Instructors - Electronic inspection copies are available or contact your local sales representative for an inspection copy of the print version. An Invitation to Cultural Psychology looks at the everyday life worlds of human beings through the lens of a new synthetic perspective in cultural psychology – that of semiotic dynamics. Based on historical work from many different fields in the social and behavioural sciences, and the humanities too, this perspective applied to cultural psychology suggests that human beings are constantly creating, maintaining and abandoning hierarchies of meanings within all cultural contexts they experience. It’s a perspective that leans heavily on the work of the great French philosopher, Henri Bergson, only now being realised as a core basis for human cultural living. Jaan Valsiner is the founding editor of the major journal in the field, Culture & Psychology, and Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. He is the first Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University in Denmark, where he leads Europe′s first Research Centre on Cultural Psychology.

A volume in Perspectives on Human Development Series Editors: Dieter Ferring, Université du Luxembourg, Jaan Valsiner, Université du Luxembourg and Conchita D'Ambrosio, Université du Luxembourg What sparks a psychologist's interest in a certain phenomenon? Is it a symptom, a syndrome, a treatment, the usual, the exceptional, the group, the individual? An epistemologist, for example, focuses on the group and delivers group results. The clinician has to focus on the patient, although the patient may be perceived as one of a group (e.g., all patients with the same disease). The patient usually focuses on the clinician, but can take other opinions into account; especially, when the clinician is not considered to be the only authority. These dynamics - observable in therapy as well as in research - are critically reflected in this book, not only highlighting differences, but also commonalities individuals share: They all filter information and concentrate on certain aspects according to their socialization. They all have different expectations and can, yet, all deal with the same objective. Communication and building relationships seem to be vital - this book aims to support this quest by moving from the universal to the particular.

This book comes as part of a broader project the first editor is developing in collaboration with the other two, aiming critically to articulate the central philosophical issue of time and temporality with Cultural Psychology and related areas in its frontier. Similarly to the previous milestone in this effort”Otherness in Question: Labyrinths of the Self, published in this same series, the present one we also invited international cast of authors to bring their perspectives about a possible dialogue between a central philosophical issue and the core subject of their respective research domains. The book interests to researchers, scholars, professionals and students in Psychology and its areas of frontier.

Product Description: The heart of this book is the translation of The Life Space of the Urban Child, written in 1935 by Martha and Hans Heinrich Muchow. Life Space provides a fresh look at children as actors and how they absorb their city environments...read more

Product Description: This book explores the basic concept of agency and develops it further in psychology using it to better understand and explain psychological processes and behavior. More importantly, this book seeks to put an emphasis on the role of agency in four distinct settings: history of psychology, neuroscience, psychology of religion, and sociocultural theories of co-agency...read more

Product Description: The goal of cultural psychology is to explain the ways in which human cultural constructions -- for example, rituals, stereotypes, and meanings -- organize and direct human acting, feeling, and thinking in different social contexts...read more

Product Description: That sciences are guided by explicit and implicit ties to their surrounding social world is not new. Jaan Valsiner fills in the wide background of scholarship on the history of science, the recent focus on social studies of sciences, and the cultural and cognitive analyses of knowledge making...read more

Product Description: YIS has been thought as an annual series of volumes collecting contributes aimed at developing the integration of idiographic and nomothetic approaches in psychological and more in general social science. At the beginning, 3 years ago, we got an agreement with an Italian publisher (FGP - Firera Publishing Group) interested in the scientific project and therefore willing to help the start up of this scientific enterprise...read more

Product Description: The Proliferation of Action Theories and Their Applications Jaan Valsiner and Louis Oppenheimer Our contemporary psychology becomes satiated by references to "action" and "activity. " Over the recent decade numerous theoretical perspectives have appeared...read more

Product Description: This book explores the diverse landscapes wherein women struggle for their personal and social identities and lives, between biology and culture, destiny and choice, shared and individual worlds, tradition and modernity. Their "peripheral lives"have "central meaning"(Chaudhary, this volume) in any society and as such are approached as a primary subject in this book, as the chapters traverse ten different countries on three continents: North America (United States); Latin America (Brazil, Chile, Colombia); Asia (India); and Europe (United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal, Finland, Estonia)...read more

Product Description: In recent years an increasing dissatisfaction with methods and thinking in psychology as a science can be observed. The discipline is operating under the tension between the traditional quantitative and the new qualitative methodologies...read more

Product Description: James Mark Baldwin left a legacy that has yet to be fully examined, one with profound implications for science and the humanities. In some sense it paralleled that of his friend Charles Sanders Peirce, whose semiotics became understood only a century later...read more

The first handbook of Socio-cultural Pyschology to deal with such a variety of themes and wide international scope. Valsiner and Rossa approach human psychology in all its complexity, providing a comprehensive description and explanation of the development of meaning -making. This unique text integrates contributions of socio-cultural specialists from 15 countries worldwide, tied together by the unifying focus on the role of sign systems in human relations with the environment. It is an essential purchase for Psychologists and will have widespread appeal to Anthropologists, Sociologists and Philosophers.

Many modern social scientists take issue with the traditional criteria for comparing human development in a constantly changing world. Social scientists have long focused only on what the differences among groups are, rather than asking how and why these groups differ. Comparisons in Human Development examines ways in which different disciplines have historically regarded development and provides empirical examples that take a new approach to human activity and thought. This book's distinguished contributors share the view that the study of development must consider processes that operate over time and are regulated by varying physical, biological, social, and cultural contexts.