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This book has been able to provide a thorough examination of certain aspects of nativism about the mind, such as its development throughout history and the modern advances in psychology and other fields that can be attributed to such. Part I was able to investigate historical debates regarding innateness, misconceptions and clarifications about this, and how we have been able to develop a novel explanation as to what nativism is. It explores the several nativist claims that involve psychological processes, as well as certain general views that some nativists may adopt. While Parts II and III accounted for innate ideas set in this context, and the author still asserts that we should still consider and examine empiricists' accounts of learning and not automatically embrace the promises attributed to nativism.

This chapter offers an account of the psychological mechanisms and processes underlying norms that integrate what is known and can serve as a framework for future research. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 1 offers a preliminary account of what norms are. Sections 2 and 3 assemble an array of facts about norms and the psychology that makes them possible, drawn from a variety of disciplines. Though the distinction is not a sharp one, Section 2 focuses on social level facts, while Section 3 focuses on how norms affect individuals. Section 4 provides a tentative hypothesis about the innate psychological architecture subserving the acquisition and implementation of norms, and explains why an architecture like the one proposed can explain many of the facts assembled in Sections 2 and 3. Section 5 focuses on open questions—important issues about the cognitive science of norms that the account in Section 4 does not address.

The goal of this chapter is to explain how action involves varied psychological processes, including thinking, feeling, self/identity, interacting, and sensing and perceiving. It is explained that different ways of acting involve different ways of structuring varied psychological processes. Moreover, different ways of structuring psychological processes emerge through individual, social, cultural, bodily, and environmental processes. In this chapter, thinking, feeling, self/identity, sensing and perceiving, and interacting are conceptualized as active processes that people do, and each process is explained in relation to individual, social, cultural, bodily, and environmental processes. Varied empirical and everyday examples are used to illustrate major concepts and claims.

This introductory chapter argues that the pogrom is an event driven by words and images, as much by the associations and invocations that precede it as by those that accompany it. The enactment of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom followed a script collectively shared on the streets and in media representations. The chapter describes the forms of complicity that the pogrom demanded and the quotidian understandings it engendered. While many of these understandings seem to be recurrent instances of collective violence, the chapter focuses only on the events of 2002 and seeks to unravel the specific cultural and psychological processes of individual and collective identification that were then prevalent in central Gujarat.

Fodor gained a certain amount of embarrassment in 1981 after realizing that the intentional integrity of the link between the concept and the cause may be questioned. While the older Fodor, the one in 1998, is able to acknowledge that his earlier conceptions had to be modified, Fodor emphasizes that acquiring a concept is not to be recognized as a psychological process. In this chapter, however, we look into how psychological processing plays, in fact, no small part in the acquisition of concepts and that cognitive psychology is capable of providing and should provide a theory regarding such. The author attempts to prove how Fodor's argument about how concepts are “brute-causally” attained and cannot be interminable, as well as to show how cognitive mediation can be obtained, and to defend the notion of acquisition from some of Fodor's criticisms on the subject of nonclassical theories about content and verificationism.

This chapter examines the influences of musical activities such as listening, singing, or dancing on the endocrine system. The underlying assumption is that psychological processes associated with musical experiences lead to changes in the hormonal systems of brain and body. It begins with a brief introduction to general questions of psychoneuroendocrinology as well as to relevant hormonal systems, followed by an overview of empirical studies, which have begun to investigate hormonal responses to musical stimulation and musical activities. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future work that will be derived from initial evidence showing that music can be seen as a psychoactive stimulant inducing physiological effects that are sometime similar to those produced by pharmacological substances.

Although the term reconciliation has been widely used in academic literature regarding international and interethnic conflict, the term has an ambiguous nature as it can be used over a wide variety of contexts and perspectives and it can be discussed also at micro and macro levels. Thus, the working definition for this study concerns reconciliation as a fusion of cognitive and emotional processes wherein concerned parties accept relationships of peace and are accompanied by certain political and structural processes during the transition from state to state. This chapter attempts to explain what psychological processes are involved in reconciliation and what the necessary conditions for the transition from conflict to peace are.

This chapter sheds light on how the once-clear distinctions between the visual and social approaches to social categorization of the human body have begun to blur. First, it reviews findings from classic studies of biological motion perception that bear directly on domains that social psychologists care deeply about—the perception of social categories, identities, and psychological states. It then describes two ways in which these basic patterns are constrained by social psychological processes. It reviews evidence that social category knowledge constrains the interpretation and evaluation of dynamic body motion for evaluative social judgments. Then, it presents data highlighting how knowledge structures(i.e., stereotypes)can bias one's basic perception of the human body in motion.

Perceptual categorization is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Any time we decide that some visually presented object is a dog rather than a cat, a bottle rather than a jar, or a tree rather than a shrub, we are making a categorization decision based on the perceptual attributes of that object. This chapter aims to review a class of theories of perceptual categorization with particular emphasis on how these theories account for the time course of these judgements. A key assumption of these theories is that perceptual categorization depends on the underlying perceptual similarity relations among objects. This general assumption is not without some controversy.

This chapter discusses a unique perspective on the processes of explanation and prediction. The major features of the folk-conceptual theory of explanation are explained in order to develop new ideas about the temporal dimension of explanation. Then, the three layers of the theory are introduced and applied to an analysis of temporal aspects of explanation. The theory's first and fundamental layer describes the conceptual framework that underlies behavior explanations. The second layer of the folk-conceptual theory concerns the psychological processes that govern the actual construction of explanations. The third layer of the theory identifies the specific linguistic forms speakers have available in their language to express behavior explanations. It is claimed that explanations and predictions overlap to a considerable extent because they share a number of cognitive processes — processes that support the agent's attempt to construct the judgment at issue, whether it be an explanation or a prediction.

This chapter investigates religious beliefs, experiences, and behavior in relation to psychological concepts and theories. Psychological research on Pentecostal religiosity is structured by the distinction between two research perspectives. The first perspective analyzes exogenous psychological causes and consequences of Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism in this perspective is regarded as a black box connected with these causes and consequences, and thus solely as an epiphenomenon of general psychological processes. The theoretical bases are general psychological categories, which are applied to the religious experiences and behavior of Pentecostals. This perspective is useful for revealing and describing aspects of religion that may not be captured otherwise. It is only one of the perspectives that are taken with respect to religion, each contributing in a different way to the investigation of the field, but, concurrently, each perspective is subjected to specific restrictions.

This chapter introduces an ethnographic approach to security that attends to the lived experience of being constituted as a target on the domestic front of the United States' “War on Terrorism.” It examines a set of core social and psychological processes through which “national security” functions and is maintained. Such discussion illustrates not only the effect of “national security” within a particular community but also the emotions, memories, and experiences that are necessary for its constitution. It shows how the state's manufacturing of fear in response to the events of 9/11 has brought back to life a host of insecurities and anxieties that many had experienced in their countries of origin and thought they had escaped by coming to the United States. By paying close attention to these experiences, and the ways that pasts and presents can come to resemble one another, this chapter develops a framework for thinking about the state's response to 9/11 as not merely an extraordinary or excessive response to a singular event. Rather, it takes this lived sense of resemblance and familiarity as a significant commentary on emerging and enduring patterns of political legitimation and state authority.

This chapter asks whether the increase in adolescent mental health problems has been accompanied by an increase in stress. Commentators have tended to use the evidence of rising levels of anxiety and depression as evidence that stress has risen, but this confuses mental health and stress and creates a tautology. This chapter unpicks some of the conceptual and research challenges in this area, and concludes that stress is a particularly salient construct in adolescence that is clearly related to mental health outcomes. However, despite widespread assumptions, there are no good, repeated surveys of adolescent stressors in the UK over the last three decades, and much of the material on stress simply buys into the zeitgeist rather than challenging it. Implications for further research are provided.

Both psychological theories and neural hardware accounts attempt to model the complete sequence from sensory registration to response, including many processes which remain inaccessible to the first-person experiencer, who is limited to a small subset of psychological processes. Why does one particular selection of mental processes become conscious, as opposed to any other selection? This chapter looks at some properties of conscious experience and speculates about why they take the form they do.

This chapter focuses on the constraints of attributing psychological properties to brain profiles. The constraint on the validity of inferences based on one source of evidence bears directly on the neuroscientist's habit of describing brain profiles with words whose meaning and validity originated in psychological data. This practice deserves careful scrutiny because animals or humans are the presumed agents in sentences containing terms describing the psychological processes of perception, memory, intention, feeling, emotion, reasoning, or action. These terms take on novel meanings in sentences in which neuronal activity is the noun. However, the practice of using psychological predicates—such as compute, regulate, or synthesize—to describe brain profiles remains popular because neuroscientists do not have a rich biological vocabulary for the diverse brain profiles that occur in response to incentives.

This chapter considers the influence of Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises on Southwell. It first discusses Southwell's religious training, which made him aware of the presence of the angelic, and allowed him to express it accordingly in his poetry. The chapter shows that it is the encouragement to express and study personal feeling that makes Exercises useful to an examination of the creation in English poetry of a new psychological realism and emotional integrity. It then considers the core experience of Exercises and stresses that Ignatius presented an understanding of the psychological processes involved in self-analysis.

This chapter discusses prefrontal cortex anatomically and functionally, based on the idea that structure and function are inextricably related. It explains that the prefrontal cortex is a composite of functionally distinct or hierarchically arranged areas engaged respectively with the cardinal psychological processes of attention, affect, emotion, memory, and motor aspects of behaviour. It further elaborates that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as a whole has a generic function—‘on-line’ processing of information or working memory in the service of a wide range of cognitive functions; also this process is iteratively represented throughout several and possibly many subdivisions of the prefrontal neopallium, and that each autonomous subdivision integrates attentional, memorial, motor, and possibly affective dimensions of behaviour by virtue of network connectivity with relevant sensory, motor, and limbic areas of brain.

This chapter discusses the theory of discriminative racial-psychological processing by examining black Americans' socialization experiences among younger generations of black Americans. It explores to what extent these experiences influence how blacks internalize race and externalize it in their trust. Blacks internalize race through the development of their racial predispositions: racial socialization, racial homogenization, racial uncertainty, racial discrimination, and racialized trust. Whereas they externalize race through their attitudes toward racial groups in different contexts: racial contextual perception. As the theory suggests, differences in trust will depend on blacks' internalized racial knowledge and racial attitudes and the externalization of these cognitive and affective components in certain contexts. Race, therefore, affects how blacks interpret their risks, safety, and livelihood.

Chapter 1, “Out of Context,” in A New Narrative for Psychology, argues that one of the main consequences of the overreliance on variable-centered methods is a misinterpretation of the nature of psychological processes. Although variable-centered research seems to argue that we can understand the process outside of the person and outside of the social world as an abstract entity, this is not really possible. Psychological processes are aspects of subjective experience that have meanings specific to a person who is situated in a definite time and space. The chapter reviews the debate on the stability of personality traits over time and argues that it makes no sense to ask if personality changes or stays the same. Personality doesn’t do anything, but variables are characterized as if they have a life of their own. Outside of the context of the person, one misunderstands what personality is and means.