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Findings from a study that surveyed editors and editorial board members of personality and social psychology journals are reviewed to examine the practice of psychological science in the field of social-personality. Findings demonstrate: (a) although personality and social researchers tend to use many of the same approaches, methods, and procedures, they show average differences in each of these domains, as well as in their overarching theoretical aims and perspectives; (b) the average differences between the two subgroups conform to social and personality researchers' explicit beliefs about the differences; (c) despite the overall methodological and philosophical differences between the two groups, there are few differences in the research topics each subgroup focuses upon, and there are many researchers whose research appears to bridge the two subareas; (d) the structure of social-personality research practices is best characterized as having two independent factors corresponding to Cronbach's (1957) correlationaland experimental “streams of research.”

This chapter sets the stage for the ways in which disciplinary psychology transformed students during the last half of the twentieth century. The traditional approach to psychological science is briefly discussed. A critical history of psychology then is presented. The “psy” hypothesis, suggested initially by Foucault but elaborated within psychology and education by others (e.g. Rose, Popkewitz) is the assertion that the psy disciplines (disciplinary psychology in particular) are powerful practices or technologies of the self that, in Western societies, have shaped our experience of ourselves as free, self-governing, self-powering, and self-realized individuals. It is argued that psychological conceptions, categories, and practices of selfhood have contributed to the development of students as radically autonomous individuals more attuned to their own self-interest than to responsible community participation.

This chapter explores how the notion of “science” or “the scientific” is invoked by Chinese psychological experts and practitioners in their efforts to translate, brand, and apply certain branches of psychology and psychotherapy to Chinese society. It explains how the popular pursuit of well-being and the “good life” in contemporary China is inseparable from the claims of modern science and Western biomedicine. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork research among Chinese psychologists, counselors, psychiatrists, and urban residents in Kunming from 2010 to the present, the chapter offers an in-depth account of how and why the so-called “science of happiness” is surging in Chinese cities and how it is embraced by different social actors. This wave occurs under the banner of “psychological science” that some experts claim is able to effectively ease personal and social suffering.

This chapter presents an overview of how exceptional creativity and genius have a direct correlation to psychological sciences. During the first half of eighteenth century, genius and creativity were considered to be dominated by psychological perspective rather than experimental psychology and behavioural sciences. The book focuses on how exceptional creativity is influenced by the behavioural application of modern knowledge of social, emotional, and biological factors. Examples of many geniuses are cited in the book to emphasize the behavioural development and psychological experience that are common to much of the human race.

This chapter is about consciousness as phenomenal experience. Its contention is that reference to consciousness in psychological science is demanded, legitimate, and necessary. It is demanded since consciousness is a central (if not the central) aspect of mental life. It is legitimate since there are as reasonable grounds for identifying consciousness as there are for identifying other psychological constructs. It is necessary since it has explanatory value, and since there are grounds for positing that it has causal status. However, the relationship of certain aspects of consciousness to the functionalist approach, which currently dominates and unites natural science, is problematic. Those aspects discussed here are phenomenal experience and content. Either functionalism will be able to deal with the problems posed, or a purely functionalist psychology will be inadequate. Psychology without consciousness, without phenomenal experience or the personal level, may be biology or cybernetics, but it is not psychology.

The earliest dates for anatomically-modern human fossil remains are around 100,000 years ago. It would seem that early modern humans had an essentially modern intelligence, and on that basis also had the capacity to act in the ways that later modern humans do. The conclusion to be drawn is that modern human languages were established after the emergence of biological species. The central point to be made in this chapter is that social structures put varying pressures on the communication systems that sustain them, through the different levels of presuppositionality a society's members share with each other. The chapter also points out that human discourse practices is moved from the fringe of psychological science to its centre, for the processes fundamental to the project of the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ are no longer encapsulated within the head of an individual, but distributed in the symbolically-mediated practices that comprise human cultures, distributed between the individual and the social.

“Reasoned Interpretations,” Chapter 9 of A New Narrative for Psychology, examines the bases for making sound research arguments in psychology. It argues that there is a general form for making arguments that is found not only in psychology but everywhere. Psychological science becomes the deliberate activity of “going after” knowledge and framing knowledge claims in the form of a reasonable argument. The chapter argues for a critical examination of research arguments in order to arrive at general, but flexible, means for evaluating research claims. Research arguments in psychology, narrative and otherwise, should be credible, trustworthy, and useful. In order to examine how narrative research can meet these standards, the chapter presents a detailed analysis of a life story interview with a Palestinian student with Israeli citizenship studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.