Integrating Human and Natural Systems in Community Psychology: An Ecological Model of Stewardship Behavior

Community psychology (CP) research on the natural environment lacks a theoretical framework for analyzing the complex relationship between human systems and the natural world. We introduce other academic fields concerned with the interactions between humans and the natural environment, including environmental sociology and coupled human and natural systems. To demonstrate how the natural environment can be included within CP’s ecological framework, we propose an ecological model of urban forest stewardship action. Although ecological models of behavior in CP have previously modeled health behaviors, we argue that these frameworks are also applicable to actions that positively influence the natural environment. We chose the environmental action of urban forest stewardship because cities across the United States are planting millions of trees and increased citizen participation in urban tree planting and stewardship will be needed to sustain the benefits provided by urban trees. We used the framework of an ecological model of behavior to illustrate multiple levels of factors that may promote or hinder involvement in urban forest stewardship actions. The implications of our model for the development of multi-level ecological interventions to foster stewardship actions are discussed, as well as directions for future research to further test and refine the model.     

Emergence of a Social Inquiry Group: A Story of Fractals and Networks

This article relates the emergence of a group of faculty researchers utilizing complexity science approaches. The narrative emerges from three projects combining research into complexity, communities, and technologies. Details of how the research was initiated, and the nature and quality of the conversational method, are provided. In addition, theoretical concepts that were consciously applied and others that arose through insights from the data as it was collected are discussed. Although this is like most real narratives, a never-ending story, it concludes with a presentation of some of the ideas that separate complexity-informed research from other paradigms.     

Principles of coparticipant inquiry: An introductory outline and implications for therapeutic action

Abstract

Historically, two paradigms have been dominant in clinical psychoanalysis: the classical paradigm, which views the impersonal analyst as objective mirror, and the interpersonal/relational model, which views the analyst as intersubjective participant-observer. An evolutionary shift in psychoanalytic consciousness has, however, been quietly taking place, giving rise to coparticipant inquiry, a third paradigm that integrates the individualistic emphasis of classical theory and the social focus of participant-observation, avoiding the reductionism of each. This new perspective, which is rooted in the radical teachings and clinical experiments of Sandor Ferenczi, represents a significant shift in analytic theory and has major clinical implications. This essay articulates the seven guiding principles of coparticipant inquiry and reviews its contribution to the psychoanalytic theory of therapeutic action. The curative process of reconstructive new experience in the analytic situation, referred to as the “living through” process, is seen to subtend curative change, for both patient and analyst. The inherent mutuality and bi-directionality of this beneficial “living through” process is examined in both its direct and its dialectic coparticipatory aspects.     

Pragmatic Democracy: Inquiry,Objectivity, and Experience

This essay argues that to understand Dewey's vision of democracy as “epistemic” requires consideration of how experiential and communal aspects of inquiry together produce what is named here “pragmatic objectivity.” Such pragmatic objectivity provides an alternative to absolutism and self‐interested relativism by appealing to certain norms of empirical experimentation. Pragmatic objectivity, it is then argued, can be justified by appeal to Dewey's conception of primary experience. This justification, however, is not without its own complications, which are highlighted with objections regarding “radical pluralism” in political life, and some logical problems that arise due to the supposedly “ineffable” nature of primary experience. The essay concludes by admitting that while Dewey's theory of democracy based on experience cannot answer all of the objections argumentatively, it nevertheless provides potent suggestions for how consensus building can proceed without such philosophical arguments.     

EMA-一种生态主义取向的研究模式

生态瞬时评估（EMA）不是一个单一的研究方法,而是一种研究模式,它强调现实世界中实时数据的采集和反复的评估,并能阐释变量间自然存在和变化的相互关系,具有很高的生态学效度。EMA的使用会加强我们对个体与环境之间的动态交互作用的理解。EMA的基本设计思路包括基于事件的设计、基于时间的设计和联合设计。在EMA 的使用中还有一些问题如软硬件的发展、伦理、数据等问题等需要研究者注意。目前EMA应用最广泛的领域是临床心理学和行为研究方面。     

Informational constraints shape emergent functional behaviours during performance of interceptive actions in team sports

Objectives

This study aimed to explain how defenders intercept the trajectory of a passing ball by understanding how they coupled their actions to critical information sources in a competitive performance setting in team sports.

Design

Time series data on movement displacements of fifteen senior male futsal performers were recorded and digitized during nine competitive futsal games.

Method

Performance was recorded by a digital camera and digitized with TACTO software. The spatial-temporal dynamics of performers during ten intercepted and ten non-intercepted passes were compared. Time to ball interception was calculated by the difference between the time of each defender to an interception point in ball trajectory and the time of the ball’s arrival at the same interception point. Initial distances between defenders and ball and velocity data of defenders and ball over time were also recorded.

Results

Time to ball interception revealed positive values when passes were not intercepted, and negative to zero values when passes were intercepted. At the moment of pass initiation defenders’ distances to the ball constrained their possibilities for successful interception. Analysis of defenders’ adaptations to the environment revealed that continuous changes in the defenders’ velocities constrained their success of the interception.

Conclusions

Intercepted passes seemed to be influenced by the continuous regulation of a defender’s velocity relative to the ball’s trajectory. Time to ball interception is a variable that captured the emergent functional behaviours of players attempting to intercept the trajectory of a pass in the team sport of futsal.     

Knowledge to Wisdom: We Need a Revolution

Introduction The following document is a very brief summary of a thesis and argument that I have devoted the last 30 years of my life to trying to get across to my fellow human beings. It was first spelled out in What’s Wrong With Science? (Bran’s Head Books, 1976) and subsequently in From Knowledge to Wisdom (Blackwell, 1984), Is Science Neurotic? (Imperial College Press, 2004) and numerous articles, references to which can be found on . Three years ago an international group was formed, called Friends of Wisdom, which seeks to get across to academics and the public the compelling arguments and urgent need to transform academic inquiry so that its basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom. The document below is taken from the website of Friends of Wisdom, the URL of which is . It is the mission statement of Friends of Wisdom. You are invited to join.     

Social epistemology as a rhetoric of inquiry

Fuller's program of social epistemology engages a rhetoric of inquiry that can be usefully compared and contrasted with other discursive theories of knowledge, such as that of Richard Rorty. Resisting the model of conversation, Fuller strikes an activist posture and lays the groundwork for normative knowledge policy, in which persuasion and credibility play key roles. The image of investigation is one that overtly rejects the storehouse conception of knowledge and invokes the metaphors of distributive economics. Productive questions arise as to how notions of creation and distribution might guide this rhetoric.     

The rhetoric of the reasoned social scientific fact

An analysis is provided for one possible practical link between rhetorical and social scientific inquiry. That link is found in the rhetoric of the reasoned social scientific fact. Understanding this point of intersection involves grounding a rhetorical theory of how to create and to evaluate arguments (a rhetorical theory of invention and judgment) in the practical problems that confront contemporary social scientists during their efforts to construct reasoned social facts. The applicability of this invention and judgment framework to analysis of the rhetoric of social science is illustrated with reference to a controversy over the legitimacy of rules theoretic explanations of human communication processes. Implications of the practical link between rhetorical and social scientific inquiry are then drawn out.