Bøker i SpringerBriefs in Psychology-serien

This book explores the nuances of how discriminatory events are viewed by people of color. Based on the authors' research, it seeks to illuminate the contextual and relational variables that influence perception of discrimination. The research suggests that: Ingroup members can perpetuate racist discrimination; Consistent with attribution theory, discrimination by White people is more often attributed to trait rather than situational causes; Consistent with cultural betrayal trauma theory, perceived racist discrimination by ingroup members can be more acutely distressing because it is unexpected. Filling a gap in the microaggression literature, this book provides an in-depth picture of discrimination and what individuals can do to offset the insidious effects of White supremacy. It highlights the importance of centering the experiences of people of color in describing ambiguous social interactions, with greater attention to the context, background, and relationships between perpetrators and targets of racist discrimination. It presents a clear next step in advancing our understanding of the attributes of discrimination. The benefits of comprehensive education and critical consciousness development are emphasized.

A creative lifestyle is not a luxury, but a necessary elixir of life. Only with creativity can we overcome despair, hatred and violence, in the world and in ourselves. Using selected examples of exceptionally creative people, Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla encourages us to unleash our own creative and social potential.Readers become acquainted with Madonna and Amy Winehouse, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, and Mick Jagger. Before wandering through their lives and work in the interplay of constructive and destructive forces, they encounter the "Big Five of Creativity": talent, ability, motivation, resilience, favorable environments. The author has theoretically researched their interaction over decades, tested them in practice and drawn the conclusion: The creative transformation of human destructiveness is our chance to lead a fulfilled life in social responsibility.

We humans make judgments about a staggering variety of topics. These include which medical condition is the correct diagnosis for your symptoms, whether a particular defendant is guilty of some crime or whether a particular political candidate will win an election¿to name a few of countless examples. But how accurate are the judgments we all make, and how can they get better? This book synthesizes interdisciplinary research about these questions into one volume. In doing so, it uniquely draws on insights from fields as diverse as medicine, political judgment, cross-cultural psychology, evolutionary history and the heuristics and biases research program. Consequently, the book also enables readers concerned with judgmental accuracy in one field to benefit from the insights in others. Moreover, the author introduces an emerging field of research: empirical epistemology or normative cognitive science. The book lastly articulates a set of recommendations¿recommendations aiming to improve our judgment, our decision-making and ultimately our lives.

This Brief proposes best practices for assessment and intervention with sex trafficking survivors, rooted in the existing theory and practice literatures. Based in current research and clinical practice, these recommendations are embedded in the context of cultural sensitivity. This volume provides a relevant, practical, and informative outline of sex trafficking, associated legal aspects, and best practices for mental health clinicians to aid in successful treatment of sex trafficking survivors. 

This book takes an insider perspective of the psychological issues of creating policy. Instead of considering what the products of policy are - often the case in psychological and political science work - this book examines the individual processes present in proposing and engaging with policy. The individual who engages with the policy and its meanings, the individual who resists the policy through conformity, and the individual who writes the policy for their own ideological purposes are all political actors in a psychological system.This book puts forward a cultural political psychology as the psychological study of the process of values, policy, and power dynamics. Through exploring public policy through private policy generation and individual interaction, this book pushes theoretical understandings of policy and activism in new ways. Centering on an individual's own values in facing various policy restrictions from governments, parents, or peers, the importance of examining collective actions and also collective inactions of individuals is noted and expanded on in the text.The book provides applications of its arguments through examining the processes of unionization and actualized democracy. It seeks to point out new research avenues, including the hypogeneralization of values, one's exclusion through activism, and everyday revolutions. This book addresses the centrality of the individual and meaning-making systems when considering where policy, politics, and psychology intersect. This book is primarily addressed to psychologists and political scientists interested in how to make change in public policy. While the experiences within the book are United States-centric, the thoughts and theories behind them are meant to be applicable to a wide variety of political systems. As there is currently very little literature on the topic, this book seeks to fill the gap and offer concise information on such an important dimension of cultural and political psychology. It is expected that the book will be of great interest for researchers in these areas, as well as for graduate-level students. In particular, this book will be relevant to researchers and students working on political psychology, public policy, development, community psychology, social representations, semiotics, activism, and social movements, to name a few.

Inner speech has been a focus of multidisciplinary interest. It is a long-standing phenomenon of study in philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. Researchers from different disciplines have turned their efforts to understand this inherent experience of being "e;talking to oneself"e;. In psychology, Vygotsky managed to develop a complete description of the phenomenon, giving rise to a great line of research related to inner speech in the human experience. Including a compilation of theoretical and empirical advances related to inner speech phenomenon, this book is aimed at academics and researchers in the area of psychology, education and culture. This book will be of interest to international research programs, related to cultural psychology, socio-constructivism, developmental psychology and education.

This book examines the best available empirical evidence regarding one of the most challenging and pervasive questions throughout ages, cultures, and religions: the survival of human consciousness after death. It begins with a contextual overview of belief in personal survival and refutes misguided historical and epistemological arguments against the notion of survival after death (e.g., irrational, purely religious, impossible to be addressed by science, that has been proved false by neuroscience). The book provides an overview of the scientific evidence regarding the survival of human consciousness after death, focusing on studies on mediumship, near-death and out-of-body experiences, and reincarnation.Featured topics of coverage include:The belief in life after death in the contemporary world as well as in the history of religions and philosophy.The key misguided arguments and prejudices against the academic study of afterlife survival.What constitutes empirical evidence for survival after death?The main explanatory hypotheses alternative to survival after death.The chief cultural barriers to a fair examination of the available evidence for survival of consciousness after death.Science of Life After Death is an essential resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians, therapists, and other professionals in developmental and clinical psychology; spirituality, religious. and consciousness studies; psychiatry; neuroscience / neurology; phenomenology / philosophy; complementary and alternative medicine; and all interrelated disciplines.

This brief treatise explores the common threads to psychoanalytic thought and theological theory. It uses a psychoanalytic lens to examine Judeo/Christian concepts of individual will, consciousness and the unconscious, and the apparent confounding idea of sin. What is new is that the definition of sin is revealed as a psychoanalytic translation of acting-out. Focusing on the behavior of acting-out it illuminates ideas that are part of Western cultural tradition providing insights to those interested in the psychology, and its history and philosophy. As such, it is a highly relevant work for psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, as well as for a comparative study of psychoanalytic and theological intersecting structures. 

The Making of a Pandemic provides a systematic account of how societal and psychological forces shaped the Covid-19 pandemic. The first part focuses on how biological and societal factors interact to create a pandemic. The second part explores how characteristics of the American economy, the American approach to public health, and domestic and international inequality combined to prolong the pandemic, hamper mitigation efforts, and arouse opposition to cooperation with public health measures. The third part examines the psychological processes that led to resistance to efforts to mitigate the pandemic and linked the resistance to right-wing ideologies. The book concludes by looking at the limits of the technical and medical reforms others have proposed to protect us from repetitions of the Covid-19 disaster and by calling for a ¿deep confrontation¿ with the societal and psychological factors that created and shaped the pandemic.

This books takes a new and critical look at the development of logotherapy and existential analysis, a prominent existential school of psychotherapy.

In the second section, "Adjusting to Place Attachment Disruption During and After a Pandemic," we focus on adaptive processes and responses that could enable people to adjust positively to place attachment disruption.

Craftsmanship provides an insight into an inherently human dimension of work resulting from our immersion in an occupation or profession. The present book illustrates and defines the vital, social, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions involved in craftsmanship, which rejects a dissociation between handwork and wit, or between action and thought. This also contrasts with the neglect contemporary psychology has shown toward craftsmanship and its reduction to mere ¿human factors.¿ Drawing on artistry as an emblem, the present account conveys that skilful action can only be renewed in a cycle involving both the personal and the transgenerational. There is little doubt in psychological and anthropological literature that the current global crises cannot be separated from social predicaments; namely, from the commodification of craftsmanship. In this book, the development of skilful action attests to a fundamental involvement required to sustainably perpetuate human endeavours.The role of expressivity in reappropriating technical activity is key in showing the continuous revaluation of our ethics and aesthetics of work, practice, and creation. The overall arc of the volume shows a movement from responsivity to responsibility. In short, if we are to reformulate our relationship to work and craft, we need to see through our responsibility in technique. The particularities of craftsmanship described here aim to contribute to such reformulation.

This book is a psychobiography on the life of Viktor Frankl and a unique exploration of his life from a positive psychology perspective. It uses Paul Wong's theory of positive psychology wave 2 (PP2.0) and explores the concepts of meaning and virtue throughout Frankl's life span.

This book explores avenues for organisations to better understand the origins of occupational stress so as to enable their managerial employees to effectively manage stress levels.

This brief investigates school shootings and their impact on individual, community, and societal levels.

This book presents an analysis of contemporary society based on the experimental and interpretative models produced by the experimental analysis of behavior, in order to think about the ways in which current social contingencies can affect the life of individuals making them more depressive.

Within the general framework of Cultural Psychology, this book provides different perspectives on the relationship between border and identity by experts from several disciplines (i.e.

This Brief provides an in-depth discussion of five major points of intersection between philosophy and cultural psychology. The first chapter frames central analytical and normative threads, foregrounding the focal notion of thresholds of sense. The second chapter explores the nature of contexts, situations, and backgrounds of meaning-making following the lead of John Dewey, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, and Gernot Böhme. Chapter three examines the complementary analytical power of the semiotic resources developed in the work of Peirce, Bühler, and Cassirer. Chapter four shows the heuristic fertility and psychological bearing of Susanne Langer's feeling-based aesthetic model of minding. The final chapter establishes affectivation as the inescapable consequence of human beings giving life to themselves by giving life to signs. The Brief concludes with three commentaries from leading researchers in the area. The chapters weave together interlocking themes: thenature of embodied perception, the variety of contexts and semiotic frameworks and their schematization of thresholds of meaning-making, the role of art and theories of imagination both in cultural psychology and in philosophy, and the centrality of feeling in all forms of meaning-making. Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology will be of interest to cognitive and cultural psychologists as well as researchers and upper-graduate students in philosophy and related psychology fields.

This Brief presents a social psychological approach to understanding the reaction of communities to organized crime and illegal groups. This book draws on the prototypical example of Italian organized crime and analyzes the thesis that the power of criminal groups is grounded in dynamics of legitimization rather than fear or coercion.

This brief serves to educate readers about the sovereign citizen movement, presenting relevant case studies and offering suggestions for measures to address problems caused by this movement.

This brief presents an overview of Gregory BatesonΓÇÖs Constructivist method of Cognition. Bateson proposes a theory of cognition that is based on the abstract notion of difference that the mind distinguishes and perceives and represents information that constitutes and separates how different states are ordered, grouped, and classified. Bateson, however, does not clearly indicate how a cognitive system can develop a knowledge of reality from the perception of these differences. This book seeks to offer a scientific approach to Constructivism. Using BatesonΓÇÖs hypothesis, chapters discuss how our mind distinguishes and elaborates differences, allowing us to form perceptions of objects, and how these objects can be described and compared. Chapters also discuss how from differences, it is possible to construct concepts or ideas of how these can be defined and how to derive from these differences the meanings of the signs used for the structuring of languages.  The brief offers a coherent structure of propositions that form an interpretative theory of the modus operandi of the human mind, which will be useful not only in shedding light on our cognitive processes, but also in laying the formal groundwork for artificial intelligence.Constructing Reality is a must-have resource for researchers and students of the cognitive sciences, as well as education sciences, and researchers and scholars of artificial intelligence, learning theory, and intelligent automata programming.

This book is a theoretical account for general psychology of how human beings meaningfully relate with their bodies-- from the basic physiological processes upwards to the highest psychological functions of religiosity, ethical reasoning, and devotional practices.

Emerging policy changes are encouraging adoption of a team-based approach to healthcare, yet most healthcare professionals receive little training in how to practice integrated care.

This brief explores the current theories, trends, risk factors, and intervention efforts related to juvenile crime.

This brief examines the U.S. foster care system and seeks to explain why the foster care system functions as it does and how it can be improved to serve the best interest of children. It defines and evaluates key challenges that undermine child safety and well-being in the current foster care system. Chapters highlight the competing values and priorities of the system as well as the pros and cons for the use of foster care. In addition, chapters assess whether the performance objectives in which states are evaluated by the federal government are sufficient to achieve positive health and well-being outcomes for children who experience foster care. Finally, it offers recommendations for improving the system and maximizing positive outcomes.Topics featured in this brief include: Legal aspects of removal and placement of children in foster care.The effectiveness of prior efforts to reform foster care.The regulation and quality of fosterhomes.Support for youth aging out of the foster care system.Racial and ethnic disparities in the foster care system.Foster Care and the Best Interests of the Child is a must-have resource for policy makers and related professionals, graduate students, and researchers in child and school psychology, family studies, public health, social work, law/criminal justice, and sociology.