Ecological Psychology - Science topic

Dear C.fils .

Its like an impact assessment study.

Psychotherapy methods can be unified, the current treatment methods are scattered, are targeted to specific needs, because of the lack of a unified psychology theory. All psychotherapy methods serve one goal: modifying the program. People's psychological activities can describe a series of program, psychological disorders are due to the disorder of these program, modify these psychological program, is psychotherapy.

Our life itself is a problem & as being said that we are social animal & as such we all have to be surrounded under the social environment consisting of various members with their outlook & also with their contributory life & as such we cannot avoid problems but we have to surmount our problem without disturbing our own life without any tension ,worries & frustration .

We know we have responsibility of our family besides in our career contribution also we have to face challenge it is in this line problem are unavoidable but we have to accept the challenge & solve the same .

However the certain problem are of ,disturbing nature our mind gets worry but with a firm faith within us & with our confidence of our self under the faith in our divinity within us we can certainly solve the solution of problem of every nature .

This is my personal opinion

You are absolutely right. Not only external conditions are important. Very critical functional state of a person, which determines the effectiveness of knowledge. But people often do not pay attention to this "inner" aspect. You are right, the leveling of personalities is unpromising.

Not a single gene, not a Gene but several genes (Per, Tim, Clock, Cry .... ) working in a very complex way.

The SCN generates circadian rhythms by means of a transcriptional-translational

feedback loop. In short, the mechanism is formed by the basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) Per-Arnt-Sim (PAS) domain containing transcription factors circadian locomotor output cycles kaput (CLOCK) and brain and muscle ARNT-like 1 (BMAL1), which activate the expressionof three Period (Per 1–3) and two Cryptochrome (Cry 1–2) genes by

binding to their E-box (5′-CACGTG-3′) promoter elements. The PERIOD

(PER 1–3) and CRYPTOCHROME (CRY1–2) proteins rhythmically accumulate,

heterodimerize, and translocate to the nucleus to suppress

their own transcription by interactionwith the CLOCK:BMAL1 complex.

CLOCK/BMAL1 also rhythmically control the expression of nuclear receptors,

such as REV-ERBα/β (reverse transcript of erythroblastosis

gene) and RORα/β/γ (retinoic acid related (RAR) orphan receptor),

which in turn repress and activate Bmal1 expression, respectively, conferring

amplitude and robustness to the oscillations in the molecular

clockwork. From a molecular point of view, light activates the expression

of several genes in SCN with different expression patterns

Dear Ingo,

I think that an article by Pater Kahn and me, titled WATER, AIR, FIRE, AND EARTH

A Developmental Study in Portugal of Environmental Moral Reasoning, published in ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 34 No. 4, July 2002 405-430 © 2002 Sage Publications, is closely related to your question, and that you can benefit from reading it. You can find and read this article in my publication in Research Gate. 

The distinction we make between anthropocentric reasoning (e.g., "We should not pollute water  because it is good for one's health") and biocentric reasoning (e.g., "We should not pollute water, because it deserves to be respected in itself) may be interesting for you.

More to the point our article points to the 4 elements of nature: water, air, fire and earth. I think that there are very few, if any, researches in Environmental Psychology on the human relations with nature. Such research was done among European citizens.

I hope it can be of help for you.

Hi Gemma,

I love the questions you have posed on ResearchGate.  My colleagues and I have recently published on the evaluation of a wilderness camp program for recent high school graduates in the US.  We thought a lot about how to measure their nature knowledge and connection as well as the health benefits of the experience.  You might find our schema and findings useful. 

Dear Brandon,

            Yours is perhaps the most important question in the neurobiology of behavior.  I have dealt with it extensively in my research and in numerous writings; it is at the very center of the cognitive neuroscience of the cerebral cortex.  Here I will answer it as succinctly and critically as I possibly can, trying not to sound simplistic or sententious.  Almost all your tentative assumptions are basically correct and compatible with one another and with my answer below. Let me attempt to qualify them a bit and to support them with a few brain facts.

            Indeed, Helmholtz was right.  We remember what we perceive, and we perceive—intuitively or unconsciously--what we remember.  This is increasingly apparent to cognitive neuroscientists if we adhere to the empirical facts and put consciousness in its proper place, that is, by accepting that it is not essential to neural mechanisms but an epiphenomenon of them.  Most cognition is totally unconscious.  In any case, my argument here is centered precisely on a conjecture that you almost inconspicuously pose as a question: actions and cognition are interdependent cyclically.

1.  In the course of goal-directed behavior, the neural mechanisms that adapt the organism to its world in pursuit of the goal are cyclic, embedded in what I call the “perception-action (PA) cycle.” This is the biocybernetic cycle--with sensors, effectors, feed-forward and feedback--that from moment to moment adjusts the organism to the environment in pursuit of the goal.  Briefly, in the course of that pursuit, a given sensory stimulus comes through the senses, is analyzed in posterior (perceptual) cortex, and informs a new or corrective action in frontal (executive) cortex; that action will produce sensory changes in the environment, which will inform new or corrective action, and so on and so forth until the goal is reached.  In essence, therefore the PA cycle runs successively through the environment, through perceptual cortex, through frontal executive cortex, and back to the environment.

2.  The processing through posterior and frontal cortex will be carried out by neuronal networks (“cognits”) representing memory or knowledge (semantic memory) acquired by prior experience. Thus the actions will be informed, every step of the way, by updating or correcting prior assumptions about the world in a probabilistic—Bayesian—manner. That internal information (knowledge and memory) is hierarchically organized, from sensory and motor cortex at the bottom, for specific sensory and motor representation, to association cortex at the top, for representation and processing of sensory input information in the context of the past experience of the individual. Both large sectors of cortex, perceptual and executive, are structurally and dynamically interconnected.  The same is true for the cortices of both hemispheres.

3.  Most important in the human, where PA cycles are long, is that the frontal—executive—cortex possesses mechanisms that anticipate, and prepare for, actions and percepts.  Before a cycle is completed, these mechanisms pre-adapt the organism for anticipated change.  Thus the prefrontal cortex, which is the “vanguard” of evolution and of individual development (ontogeny), has both predictive and preadaptive properties that are unique to the human.  The human prefrontal cortex is eminently endowed for prediction and preadaptation, thus priming and to some extent “short-cutting” the PA cycle.  That cortex does this in cooperation with other brain structures, by engaging them in several prospective cognitive functions, prominently among them:  planning, attentive set, working memory and decision-making.  All suffer, to one degree or another, from injuries of the dorsal and lateral prefrontal cortex.

            I think this, although heavily abstracted, is plenty for this post.  I hope you will find it helpful.

Cheers, Joaquín

 References:

 JM Fuster - Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition. Oxford, 2003.

   JM Fuster and SL Bressler – Past makes future: Role of pFC in prediction.  J. Cognit. Neuroscience, 27: 639-654, 2015.

Brandon Thomas's description of Skinner's behaviorism is a caricature.  Skinner is notable for being the one to get away from S-R connectionism and mechanical explanations.  His approach was distinctively functional.  He invented new concepts, such as stimulus control, to explain the relations between behavior and environment, and he adopted response rate, a non-momentary variable, as his measure.  The thrust of his innovations was toward viewing environment and behavior as temporally extended.  Although he never gave up his limited and limiting idea of reinforcement based on contiguity, others coming after like myself, Howard Rachlin, and Philip Hineline have developed a much more plausible behaviorism.  See my book, Understanding Behaviorism, for a more up-to-date presentation.

I am not aware of any applications of the theory of affordances to teaching or learning. But, the publication below may be a good starting point for how affordances fit into a coaching context.

Best,

Brandon

Thank you Atena, I didn't knew two of them. Best Regards.

Dear Behzad,

the question of using smartphones in researc h is not as critical as discussed. We did this for many years, and with an appropriate tool, you dont need a technical background to run a study.

If you want to assess the behavioral regulations in exercise, the use of mobile devices ist mandatory if you want to do it as an EMA study. Did you have a look at the movisens XS tool to design such a study? And in the newest version of this platform, you are able to connect activity sensors to the smartphone via bluetooth to asses the activity and the subjective data in parallel and to be able to trigger the query on the smartphone by events registered by the activity sensor.

I assume you are talking about researchers using/studying animals. Although it's a bit old now, you should look for "The Inevitable Bond: Examining Scientist-Animal Interactions", pub 1992 by Cambridge and edited by Davis and Balfour. But there is now a large literature on human-animal studies, with specialist journals, which you should seek out.