Theory & Psychology

Empiricist philosophers have supposed that the primitives of experience that underpin our mature ways of thinking are but simple awarenesses of simple properties. Phenomenologists, on the other hand, have taken the manifold of experience as what is primitive. Neither approach can best account for experimental findings about infant experience. It is argued that our mature ordering of experience in terms of objects and their properties does not have its origins in a crude infant version of the same ordering, but instead develops out of infant experiences that consist of noticings of differences. It is not that neonates see objects as objects and properties as properties, but less effectively than do adults; what initially captures their attention is differences, particularly changes, in what is presented to them, rather than things and their sensible properties. It is suggested that an infant’s perceptual development proceeds from awareness of individual differences to that of patterns of differences incorporating Gibsonian invariants, before, finally, it comes to perceive objects as objects.

Given some consensus that statistical significance tests are broken, misused or at least have somewhat limited utility, the focus of discussion within the field ought to move beyond additional bashing of statistical significance tests, and toward more constructive suggestions for improved practice. Five suggestions for improved practice are recommended; these involve (a) required reporting of effect sizes, (b) reporting of effect sizes in an interpretable manner, (c) explicating the values that bear upon results, (d) providing evidence of result replicability, and (e) reporting confidence intervals. Though the five recommendations can be followed even if statistical significance tests are reported, social science will proceed most rapidly when research becomes the search for replicable effects noteworthy in magnitude in the context of both the inquiry and personal or social values.

The practices suggested by Thompson (1999) have not been adopted by researchers because they would rarely be useful. There are problems with reports of effect size that depend on methodological details. The practical importance of a finding depends on personal circumstances, and the researcher’s personal evaluation of that importance is outside the purview of science. Researchers are concerned with the accuracy of their conclusion, and given pcalculated, estimates of replicability add no information to this issue.

Two themes are argued in this comment on the use of statistical significance tests. First, effect sizes are an important aspect of results that should be reported. However, 10 empirical studies (some of several different journals) of articles in various disciplines demonstrate that effect sizes are still not usually being reported, notwithstanding the admonitions of the 1994 American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual. Second, using statistical significance tests does not (and cannot) make scientists (or their science) objective.

In this paper I am concerned with our conception of ourselves and how best to study the person. I will argue that it is on a non-psychic conception of the person that we can pin our hopes for knowing something interesting and informative about people. Moreover, I suggest a productive route out of the (metaphysical) dualism between bodies and minds—which seems to have always bedevilled the study of people—and into another; that between science and stories. I advocate a continuous interplay between stories and science because, in this way, we are better able to account for and configure who we are and how to live, as I argue in what follows. However, this does not promise a final word on how to study people, nor does it solve inter-theoretic battles between science and stories.

Although psychology has taken an interdisciplinary approach to religion, at present most studies are aligned with mainstream psychology, which largely disregards the constitution of psychic functioning by cultural forces. After a brief overview of historical psychologizing positions and a discussion of the background of contemporary proposals to consider religion as naturally rooted in human beings, the paper suggests that a cultural psychological perspective may give an impetus to psychological analyzes of religion by providing a religiously neutral starting point. Some contemporary approaches compatible with this perspective are briefly sketched: activity and habitus theory; narrative psychology; Lacanian psychoanalysis. Acknowledging religion as first and foremost a cultural phenomenon, the paper proposes to conceive of religiosity as its subjective-personal counterpart, that is, as (a) a multi-dimensional phenomenon constituted by specific religious (sub)cultures about whose features and functions other scholarly disciplines can inform us, and (b) involving many kinds of psychic functions (instead of being rooted in a single psychological feature). Collaborating interdisciplinarily, a cultural psychological perspective renders superfluous any discussions on the material object of psychology of religion.

This review discusses two books. Philosophical Psychopathology is an anthology of articles by philosophers in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition who address themselves to a disparate assortment of topics—including schizophrenia, MPD, autism, blindsight, diagnostic classification and the problem of despair. In general, the articles display admirable conceptual rigor, but are often accompanied by a distant and rather abstract grasp of psychopathological phenomena. Detailed criticisms are offered of an interesting discussion, by the volume editors, of thought insertion in schizophrenia. Deconstructing Psychopathology, written by five British authors, offers a wide-ranging but somewhat predictable critique, from a politically and epistemologically radical perspective (influenced by Foucault, Derrida, etc.), of medical-model and other mainstream approaches to ‘mental illness’—a concept whose validity the authors deny and whose political effects they deplore.