Predicating from an early age: edusemiotics and the potential of children’s preconceptions

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce’s semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W 8:15; Pietarinen in Signs of logic, Springer, Dordrecht, 2006; Stjernfelt in Diagrammatology. An investigation on the borderlines of phenomenology, ontology and semiotics, Springer, Dordrecht, 2007) and relational logic. Constructivism was traditionally developed within psychology and sociology and, therefore, some incompatibilities can be expected between these two schools. While acknowledging the differences, we explain that constructivism and semiotics share the assumption of realism that knowledge can only be developed upon knowledge and, therefore, an epistemological collaboration is possible. The semiotic analysis performed confirms the constructivist results and provides a further insight into the teacher-student relation. Like the constructivist approach, Peirce’s doctrine of agapism infers that the personal dimension of teaching must not be ignored. Thus, we argue for the importance of genuine sympathy in teaching attitudes. More broadly, the article also contributes to the development of postmodern humanities. At the end of the modern age, the humanities are passing through a critical period of transformation. There is a growing interest in semiotics and semiotic philosophy in many areas of the humanities. Such a case, on which we draw, is the development of a theoretical semiotic approach to education, namely edusemiotics (Stables and Semetsky, Pedagogy and edusemiotics: theoretical challenge/practical opportunities, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2015).

Essays on decision sciences: exploring cognition, information processing, and complexity

This thesis provides three original contributions to the field of Decision Sciences. The first contribution explores the field of heuristics and biases. New variations of the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT--a test to measure "the ability or disposition to resist reporting the response that first comes to mind"), are provided. The original CRT (S. Frederick [2005] Journal of Economic Perspectives, v. 19:4, pp.24-42) has items in which the response is immediate--and erroneous. It is shown that by merely varying the numerical parameters of the problems, large deviations in response are found. Not only the final results are affected by the proposed variations, but so is processing fluency. It seems that numbers' magnitudes serve as a cue to activate system-2 type reasoning. The second contribution explores Managerial Algorithmics Theory (M. Moldoveanu [2009] Strategic Management Journal, v. 30, pp. 737-763); an ambitious research program that states that managers display cognitive choices with a "preference towards solving problems of low computational complexity". An empirical test of this hypothesis is conducted, with results showing that this premise is not supported. A number of problems are designed with the intent of testing the predictions from managerial algorithmics against the predictions of cognitive psychology. The results demonstrate (once again) that framing effects profoundly affect choice, and (an original insight) that managers are unable to distinguish computational complexity problem classes. The third contribution explores a new approach to a computationally complex problem in marketing: the shelf space allocation problem (M-H Yang [2001] European Journal of Operational Research, v. 131, pp.107--118). A new representation for a genetic algorithm is developed, and computational experiments demonstrate its feasibility as a practical solution method. These studies lie at the interface of psychology and economics (with bounded rationality and the heuristics and biases programme), psychology, strategy, and computational complexity, and heuristics for computationally hard problems in management science.

Formação de profissionais em psicologia para atenção às pessoas com deficiência: análise de ementários dos cursos públicos de graduação no país

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Laços de afeto: as homoparentalidades pela via da adoção

Pós-graduação em Psicologia - FCLAS

Psicologia e sistema penitenciário: cartografando as atuações da(o)s psicóloga(o)s em uma "instituição total"

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

The Challenges of Psychology at Work in Mental Health: the drugs issue.

This article aims to show that the challenges of psychology in working with mental health in the field of drugs is traversed by both the conceptions molded by biopolitical forces (FOUCAULT) as the decadence of modern democracy (AGAMBEN), and visible features in the current treatment given in Brazil to issue of smoking (SILVA), as well as urbanistic projects such as the case of Luz district in São Paulo (LEITE & CASTRO). In this sense, it leads us to question about what is prohibited, about who actually suffers the punishment, in short, about what do we really take care when we take into account the Unheimlich (FREUD) and other social interdicts (BATAILLE).

Parental Ethnotheories of Child Development: Looking Beyond Independence and Individualism in American Belief Systems

Over the past several decades, the topic of child development in a cultural context has received a great deal of theoretical and empirical investigation. Investigators from the fields of indigenous and cultural psychology have argued that childhood is socially and historically constructed, rather than a universal process with a standard sequence of developmental stages or descriptions. As a result, many psychologists have become doubtful that any stage theory of cognitive or socialemotional development can be found to be valid for all times and places. In placing more theoretical emphasis on contextual processes, they define culture as a complex system of common symbolic action patterns (or scripts) built up through everyday human social interaction by means of which individuals create common meanings and in terms of which they organize experience. Researchers understand culture to be organized and coherent, but not homogenous or static, and realize that the complex dynamic system of culture constantly undergoes transformation as participants (adults and children) negotiate and re-negotiate meanings through social interaction. These negotiations and transactions give rise to unceasing heterogeneity and variability in how different individuals and groups of individuals interpret values and meanings. However, while many psychologists—both inside and outside the fields of indigenous and cultural psychology–are now willing to give up the idea of a universal path of child development and a universal story of parenting, they have not necessarily foreclosed on the possibility of discovering and describing some universal processes that underlie socialization and development-in-context. The roots of such universalities would lie in the biological aspects of child development, in the evolutionary processes of adaptation, and in the unique symbolic and problem-solving capacities of the human organism as a culture-bearing species. For instance, according to functionalist psychological anthropologists, shared (cultural) processes surround the developing child and promote in the long view the survival of families and groups if they are to demonstrate continuity in the face of ecological change and resource competition, (e.g. Edwards & Whiting, 2004; Gallimore, Goldenberg, & Weisner, 1993; LeVine, Dixon, LeVine, Richman, Leiderman, Keefer, & Brazelton, 1994; LeVine, Miller, & West, 1988; Weisner, 1996, 2002; Whiting & Edwards, 1988; Whiting & Whiting, 1980). As LeVine and colleagues (1994) state: A population tends to share an environment, symbol systems for encoding it, and organizations and codes of conduct for adapting to it (emphasis added). It is through the enactment of these population-specific codes of conduct in locally organized practices that human adaptation occurs. Human adaptation, in other words, is largely attributable to the operation of specific social organizations (e.g. families, communities, empires) following culturally prescribed scripts (normative models) in subsistence, reproduction, and other domains [communication and social regulation]. (p. 12) It follows, then, that in seeking to understand child development in a cultural context, psychologists need to support collaborative and interdisciplinary developmental science that crosses international borders. Such research can advance cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology, and indigenous psychology, understood as three sub-disciplines composed of scientists who frequently communicate and debate with one another and mutually inform one another’s research programs. For example, to turn to parental belief systems, the particular topic of this chapter, it is clear that collaborative international studies are needed to support the goal of crosscultural psychologists for findings that go beyond simply describing cultural differences in parental beliefs. Comparative researchers need to shed light on whether parental beliefs are (or are not) systematically related to differences in child outcomes; and they need meta-analyses and reviews to explore between- and within-culture variations in parental beliefs, with a focus on issues of social change (Saraswathi, 2000). Likewise, collaborative research programs can foster the goals of indigenous psychology and cultural psychology and lay out valid descriptions of individual development in their particular cultural contexts and the processes, principles, and critical concepts needed for defining, analyzing, and predicting outcomes of child development-in-context. The project described in this chapter is based on an approach that integrates elements of comparative methodology to serve the aim of describing particular scenarios of child development in unique contexts. The research team of cultural insiders and outsiders allows for a look at American belief systems based on a dialogue of multiple perspectives.

No more than Conjectures: Popper and the Ethics of Scientific Enterprise

Karl Popper dealt with both problems Yurevich (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 43(2), 2009, doi:10.1007/s12124-008-9082-7) deals: the crisis in Psychology and in the discourse about the nature of science. Although he failed to provide a complete response for both problems, his proposals can yet be fruitful to the reflection on these matters in the context of the present discussion. He offers some tentative answers to what could be considered a healthy epistemic activity, something Yurevich does not provide. More interestingly, some of the Popper proposals seem to fit, and in some extent correct, the quest for ""collaborative work"" proposed by Zittoun et al. (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 43(2), 2009, doi:10.1007/s12124-008-9082-7) as a way of transforming crisis in development.

Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão: 30 anos registrando o avanço da Psicologia Brasileira

Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão (PCP), publicada pelo Conselho Federal de Psicologia ao longo de 30 anos, registra o avanço da Psicologia, como ciência e profissão. O objetivo deste trabalho é relatar alguns aspectos que merecem destaque, a partir de 2005, quando PCP se consolida como uma revista científica, ganha a versão digital e se insere no movimento do acesso aberto. É feita também uma breve análise dos indicadores de citações da revista. As análises foram efetuadas a partir da leitura dos editoriais dos fascículos publicados do ano 2005 até o momento. Com base nos módulos de bibliometria do PePSIC e SciELO, além dos dados das referências da revista, foram levantados indicadores de citações recebidas e fornecidas por PCP. Os dados permitem afirmar que PCP vem aumentando o número de citações recebidas. A rede de revistas que mais citam PCP está publicada no PePSIC, demonstrando que publicações eletrônicas ganham maior visibilidade na comunidade científica. Ao completar 30 anos, a proposta da revista é o comprometimento com a Psicologia voltada para aliviar o sofrimento humano, mas também dedicada ao avanço da ciência psicológica. O conhecimento documentado em revistas científicas e o impacto que tais publicações representam para o saber universal é algo que deve ser abordado, discutido e entendido, assim, estudos dessa natureza devem ser incentivados.

Dilthey: The hermeneutics of life and the universal aspirations of pedagogy

Dilthey claimed that first psychology and then hermeneutics played the foundational role for his philosophy of life, whose main practical goal is to develop a pedagogy or theory of education. Pedagogy needs help from h ethics to establish its ends, and from psychology to indicate it means. This paper intends to show the relationship between Dilthey's hermeneutics of life and his pedagogy. Dilthey's philosophy of life, in so far it adopts the hermeneutical procedure, engages in the understanding of or the search for the meaning of human socio-historical creations, by adopting a special type of relationship between parts and whole. It is exactly within this hermeneutical balance that we propose to extinguish any indication of a rupture, breach, or contradiction between the quest for universal principles of human behavior and :Dilthey's defense of the impossibility of constructing human moral tasks by means of universal principles. Dilthey began his ethics lectures at the University of Berlin in 1890. These lectures, published in 1958 by Herman Nohl in volume X of Dilthey's collected works, indicate the direction of the trajectory by which formative or social ethics are consolidated as a historical solution for reaching universal principles that can guide human purposes. This trajectory is a result of the distinctively human exercise of self-reflection, by means of which we can fulfill our destiny of manifesting and exteriorizing in time the immanent energy of the absolute spirit. We wish to show that it is possible that such a pedagogy can respect its universal task of orienting the historical development of the younger generation without directing this process by means of fixed and rigid aims.

How Porous are the Walls that Separate Us?: Transformative Service-Learning, Women’s Incarceration, and the Unsettled Self

In this article, we refine a politics of thinking from the margins by exploring a pedagogical model that advances transformative notions of service learning as social justice teaching. Drawing on a recent course we taught involving both incarcerated women and traditional college students, we contend that when communication among differentiated and stratified parties occurs, one possible result is not just a view of the other but also a transformation of the self and other. More specifically, we suggest that an engaged feminist praxis of teaching incarcerated women together with college students helps illuminate the porous nature of fixed markers that purport to reveal our identities (e.g., race and gender), to emplace our bodies (e.g., within institutions, prison gates, and walls), and to specify our locations (e.g., cultural, geographic, socialeconomic). One crucial theoretical insight our work makes clear is that the model of social justice teaching to which we aspired necessitates re-conceptualizing ourselves as students and professors whose subjectivities are necessarily relational and emergent.

Aging and Mental Health: Business as Usual?

Cautions that in developing training models in mental health and aging, psychologists must not overlook what experience has taught them about mental health intervention or what they know already about older adults. It is suggested that a life-span developmental view complements a community and preventive approach to the mental health needs of the elderly. Creation of a separate subspecialty of clinical geropsychology will not effectively serve older adults. What is needed is a synthesis ofalready existing expertise in areas such as life-span development, clinical psychology, and community psychology. This synthesis provides a conceptual foundation and set of intervention approaches on which to base training programs in mental health and aging.

Applied Developmental Psychology as an Implementation of the Life-Span View of Human Development

Application of knowledge about psychological development should, ideally, be theory based. As such, these applications represent “natural ontogenetic experiments”; the results of the evaluation of such interventions feed back to the theory, helping to support, falsify, or refine the ideas from the theory which led to the particular application. Such applied developmental intervention research is central within a currently popular perspective of life-span human development. Thus, applied developmental intervention research provides critical tests of such key concepts within this life-span perspective as: plasticity; multidirectionality; the synthesis of continuous and discontinuous processes across ontogeny; contextual embeddedness; and the role of individuals as agents in their own development. This paper elucidates some of the major features of the dynamic linkage between applied developmental psychology and this view of life-span human development. Key elements of this life-span perspective and the facts of developmental intervention, as seen from this perspective, are specified. Finally, the doctoral training program at the authors' institution is presented as one example of how this link may be institutionalized in the form of graduate education.