Ivana Markova

University of Stirling · Department of Psychology

In this conclusion to the special issue on The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt, we, the authors, reflect back on our dialogue with the philosopher’s text. Our reflexion has two main parts. First, we emphasise transversal themes – themes that most triggered our interrogations and that we as psychologists, all addressed in our separate papers: thin...

Why did Hannah Arendt, in her book on The Life of the Mind, select thinking, willing and judging as the basic faculties of the mind in preference to some others which might be equally plausible? Why did she conceptualise these three faculties as autonomous, each being an activity with its own features, self-motivation and self-determination? If wil...

The Life of the Mind is an intriguing unfinished book written by Hannah Arendt, known as a political philosopher, at the very end of her life in 1975. We devote this Special Issue of Culture & Psychology to this work, because we are convinced that it raises interesting and important questions for social and cultural psychology today. In this Introd...

Throughout her distinguished academic career Michele Grossen has been making inspiring contributions to the study of dialogical interactions in diverse fields of psychology, such as child development

Dialogical single case studies involve mutually interdependent relations between humans in their real locations and in real time (here-and-now). Mikhail Bakhtin explored such relations in terms of chronotopes, i.e. as indivisible units serving as analytical tools for the study of dynamic processes in literature. We argue that chronotopic thinking a...

Drawing on historical, theoretical and cultural knowledge, this introduction explains and justifies the importance of generalisation from dialogical single case studies. We clarify the meaning of dialogism and dialogicality, differentiate between single case studies and dialogical single case studies, identify the dynamic and ethical features of di...

Rom Harré’s focus on morality, attributing humans with powers to act and accounting for their inner mental states, forms a fundamental basis for the epistemological redefinition of social psychology as a human and cultural discipline. Harré suggests possible links between his positioning theory and another two socio-cultural psychologies, namely, V...

This editorial highlights the contributions of Gustav Jahoda to cross-cultural and cultural psychology. Gustav’s broad and deep scholarship, focusing on culture, mind and history, crossed disciplinary boundaries of psychology, anthropology and sociology in his attempts to understand human psyche and concrete activities in various situations and loc...

Gustav Jahoda’s research on children’s development of ideas and concepts constitutes a fundamental contribution to social psychology as a developmental and cultural discipline. Jahoda conceived humans in their interdependent relations with socio-cultural and historical environments in which they live, attain knowledge and act. Jahoda’s research on...

Imagination is a basic capacity of humanity and it cannot be annihilated without destroying the human being as the human being. Images are products of imagination and can be manipulated by social means. This concluding chapter identifies some common themes that permeate the volume, and it discerns some guiding concepts. Imaginings of collective fut...

Since Aristotle, scholars provided different answers to the question whether humans are rational. Some scholars, e.g. Descartes, presupposed that rationality is a norm, while others, e.g. Freud, claimed that humans are basically driven by irrational tendencies which they cannot control. For Gustav Ichheiser, rationality and irrationality were socia...

Human thinking is heterogeneous, and among its different forms, thinking in dyadic oppositions is associated with the concept of themata. Gerald Holton characterises themata as elements that lie beneath the structure and development of physical theories as well as of non-scientific thinking. Themata have different uses, such as a thematic concept,...

This paper presents the theory of social representations as a model of social scientific theory. In doing so, it attempts to reconstruct the foundations of the theory of social representations by focusing on intellectual resources that were available to Serge Moscovici during the time he was developing the theory. These resources shaped his epistem...

Imagination is one of the basic mental capacities that define humans as a species. Throughout history, the capacities of imagination and of liberated thought have always constituted threats to political and religious powers. Using the example of two dictatorships in the 20th century, Nazism and Stalinism, this chapter shows that these regimes used...

O diálogo tornou-se um conceito teórico central em ciências humanas e sociais, assim como para profissionais da educação, da saúde e da psicoterapia. Essa “virada dialógica” da contemporaneidade enfatiza a importância das relações sociais e da interação em nosso comportamento e em como damos sentido ao mundo. Neste livro, por meio da combinação de...

Dialogue has become a central theoretical concept in human and social sciences as well as in professions such as education, health, and psychotherapy. This ‘dialogical turn’ emphasises the importance of social relations and interaction to our behaviour and how we make sense of the world; hence the dialogical mind is the mind in interaction with oth...

The theory of social representations studies the formation and transformation of meanings and activities of complex social phenomena like health and illness, political problems or environmental issues in and through language and communication, history and culture. There are two mutually interdependent meanings of social representations. The first m...

‘Haemophilia’ is a term referring to a group of genetically transmitted life-long blood clotting disorders which are caused by a defect in one or more of the plasma clotting factors. The most common are sex-linked recessive disorders, haemophilia A (classic haemophilia) and haemophilia B (Christmas disease), which are due to an isolated deficiency...

A commonly held point of view defines a discipline as a science if it uses inductive and/or deductive methods in studying phenomena in question, because these methods, it is believed, will enable generalization of findings. Both history and theory of social representations study unique phenomena and therefore, for these disciplines, induction and d...

In epistemologies of both scientific and common sense thinking ‘objectification’ characterizes the formation of knowledge and concepts, yet in each case its meaning is different. In the former, objectification in acquiring knowledge refers to the individual's rationalistic reification of an object or of another person, and to disengagement or alien...

Research on the transition of countries in post-Communist Europe towards democracy mostly indicates that there is more political and institutional trust in Western democratic countries than in the post-Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Questions about citizens' trust and distrust in the newly formed institutions and about the trust...

The Theory of Social Representations studies formation and transformation of meanings, knowledge, beliefs, and actions of complex social phenomena like democracy, human rights, or mental illness, in and through communication and culture. This chapter examines the nature of interdependence between social representing, communication, and culture. It...

As disciplines, psychology and history share a primary concern with the human condition. Yet historically, the relationship between the two fields has been uneasy, marked by a long-standing climate of mutual suspicion. This book engages with the history of this relationship and possibilities for its future intellectual and empirical development. Br...

The ten chapters in this book are concerned with theoretical and empirical analyses of trust and distrust in post-Communist Europe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. The contributors come from different disciplines, ranging from history, economics, and political science to social psychology and sociology, and they show, above all, that...

Social influence and dialogicality The dominant model in most theories of contemporary social psychology conceives influence as a flow of information from the source to recipient. In contrast, we shall claim here that the source and recipient act on one another: they are in internal interaction and both participants sustain simultaneous and sequent...

The social representation of the economic crisis in four European countries The aim of this article is to present an international research on the social representation of the economic crisis. Given the complexity and the recency of this object, we chose a multimethodological approach. The data analysis was conducted in three successive stages: des...

There is a continuing debate about the future of day services for people with mental handicaps. In this study people who attended adult training centres were interviewed to ascertain their views on their day placements. They were glad to have somewhere to go during the day and enjoyed elements of the daily programmes. However, most people felt that...

In the controversy surrounding community care the opinions of people with mental handicaps themselves have rarely been heard. In this study people living in a mental handicap hospital were interviewed in order to discover their views on living there. They reported a large number of deficiencies with hospital life. Every person interviewed wanted to...

Closings present particular difficulties in interactions between people with cerebral palsy who use alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) systems, and ‘natural’ speakers. Using conversation analytic techniques this paper explores how closings proceed in video-recordings of such interactions. Four varieties of closings are identified, and...

Many psychologists adopt a dogma they never question: if you want to learn something about the human mind, you must start with the cognition of the individual. Only then can you ask how that single mind comes to realize that there are other minds and how, sooner or later, it starts imputing intentions to others and interacting with them. Considerin...

The theory of social representations must be understood in terms of its proper epistemology so that it can accomplish its full potential in social sciences. This is often difficult to achieve because researchers comprehend it in terms of concepts that are part of static and individualistic Newtonian epistemology rather than in terms of dynamic and...

It is argued that the analysis of language should play a central role in the study of social psychological phenomenon. For example, there is evidence that habitual inauthenticity in the use of language which was practised in the Eastern and Central European totalitarian systems was partly related to the breakdown of moral principles and to the loss...

This paper aims to show that propaganda and persuasion are underlined by two forms of communication, one aiming at a monologue, and the other aiming at a dialogue, which in practice do often coexist, with one or the other prevailing at a particular time. In order to understand propaganda or persuasion, we need to study them as part of the systems (...

This editor’s introduction to the issue recalls the main methodological approaches to persuasion, rhetoric and propaganda in social psychology. It summarizes the classical theories issued from Hovland’s Yale Communication Program in experimental social psychology, like dissonance, attitude changes, inoculation approach, elaboration likelihood model...

Discourse about responsibility has become a fashionable contemporary subject. Much of it, at least in the social sciences and humanities, is related to claims that in traditional democracies we can observe decreasing demands on taking individual and collective responsibilities. Instead, we witness an increase in, and magnified claims for, more and...

Throughout its history social psychology as a discipline has paid relatively little attention to language and communication. As with psychology, in social psychology the starting point of inquiry has been primarily the individual or the self rather than the interdependence between the individual and others, or between the ego and alter. This paper...

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Les AA. portent leur attention sur le dialogue, sur l'interaction verbale entre plusieurs personnes. Ils examinent la nature de ce type d'interaction. Ils passent en revue les procedures de codage et d'analyse des interactions dialogiques. Ils se demandent de quelle maniere le codage peut rendre compte de la reflexivite du discours humain

This article tells the story of the journey made by an international research group of social psychologists in their collaborative projects carried out over a number of years after the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989. The article explores some relations between the aims of research conducted during a period of rapid political, social and ec...

The present study examines the relationship between hypothesis formation and the degree of complexity of the problem which has to be solved. Ninety subjects played a simple arithmetical game with the investigator. They were divided into two groups according to the type of problem given. The hypotheses formed by the subjects in the course of the gam...

The concepts of “identity” and “representation” have had a long history both in mundane and philosophical thought; over aeons of time, they have both retained some stable characteristics, but they have also changed. Questions like “who am I?” “who are we?” and “who are they?” as well as “what do we know about the world and how do we represent it?”...

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This fascinating book makes an important contribution to the history of the social sciences. It tells the largely hidden story of how social psychology became an international social science, vividly documenting the micro-politics of a virtually forgotten committee, the Committee on Transnational Social Psychology, whose work took place against the...

A comprehensive range of literature on awareness in dementia published in peer-reviewed journals during the last 15 years was reviewed with the aim of extracting details of the methods and measurement instruments adopted for the purposes of assessing awareness. Assessment approaches fell into five categories: clinician rating methods, questionnaire...

During its history social psychology as a discipline has paid relatively little attention to language and communication. Just like in psychology, so in social psychology the starting point of inquiry has been primarily the individual or the self rather than the interdependence between the individual and others, or between the ego and alter, This pa...

Social stigma and its impact on the life opportunities and emotional well-being of people with intellectual disabilities (IDs) are a subject of both practical and theoretical importance. The disability movement and evolving theories of self, now point to individuals' ability to develop positive identities and to challenge stigmatizing views and soc...

It is not so long ago that Niklas Luhmann (1988) wrote that the study of trust has never been a topic in mainstream sociology, and others have echoed this claim with reference to other social sciences. Curiously, deep insights of Georg Simmel (1858-1918) on trust have been largely ignored or have been remembered only in minor references. Since the...

Ce numéro réunit plusieurs chercheurs expérimentés ayant travaillé sur les focus groups, dans le but de présenter cette méthode de recherche passionnante et de plus en plus utilisée par les psychologues. Nous tenons, en particulier, à souligner les liens existant entre les focus groups et la théorie psycho-sociologique des représentations sociales,...

The polysemic nature of intersubjectivity stems not only from diverse pursuits and goals but also from different ontologies of intersubjectivity. More specifically, the four matrices described by Coelho and Figueiredo (2003) imply two ontologies: `I-Other(s)' and `I' versus `Other(s)'. These ontologies lead to different concepts of communication. I...

This chapter conducts a social psychological analysis of social representations of democracy. To do so, it adopts a dialogical approach to the theory of knowledge in which dialogism is understood as a heterogeneous interplay of voices sustained by inherent tensions. Dialogism is located in the long epistemological tradition of antinomy-formation an...

The theory of social representations and communication belongs to a broadly conceived family of approaches studying interdependencies between socially and individually shared knowledge, which are based on dialogical epistemology. This epistemology, in order to ask questions about stability in knowledge, presupposes its change. The theory of social...

The first part of this article examines the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of various theories concerned with the interdependence between the individual and society. It shows that the majority of theories, namely those of the `constructivist turn', tend to reverse to ontologies which separate the individual and society into two ind...

The part played by culturally shared knowledge in interaction is generally recognised. However, the details of how it may be manifested in interaction are largely undocumented. This study explores this issue in the context of interactions between impaired and unimpaired speakers, using a conversation analytic approach in combination with a communic...

This paper gives an overview of social representation theory, definitions of the key terms and of the social processes leading to a representation and to social identity. Six empirical studies are presented and details of their methods and findings are given to illustrate this social psychological approach. These studies are about the ontogenesis o...

Social representations of the individual are examined in three post-Communist Central European nations, i.e. the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, and in three West European nations, i.e. Scotland, England and France. All six nations share a common European history since the Renaissance and Humanism, based on such values as freedom, agency, ind...

Serge Moscovici's theoretical system of social representations is by now nearly 40 years old; yet, today, various social psychological activities surrounding this field seem to flourish more than ever; much research into social representations is being carried out all over Europe and on other continents; there is a European PhD programme on social...

The study examined the perspectives of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) users and their 'formal' and 'informal' communication partners in relation to two areas of relevance to AAC: firstly, communication strategies, and secondly, advantages and disadvantages of AAC systems. With respect to communication strategies, it was found that...

The purpose of this paper was to examine meanings of the terms ‘individual’, ‘the community’ and ‘local community’ in Slovakia and Scotland. The social, cultural, political and economic histories of these two small European nations are quite different. Slovakia is one of the post-communist countries in which rapid changes have recently taken place....

Individualism, collectivism and communitarianism can only be understood in their historical and cultural contexts. The author discusses a post-communist perspective on the relationship between the individual and the community. Stressing the complementary nature of the two terms, the author reviews the pre-communist history of the idea of community...

A sample of 559 inmates in Scottish prisons were administered a 48-item HIV/AIDS knowledge questionnaire. High levels of HIV-related knowledge were associated with: a history of drug offences, having had an HIV test, knowing someone who has had an HIV test, knowing someone who is HIV seropositive, a history of injecting drug use and having a sexual...

This paper investigates some of the issues which contribute to the lack of use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems. It presents findings from a two-year research study which examined the communication of 93 adolescent and adult AAC users with cerebral palsy and 186 of their communication partners. The methods of data collect...

In recent years a great deal of research has been initiated to examine lay representations and understanding of the political, economic and social changes in the post-Communist countries in the Central and Eastern Europe. It is argued that the study of such representations and understanding must take into consideration the multi-layered nature of t...

While the term 'democracy' has existed in political a and philosophical vocabularies since classical Athens, representations of democracy by laypeople are relatively more recent. Lay representations of democracy are likely to be formed, maintained and changed by both implicit and explicit processes. Some features of lay representations are deeply s...

Comunication is a cooperative undertaking and the successful use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems is as dependent on the communication partner as it is on the user. This paper presents findings from a two-year research study, funded by the Scottish Office Home and Health Department, which examined the communication of 93...

Four hundred and eighty male prisoners and 500 male staff from 7 Scottish prisons took part in a study assessing perception of risk and attitudes towards HIV/AIDS. Prison staff were found to perceive prison as a higher-risk environment for HIV/AIDS than outside prison, whereas prisoners perceived the opposite. Prisoners perceived less personal risk...

The present survey shows that in 1991–1992 there were 72 children, 37 adolescents, and 107 adults with cerebral palsy in Scotland who used some form of an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system. Among these, 61% were males and 39% were females. There has been a substantial increase in the use of AAC systems over the last 3 years an...