scholarly journals Crisis” and “re-foundation” of psychology – outmoded topics of theoretical-psychological discourse?

Author(s):  
Wolfgang Maiers

In the 1970-80ies critical assessments of the problematic state of psychology as science were flourishing, stressing the theoretical disintegration and practical irrelevance of psychological basic research and connecting both defects to a misplaced dependence of mainstream psychology on a scientistic notion of scientific cognition. Talks of a crisis in psychology were gaining ground again. Controverting the paradigmatic maturity vs. the pre-/non-paradigmatic state of our discipline or, alternatively, its necessarily multi-paradigmatic character, the quest for unification as against a programmatic theoretical pluralism became a top issue of scholarly dispute. The institutionalisation of ISTP in 1985 and its initial epistemological and meta-theoretical core themes clearly reflected this pervasive trend. Some 35 years later, it has become noticeably quiet about such concerns, and there is no evidence of a renewal of large-scale discussions on a foundational crisis in psychology, let alone of ambitious attempts at theoretical unification or re-foundation – despite the fact that none of the “epistemopathologial“ (Koch, 1981) diagnoses of traditional variable-psychology have been refuted or lost strategic importance. Combining historical retrospection with an exemplary analysis of topical theoretical-psychological subjects, the aim of my paper is to get a clearer idea of where Theoretical Psychology currently stands in regard to the meta-scientific study of psychological theory-problems.

Author(s):  
Tim Lomas

Positive psychology—the scientific study of well-being—has made considerable strides in understanding its subject matter since emerging in the late 1990s. However, like mainstream psychology more broadly, it can be deemed relatively Western-centric, with its concepts and priorities influenced by ways of thinking and understanding that are prominent in Western cultures. Consequently, the field would benefit from greater cross-cultural awareness, engagement, and understanding. One such means of doing so is through the study of “untranslatable” words (i.e., those lacking an exact equivalent in another language, in this case English). This chapter reflects on the nature of untranslatable words, considers their significance to positive psychology (and psychology more broadly), and offers suggestions for why and how the field should engage with them.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095679762097751
Author(s):  
Li Zhao ◽  
Jiaxin Zheng ◽  
Haiying Mao ◽  
Xinyi Yu ◽  
Jiacheng Ye ◽  
...  

Morality-based interventions designed to promote academic integrity are being used by educational institutions around the world. Although many such approaches have a strong theoretical foundation and are supported by laboratory-based evidence, they often have not been subjected to rigorous empirical evaluation in real-world contexts. In a naturalistic field study ( N = 296), we evaluated a recent research-inspired classroom innovation in which students are told, just prior to taking an unproctored exam, that they are trusted to act with integrity. Four university classes were assigned to a proctored exam or one of three types of unproctored exam. Students who took unproctored exams cheated significantly more, which suggests that it may be premature to implement this approach in college classrooms. These findings point to the importance of conducting ecologically valid and well-controlled field studies that translate psychological theory into practice when introducing large-scale educational reforms.


Micromachines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Joon Hyong Cho ◽  
David Cayll ◽  
Dipankar Behera ◽  
Michael Cullinan

The demand for graphene-based devices is rapidly growing but there are significant challenges for developing scalable and repeatable processes for the manufacturing of graphene devices. Basic research on understanding and controlling growth mechanisms have recently enabled various mass production approaches over the past decade. However, the integration of graphene with Micro-Nano Electromechanical Systems (MEMS/NEMS) has been especially challenging due to performance sensitivities of these systems to the production process. Therefore, ability to produce graphene-based devices on a large scale with high repeatability is still a major barrier to the commercialization of graphene. In this review article, we discuss the merits of integrating graphene into Micro-Nano Electromechanical Systems, current approaches for the mass production of graphene integrated devices, and propose solutions to overcome current manufacturing limits for the scalable and repeatable production of integrated graphene-based devices.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Matthews ◽  
Shoaib Sufi ◽  
Damian Flannery ◽  
Laurent Lerusse ◽  
Tom Griffin ◽  
...  

In this paper, we present the Core Scientific Metadata Model (CSMD), a model for the representation of scientific study metadata developed within the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to represent the data generated from scientific facilities. The model has been developed to allow management of and access to the data resources of the facilities in a uniform way, although we believe that the model has wider application, especially in areas of “structural science” such as chemistry, materials science and earth sciences. We give some motivations behind the development of the model, and an overview of its major structural elements, centred on the notion of a scientific study formed by a collection of specific investigations. We give some details of the model, with the description of each investigation associated with a particular experiment on a sample generating data, and the associated data holdings are then mapped to the investigation with the appropriate parameters. We then go on to discuss the instantiation of the metadata model within a production quality data management infrastructure, the Information CATalogue (ICAT), which has been developed within STFC for use in large-scale photon and neutron sources. Finally, we give an overview of the relationship between CSMD, and other initiatives, and give some directions for future developments.    


1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (S2) ◽  
pp. 1018-1019
Author(s):  
Jordanka Zlatanova ◽  
Andrei Mirzabekov

Recently, a quantum leap has been achieved in the analysis of DNA and proteins through the advent of the biochip technology. This technology is a product of a broad interdisciplinary approach combining biochemical analysis, semiconductor manufacturing and computer software. Biochips can be defined as miniaturized ordered arrays of macro molecules or pieces thereof that are immobilized in a precise spatial manner on support media and can be used in highly automated, large-scale and high-throughput fashion to analyze biological material. The biochip can be used in a wide variety of areas related to basic research and can find versatile applications in almost all areas of human activities connected to biotechnology, medicine, agriculture, and environment monitoring and bioremediation.The power of the technology has already been demonstrated in areas like gene sequencing and proofreading, detection of single-nucleotide mutation and polymorphism, identification of genes, identification of viruses and microorganisms, gene expression analysis, analysis of sequencespecific ligands and proteins, and others.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Hill

For Christian psychologists to move from their marginalized position with mainstream psychology, they must be able to substantively demonstrate the unique insights that the integration of psychology with Christian theology offers to the discipline. To do this, Christian psychologists must be able to show, not just claim, the authority of Scripture by demonstrating its explanatory power on psychology's terms. Three factors in psychology's new zeitgeist provide both opportunities and challenges to demonstrating Scriptural authority: a growing cultural interest in spirituality, postmodernism, and novel approaches to cognitive science. Cognitive-Experiential Self Theory (CEST) is provided as a concrete example where Christian thinking provides greater understanding of an emerging psychological theory, thus demonstrating explanatory power and providing Scripture a more authoritative position.


1969 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Preston

If anyone could be claimed the father of the school for the scientific study of Indian defence policy it would undoubtedly be Sir Charles Metcalfe MacGregor. With the re-opening of the Central Asian Question in the early 1860s, it became MacGregor's mission in life completely to recast the Indian defence structure and it counter-insurrectionary role to enable it to undertake large-scale offensive operations against a major European military power. Almost single-handedly, he began to create the machinery within the Indian Army establishment—the special departments, professional institutes, journals and literature—to stimulate a greater awareness of the special and peculiar nature of Indian defence problems that this new role involved, and to encourage an iconoclastic re-examination of prevailing defence assumptions. From MacGregor's groundwork there was logically bound to arise a sense of Indian Army professionalism separate and distinct from that of Great Britain, and the beginnings of the belief that obligations of national defence are inseparable from nationhood. It was MacGregor who first appreciated on the basis of systematic and scientific study that India constituted a vast manpower reservoir, greater than that of Ireland and Egypt together, upon which Britain relied for the prosecution of her imperial, military and foreign policies in the East; that the North-West Frontier presented the only strategic boundary that Britain had to defend; and that the geo-strategic and demographic facts of her existence had made India potentially a great military power bound to adopt a ‵Continental′ military policy and defence structure in many respects parallel to those of the major European military powers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 324-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Pepping ◽  
Geoff MacDonald ◽  
Penelope J. Davis

The number of people who remain single for long periods of time is sizeable and growing in the Western world, yet they are largely ignored in psychological theory and research. In this article, we review psychological and sociological evidence that long-term singles are a heterogeneous group of individuals, outline an attachment-theoretical model of long-term singlehood, and review direct and indirect empirical evidence suggestive of at least three distinct subgroups of long-term singles: (a) singlehood due to attachment-system deactivation, (b) singlehood due to attachment-system hyperactivation, and (c) singlehood as a secure personal choice. Our aim is to highlight long-term singles as a population that merits scientific study and to provide a foundation on which future research can build.


1993 ◽  
Vol 04 (06) ◽  
pp. 1167-1177 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. SCHILLING ◽  
G. S. BALI

This meeting produces another evidence that present parallel computers are (a) real instruments of computational physics, (b) largely in the hands of still-pioneers, (c) efficiently promoted by basic research groups with large-scale computational needs. Progress in parallel computing is carried by two types of such groups, that either follow the build-it-yourself or the early-use strategies. In this contribution, we describe, as an example to the second approach, the Wuppertal university pilot project in applied parallel computing. We report in particular about one of our key applications in theoretical particle physics on the Connection Machine CM-2: a high statistics computer experiment to determine the static quark-antiquark potential from quenched quantum chromodynamics.


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