Jaan Valsiner

Forms of Dialogical Relations and Semiotic Autoregulation within the Self

The dialogical self entails relations between perspectival positions (I-positions) that maintain and develop within the self as a field. A typology of such relations is outlined, and related with the process of semiotic mediation. Semiotic mediation takes the form of flexible control systems that regulate the relations between I-positions. These autoregulatory processes generate both the meaningfulness of the flow of experience, and meta-level meanings that constrain the extent of construcion and loci of application of the direct semiotic regulators to the flow of experience. The dialogical self is an autocatalytic system that orients itself towards the future by either enabling or blocking the emergence of its own new states.

An invitation to cultural psychology

Introduction: Why Cultural Psychology? Making the human condition meaningful Chapter 1: Human Experience through the Lens of Culture: An invitation to psychology in a new key Chapter 2: What is culture? And -- why human psychology needs to be cultural? Chapter 3: Co-constructing the Mind Socially: Beyond a communion Chapter 4: Mutuality of Internalization and Externalization Chapter 5: Creating Ourselves: Signs, myths, and resistances Chapter 6: Sign Hierarchies: Their construction, use, and demolition Chapter 7: How Culture is Made Through Objects Chapter 8: Cultivating Environments: Over-determination by meaning Chapter 9: Weaving Social Textures Together: Personal and collective culture in action Chapter 10: Signs as Organizers: Maintaining and innovating tensions Epilogue: Cultural psychology as a science of universality of culture

The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology

This handbook provides a representative international overview of the state of our contemporary knowledge in sociocultural psychology – as a discipline located at the crossroads between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Since the 1980s, the field of psychology has encountered the growth of a new discipline – cultural psychology – that has built new connections between psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and semiotics. The handbook integrates contributions of sociocultural specialists from 15 countries, all tied together by the unifying focus on the role of sign systems in human relations with the environment. The handbook emphasizes theoretical and methodological discussions on the cultural nature of human psychological phenomena, moving on to show how meaning is a natural feature of action and how it eventually produces conventional symbols for communication. Such symbols shape individual experiences and create the conditions for consciousness and the self to emerge; turn social norms into ethics; and set history into motion.

Process Structure of Semiotic Mediation in Human Development

Development of semiotic mediation of psychological functions entails construction and use of signs to regulate both interpersonal and intrapersonal psychological processes. The latter can be viewed as regulated through a hierarchy of semiotic mechanisms. It is demonstrated that semiotic mediation leads to the creation of psychological problems as well as to their solutions. Semiotic mediation guarantees both flexibility and inflexibility of the human psychological system, through the processes of abstracting generalization and contextualizing specification, which operate through the layers of the semiotic regulation hierarchy. Context specificity of psychological phenomena is an indication of general mechanisms that generate variability. Much has been written about the role of signs – semiotic mediators – in psychology over recent decades. Usually more or less elaborate claims in favor of the importance of signs – semiotic mediators, words, ‘voices’, meanings – in human psychological worlds have been made [Cole, 1996; Shweder, 1995; Wertsch, 1991, 1998]. That importance is here taken for granted, and the question addressed moves beyond the discourse about the social nature of the human individual psyche [Valsiner & Van der Veer, 2000]. In which ways could one conceptualize the functioning of signs in the regulation of psychological processes? The present elaboration is based on previous work along similar lines [Valsiner, 1996, 1997a, 1998a, 1999]. By a focus on regulation, a systemic perspective is immediately evoked. The system that is being regulated entails psychological processes of intra- and interpsychological communication. These processes are mutually related in a hierarchical organizational order – some of them (higher psychological functions, based on the operation of signs) controlling others (lower, nonintentional psychological functions, or flow of personal experience). The hierarchy can be viewed as open to changes [including reversals, or formation of intransitive order – see Valsiner, 1997d]. The person is viewed as inclusively separated from its environment [Valsiner, 1997a, 1998c]. The intrapsychological system is cultural through the inclusion of semiotic regulators into the hierarchy of psychological processes [Valsiner, 1998a]. How that system works in its immediate relatedness with the environment is the target of the present theoretical construction.

The Individual subject and scientific psychology

Introduction: Where is the Individual Subject in Scientific Psychology?.- Introduction: Where is the Individual Subject in Scientific Psychology?.- Individual-Based Inference Methodology: Past, Present, and the Future.- Psychology as a Science.- From Idiographic Approaches to Nomothetic Hypotheses.- The Production, Detection, and Explanation of Behavioral Patterns.- Group versus Individual-Based Inference in Psychology: Logic and Practice.- Phenomena Lost.- Between Groups and Individuals.- The Individual Subject in Behavior Analysis Research.- The Time Domain in Individual Subject Research.- Ordinal Pattern Analysis.- Toward the Study of Individual Subjects: Contributions from Different Fields in Psychology.- Academic Diagnosis.- A Method for the Analysis of Patterns, Illustrated with Data on Mother-Child Instructional Interaction.- The Role of the Case Study in Neuropsychological Research.- Psychophysiological Activation Research.- Sequence-Structure Analysis.- Epilogue: Different Perspectives on Individual-Based Generalizations in Psychology.- Epilogue: Different Perspectives on Individual-Based Generalizations in Psychology.

Dynamic process methodology in the social and developmental sciences

The Unbearable Dynamicity of Psychological Processes: Highlights of the Psychodynamic Theories.- Reviving Person-Centered Inquiry in Psychology: Why its Erstwhile Dormancy?.- How Methodology Became a Toolbox-And How it Escapes from that Box.- The Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology, or: The Disunity of Psychology as a Working Hypothesis.- The Experimental Methodology of Constructive Microgenesis.- The Schema Approach: A Dynamic View on Remembering.- Against Reification! Praxeological Methodology and its Benefits.- Grasping the Dynamic Nature of Intersubjectivity.- Idiographic Data Analysis: Quantitative Methods-From Simple to Advanced.- Depicting the Dynamics of Living the Life: The Trajectory Equifinality Model.- Analysis of Intensive Categorical Longitudinal Data.- Advances in Dynamic Factor Analysis of Psychological Processes.- Hidden Markov Models for Individual Time Series.- Multilevel Simultaneous Component Analysis for Studying Intra-Individual Variability and Inter-Individual Differences.- Idiographic Microgenesis: Re-Visiting the Experimental Tradition of Aktualgenese.- Dynamic Methods for Research in Education.- Social Dynamics in Complex Family Contexts and its Study.- Dynamics of Life-Course Transitions: A Methodological Reflection.- Dynamic Methodology in Infancy Research.- Dynamics of Psychotherapy Processes.- Dramatic Life Courses: Migrants in the Making.- Innovative Moments and Change Processes in Psychotherapy: An Exercise in New Methodology.- Techno Parties, Soccer Riots, and Breakdance: Actionistic Orientations as a Principle of Adolescence.- Dynamic Processes and the Anthropology of Emotions in the Life Course and Aging: Late-Life Love Sentiments and Household Dynamics in Tuareg Psycho-Biographies.- Synthetic Phenomena and Dynamic Methodologies.- Developmental Science: Integrating Knowledge About Dynamic Processes in Human Development.- Cognitive and Interactive Patterning: Processes of Creating Meaning.

Changing Methodologies: A Co-constructivist Study of Goal Orientations in Social Interactions

In psychology the need for methodological innovation along the lines of the co-constructionist paradigm is emphasised. The model of methodology outlined is a cyclical research process in which goal-oriented thinking and interven tional procedures are used by the investigator in interaction with investigated phenomena. Traditional psychologys concern with variables has led to a sepa ration of the different facets of the target phenomena and has not proved useful in studying developmental processes. Co-constructionist methods involve the re-interpretation of existing methods, for example, interview and it is sug gested that these methods are akin to the hermeneutic process of knowledge construction whereby the emergence of relevant and novel psychological phe nomena is possible. The microgenetic research strategies that are used help to retain the individual sequence of the phenomena in the constructed data. The co-constructionist methodological approach is used to study cooperative and competitive behaviours in pre-school children. This process involves a uni fication of inductive and deductive inferences and a re-conceptualisation of the phenomena in terms of goal orientation convergence and divergence. An analysis of interactions between children and the adult experimenter is provided.

Between the General and the Unique Overcoming the Nomothetic versus Idiographic Opposition

In accordance with Windelband’s original proposal, the notions of nomothetic and idiographic are complementary terms, rather than an oppositional dyad. Given their dynamic and field-dependent nature, psychological phenomena are inherently unique—the relationship between their way of being and their constant becoming is mediated by the contingent conditions of the field. Therefore, science cannot be anything but idiographic—always facing a new unique event—while it is aimed at producing general knowledge of the nomothetic kind out of the ever-changing processes that unfold through irreversible time. The uniqueness of psychological phenomena makes it unfeasible for science to rely exclusively on inductive generalization that works through accumulation of empirical evidence provided by aggregated collections of specimens either within a single case (accumulation over time) or by assuming equivalence of exemplars across single cases subsumed under the same general class (a category viewed as a population). Abductive generalization can be a solution to the class←→ individuals relationship problem as it allows characterizing the dynamics of the unique case while it arrives at generalization.

Making Personal Sense An Account of Basic Internalization and Externalization Processes

This paper presents an account of basic internalization/externalization processes as the vehicle by which socio-cultural meanings are turned into personal sense systems. Such systems guide persons’ actions in respect to their environments. Social and personal worlds constantly mutually constrain each other in ways that lead to transformations in both. Internalization and reciprocal externalization occur as the person takes in and transforms social messages and other signs in self-talk (dialogues with oneself and imagined others). The theoretical account is accompanied by the specifications of empirical criteria for observing personal dialogues, and an empirical example is provided and analyzed in terms of the unfolding of the personal sense system in a task environment. The data of dialogues between police officers and a computer program about adolescent shoplifting reveal how these respondents transformed the computer input through their internalizing/externalizing operations, by interpolating specialized knowledge and personal beliefs, taking up prior expressions, and going beyond the social material that was given in the task. This account of internalization/externalization extends sociogenetic approaches to explain how the human mind functions as both a social and a personal organized system.

Bidirectional Cultural Transmission and Constructive Sociogenesis

Contemporary psychology is remarkable for the discrepancy between the socially promoted beiief in the speedy advancement of the discipline, and the actually very slow progress in the basic ideas and understanding of the pertinent phenomena. The case of sociogenesis is exemplary in this respect: psychologists have been talking about the relevance of the social world for the formation of the psychological functions of persons for over a century, but still there is very little progress in building explicit theoretical models that could explain how the individual becomes a person via social relationships.