of the important topics of interest to positive social science, as long as it is approached in an even-handed way.     

心理传记学的研究方法思考

摘 要 当代心理学由于“本体与方法”的割裂形成科学心理学与人文心理学双峰对峙的局面,科学心理学受自然科学方法的影响而难以直面人性关怀问题;以人文心理学为研究传统的心理传记学,通过对悬疑性问题的逐层解读,直面人类心理动力系统,从而能够直面人性关怀问题。为进一步促进心理传记学的发展,对当前心理传记研究的资料筛选、研究模式、理论运用改进,以期研究者能够更好地通过史料分析进入传主生命事件的历史现场,对传主生命历程进行恰当的理论解释,从而进一步激发中国本土心理传记学发展的动力。     

Roles of instruments in psychological research

What roles have instruments played in psychology and related disciplines? How have instruments affected the dynamics of psychological research, with what possibilities and limits? What is the psychological instrument? This article provides a conceptual foundation for specific case studies concerning such questions. The discussion begins by challenging widely accepted assumptions about the subject and analyzing the general relations between scientific experimentation and the uses of instruments in psychology. Building on this analysis, a deliberately inclusive definition of what constitutes a psychological instrument is proposed. The discussion then takes up the relation between instrumentation and theories and differentiates in greater detail the roles instruments have had over the course of psychology's history. Finally, the authors offer an approach to evaluating the possibilities and limitations of instruments in psychology.     

Nothingness and the Human Umwelt

In the paper I argue that the great impact of empiricism on psychology and the enclosed dualist agenda traps psychological phenomena into subjectivism. By discussing the phenomena of nothingness in biological and cultural life it is argued that meaning must be considered as a phenomenon that represents both a fit and a misfit of the individual with the environment. By stressing the overall presence of nothingness phenomena it is argued how the reduced ontology of empiricism—and its blindness to relations and transformations out of which meaning grows—should be overcome. In human cultural life, transformations are constitutive and ongoing changes are being produced to make sure that continuity as well as discontinuity will happen. The analysis of especially one case—the removal of an Amish school after a shooting episode—serves to prove how meaning grows out of cultural processes as people produce their own conditions of life. From a cultural-ecological point of view, analyzing meaning at the level of individual phenomenology, hence, means analyzing the ‘total psychological situation’ (legacy of Kurt Lewin). This may for instance include analyzing how people live, what they consider important and worth preserving, what must be changed, what are their core values and how do institutional arrangements contribute to keeping up that which is valued or to changing that which is not, etc. Meaning may be viewed the lived-out experience—the domain of self-generativity in human life.     

Creation and the Symbiosis of Science and Judaism

It seems to me that the critical questions that science and natural philosophy raise for Jewish theology are the following: Does God evolve? Does the universe have or even need an interpretation, specifically with reference to the fact that most of the universe most of the time is uninhabitable, and there may be many more than one universe? Does the universe need a beginning? What is distinctive about human consciousness, intelligence, and ethics in the light of evidence for evolution from all of the life sciences? Finally, will both life and the universe end? These questions are not only modern. They contain all the primary issues that have dominated rabbinic thought. That agenda can be summarized in six topics: How should we model what we believe about (1) God, (2) the world, and (3) the human being; and how should we understand the relations between them, that is, between (4) God and the world (or, creation), (5) God and the human (or, revelation), and (6) the human and the world (or, redemption)? In this paper I focus on the fourth issue, creation. My answer is presented in detail in my Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation(Samuelson 1994). Here I shall summarize my conclusions there concerning science, Jewish texts, and the correlation between them.     

遗传算法与易算算法

本文认为 ,《周易·系辞传》“天地之大德曰生” ;“生生之谓易”等以生命为本并强调生命演化的思想都与西方新兴起的遗传算法 (基因算法 )精神一致。文章在介绍了已故著名科学易学家潘雨廷先生对遗传密码的理解后 ,进而介绍了西方遗传算法的内容和结构 ,并把DNA本体看作计算硬件 ,把易数看作软件。最后比较了象数思维与遗传算法的思维 ,并提出了八卦空间     

Propos sur la responsabilité scientifique du psychologue : essai d’épistémologie appliquée

As far as psychologists’ practice rests on scientific knowledge, scientific responsibility follows. To make it explicit, it is useful to detail what is meant by scientific knowledge in psychology, which consists in applying epistemology to psychology. A ternary approach to the use of knowledge is applied to identification of mental disorders, clinical evaluation of change, demonstration of an effect, and construction of objectivity in psychology. Such an analysis suggests that psychologists should be prepared to claim psychological indetermination of the singular persons of interest, in the light of current scientific knowledge.     

Parent-offspring conflict theory: an evolutionary framework for understanding conflict within human families

Decades of research demonstrate that conflict shapes and permeates a broad range of family processes. In the current article, we argue that greater insight, integration of knowledge, and empirical achievement in the study of family conflict can be realized by utilizing a powerful theory from evolutionary biology that is barely known within psychology: parent-offspring conflict theory (POCT). In the current article, we articulate POCT for psychological scientists, extend its scope by connecting it to the broader framework of life history theory, and draw out its implications for understanding conflict within human families. We specifically apply POCT to 2 instances of early mother-offspring interaction (prenatal conflict and weaning conflict); discuss the effects of genetic relatedness on behavioral conflict between parents, children, and their siblings; review the emerging literature on parent-offspring conflict over the choice of mates and spouses; and examine parent-offspring conflict from the perspective of imprinted genes. This review demonstrates the utility of POCT, not only for explaining what is known about conflict within families but also for generating novel hypotheses, suggesting new lines of research, and moving us toward the "big picture" by integrating across biological and psychological domains of knowledge.     

The Ignorant Citizen: Mouffe,Rancière,and the Subject of Democratic Education

Much work in the field of education for democratic citizenship is based on the idea that it is possible to know what a good citizen is, so that the task of citizenship education becomes that of the production of the good citizen. In this paper I ask whether and to what extent we can and should understand democratic citizenship as a positive identity. I approach this question by means of an exploration of four dimensions of democratic politics—the political community, the borders of the political order, the dynamics of democratic processes and practices, and the status of the democratic subject—in order to explore whether and to what extent the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can and should be understood as a particular order. For this I engage with ideas from Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière who both have raised fundamental questions about the extent to which the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can be captured as a particular order. In the paper I introduce the figure of the ignorant citizen in order to hint at a conception of citizenship that is not based on particular knowledge about what the good citizen is. I introduce a distinction between a socialisation conception of citizenship education and civic learning and a subjectification conception of citizenship education and civic learning in order to articulate what the educational implications of such an ‘anarchic’ understanding of democratic politics are. While the socialisation conception focuses on the question how ‘newcomers’ can be inserted into an existing political order, the subjectification conception focuses on the question how democratic subjectivity is engendered through engagement in always undetermined political processes. This is no longer a process driven by knowledge about what the citizen is or should become but one that depends on a desire for a particular mode of human togetherness or, in short, a desire for democracy.     

The big picture: Writing psychology into the history of the human sciences

The grand narratives which once gave order and readability to histories, of science and of the human sciences are widely rejected in current historiography, and historians focus on detailed studies of scientific knowledge and activity in particular contexts. How, then, are synthetic general histories, accessible to the non-specialist, to be written? This paper, designed as an open-ended discussion, reflects on the business of writing about psychology in a general history of the human sciences. It considers three large topics: reflexivity, and the situation in the human sciences where “man” is both subject and object; the boundary-less identity of the human sciences and hence the need to express values in delimiting the content of the field; and the long-standing debate about what sort of “science” is appropriate for knowledge of human beings. The conclusion turns to “the quest” as a narrative form. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

服部宇之吉的《心理学讲义》

日本学者服部宇之吉的《心理学讲义》（中文版）形成于他自1902年在中国京师大学堂开始的心理学教学活动,出版于1905年11月。该书在日本发行而在中国发售,它是面向中国学生的心理学教材。服部宇之吉将中国传统文化融入了科学心理学教材,肯定了中国传统文化的心理学意义。《心理学讲义》具有明显的进化论取向以及为教育服务的倾向。服部宇之吉的心理学教学是现代科学心理学在中国高等教育体系中传播的开端。《心理学讲义》是以知、情、意三分法为基础的心理学体系。中国早期心理学术语与日本心理学中的同形汉字有着紧密联系,服部宇之吉直接采用日本心理学界通用的术语以解决汉语心理学术语的创制困难。