Towards an ecologically grounded functional practice in rehabilitation

According to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, effective rehabilitation requires interventions that go beyond minimizing pathological conditions and associated symptoms. The scope of practice must include promoting an individual’s activity within relevant contexts. We argue that best practice requires decisions that are not only evidence-based but also theory-based. Perception and action theories are essential for interpreting evidence and clinical phenomena as well as for developing new interventions. It is our contention that rehabilitation goals can best be achieved if inspired by the ecological approach to perception and action, an approach that focuses on the dynamics of interacting constraints of performer, task and environment. This contrasts with organism-limited motor control theories that have important influence in clinical practice. Parallels between such theories and the medical model of care highlight their fundamental inconsistency with the current understanding of functioning. We contend that incorporating ecological principles into rehabilitation research and practice can help advance our understanding of the complexity of action and provide better grounding for the development of effective functional practice. Implications and initial suggestions for an ecologically grounded functional practice are outlined.     

Coordinated policy action and flexible coalitional psychology: How evolution made humans so good at politics

The observation that politics makes strange bedfellows may be hackneyed, but it is also often true: Politicians and other actors in the policy process routinely align themselves on specific issues with actors with whom they otherwise have broad disagreements. This fits with social psychological research showing that humans have a coalitional psychology that is remarkably flexible, allowing us to feel strong bonds toward the coalitions to which we belong but to also break those bonds and move on to new coalitions when circumstances change. How is this flexibility possible? Here we examine the possible ways in which evolutionary forces helped shape our species’ trademark flexible coalitional psychology, focusing in particular on gene-culture coevolution and cultural group selection. We conclude with some examples of coordinated policy action among erstwhile foes in contemporary politics.     

试论西方马克思主义心理学取向的特点及成就

当今西方心理学研究中盛行着形形色色的马克思主义流派, 除了传统的精神分析马克思主义、人本心理学马克思主义和辩证法心理学等思潮之外, 还涌现出了实证主义心理学的马克思主义、女权主义心理学的马克思主义、批判心理学的马克思主义和多元主义辩证法等新取向, 其中批判心理学已成为发展的主流。马克思主义是我们的立国之本, 随着世界范围内马克思主义研究运动的日益高涨, 如何认识西方马克思主义的心理学理论资源, 是我们中国心理学研究需要进一步探讨的一个重要理论和现实问题。     

当代心理学发展的一种新取向--进化心理学

进化心理学是近年在西方心理学中出现的一种新的研究取向,目前仍没有一个明确的概念和系统的理论。其基本主张是：过去是理解心理机制的关键;功能分析是理解心理机制的主要途径;心理机制是在解决问题的过程中演化形成的;模块性是心理机制整体组织的特性;人的行为是心理机制和环境互动作用的结果。进化心理学的发展既有意义同时也存在局限。其意义是：其发展与当代科学发展趋势相一致;它的研究促进了对人性和心理的进一步思考。局限是：具有遗传决定论的倾向;方法论存在一定的缺陷,忽视了文化对进化的意义等等。     

进化心理学择偶心理机制假设的跨文化检验

通过对404例天津和432例Boston征婚启事的内容分析,结果发现：（1）男性更关注未来异性配偶的相貌、身材信息,而女性更关注对方的资源与承诺信息,但天津男女征婚者在这两方面都表现得更为强烈;（2）男性随年龄增长,会倾向于更大程度地寻找比自己小的女性,而中美女性则较稳定;（3）Boston人的配偶选择年龄空间较天津人广;（4）在个性特质方面,天津人更关注承诺性,Boston人更关注精神性与“享乐性”。结果表明,进化心理学对男女间差异有较大解释力,但对中美之间的文化差异却缺乏足够说服力。     

第二次认知革命与社会建构论的产生

第二次认知革命是后现代主义的革命。它的直接结果是促进了社会建构论的产生。社会建构论主张(1)知识是建构的,建构是社会的建构,而不是个体的建构。(2)人格、态度、情绪等心理现象并不存在于人的的内部,而是存在于人与人之间,是文化历史的产物。(3)语言并非是具有确定意义的透明的媒介,语言是先在的,规定了思维的方式。(4)没有超越历史和文化的普遍性知识,我们对于心理现象的理解是受时间、地域、历史、文化和社会风俗等制约的。(5)心理学家应该关注话语的作用,话语分析是心理学的基本研究方法。     

Why Clinical Psychology Needs to Engage in Community‐Based Approaches to Mental Health

The aim of this article is to advocate for clinical psychology to engage with community‐based approaches to mental health. This engagement will be challenging given community work is antithetical to the individualism that defines much of clinical psychology. It would also result in a direct challenge to the core tenets of our profession, including an emphasis on individualism, psychopathology, and expert‐driven intervention. We need clinical psychology, however, to decolonise itself to respond to the needs of Aboriginal communities and those from non‐Western collectivist cultures. We also need clinical psychology to consider the sociopolitics of human distress and lend itself to social action for complex problems. Specific examples of community‐based practices will be provided, focusing specifically on those that relate to mental health. Implication for the reform of research methodologies and classroom pedagogies will also be discussed.     

A tale of two processes: On Joseph Henrich’s the secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution,domesticating our species,and making us smarter

We situate Henrich’s book in the larger research tradition of which it is a part and show how he presents a wide array of recent psychological, physiological, and neurological data as supporting the view that two related but distinct processes have shaped human nature and made us unique: cumulative cultural evolution and culture-driven genetic evolution. We briefly sketch out several ways philosophers might fruitfully engage with this view and note some implications it may have for current philosophic debates in moral and political theory and over the nature of extended cognition. We end by noting how Henrich’s view of the source of cultural design and innovation, and the prominence of place he gives to the extended process of cultural evolution, cuts against a cluster of broad but common views about human minds, recasting putative bugs as features and indicating that many of the distinctive features of our individual minds evolved to allow them to be effective cogs in the larger, more productive cultural machine.     

Fight,Flight, or Remain Silent? Juggling Multiple Accountabilities throughout the Formative Stage of a Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative

This paper describes the experiences of a research team as they navigated uncertain ethical and political terrain throughout the formative stage of a public housing redevelopment project. Specifically, we discuss the challenges related to balancing multiple accountabilities and the tensions among the various roles and responsibilities that emanated from different accountabilities. Due to contractual obligations to our funding source, established relations with community partners, and an ethical imperative to align with those holding the least power, we grappled with embodying multiple and often conflicting roles. Without oversight provided by our university institutional review board or a clear ethical framework for community psychology research and action, our team was left to negotiate the challenges that emerged through critical reflection and financial considerations. Throughout the case example presented in this paper, we highlight our difficulty in ethical decision‐making with respect to the principles of obligation, disclosure, consent, commitment, and professionalism. Community psychologists often straddle the realms of academia, community partnerships, and conscious engagement with little guidance in navigating often conflicting roles and value systems. We present our narrative to highlight the complexity of scholar‐activism in the context of community psychology and the necessity for developing ethical standards and guidelines tailored to meet the unique needs of community psychologists.     

Social and emotional self‐efficacy at work

Research has shown that self‐efficacy is often one of the most important personal resources in the work context. However, because this research has focused on cognitive and task‐oriented self‐efficacy, little is known about social and emotional dimensions of self‐efficacy at work. The main aim of the present study was to investigate social and emotional self‐efficacy dimensions at work and to compare them to a cognitive and task‐oriented dimension. Scales to measure social and emotional self‐efficacy at work were developed and validated and found to be well differentiated from the cognitive task‐oriented occupational self‐efficacy scale. Confirmatory factor analyses of data from 226 Swedish and 591 German employees resulted in four separate but correlated self‐efficacy dimensions: (1) occupational; (2) social; (3) self‐oriented emotional; and (4) other‐oriented emotional. Social self‐efficacy explained additional variance in team climate and emotional self‐efficacy in emotional irritation and emotional exhaustion, over and above effects of occupational self‐efficacy. Men reported higher occupational self‐efficacy, whereas social and emotional self‐efficacy revealed no clear gender differences. The scales have strong psychometric properties in both Swedish and German language versions. The positive association between social self‐efficacy and team climate, and the negative relationships between self‐oriented emotional self‐efficacy and emotional irritation and emotional exhaustion may provide promising tools for practical applications in work settings such as team‐building, staff development, recruitment or other training programs aiming for work place health promotion. The next step will be to study how social and emotional self‐efficacy relate to leadership, well‐being and health over time.