In this article, we propose three new approaches to analyzing person-oriented mediation hypotheses. First, we propose using relevance logic instead of classical logic. Relevance logic (1) rejects the ex falso sequitur quodlibet (“from a falsehood anything follows”) rule and (2) requires that the premise and the outcome of an implication exhibit variable sharing, that is, possess a substantive link. Propositions are declared irrelevant when the premise is false, when there is no substantive link, or both. Second, we discuss, based on relevance logic, alternative concepts of mediation. Specifically, we discuss that mediation can be based on conjunctive as well as on implicative relations. In contrast to conjunctive mediation models, implicative mediation models do allow one to distinguish between full and partial mediation. Third, we propose using confirmatory Configural Frequency Analysis to test hypotheses of full or partial mediation. This is illustrated using data on adolescent development.
Research across developmental and lifespan psychology has identified a recurring pattern in psychological well-being: relatively high emotional flexibility in early childhood, increased vulnerability to distress across adolescence and midlife, and partial improvement in later adulthood. Prevailing explanations typically attribute these shifts to the acquisition, calibration, and eventual decline of regulatory capacities and psychosocial resources. This paper proposes an alternative, integrative account grounded in a generative, homeostatic framework of psychological experience. Within this perspective, experience is understood as continuously constructed through ongoing interpretive activity and rendered subjectively real through conscious awareness, while an intrinsic regulatory capacity supports adaptive reorganization. Psychological health is conceptualized as reflecting the system's baseline flexibility, whereas distress corresponds to the stabilization of self-referential interpretive patterns that narrow experiential and behavioral possibilities. Drawing on research from developmental, affective, and systems-oriented psychology, the paper reinterprets lifespan trends as emergent properties of changing constraints on experiential organization rather than as cumulative gains or losses in psychological assets. This framework offers a unifying account of resilience, vulnerability, and recovery, and suggests new directions for research and intervention focused on the conditions that support adaptive reorganization across the lifespan.
Heinz Werner contrasted the consensual preoccupation with hypothesis testing in experimental research and his own emphasis on the process of exploration. In this paper, the type of exploratory process that Werner is referring to is addressed, using his classic study on contour formation to exemplify this. In that study, Werner explored the phenomenon of contour formation, without testing any particular hypothesis. To further consider the distinction between the systematic exploration of a phenomenon, with a study designed to prove or disprove a specific hypothesis, I consider a study exemplifying the latter. I argue that Werner’s thinking has relevance for active researchers today and conclude that the present concern regarding the ‘replication crisis’ and the complementary advocacy of the pre-registration of studies is inherently detrimental to the process of exploration and discovery that Werner promoted for psychological research.
Different theoretical developments in Cultural Psychology have advanced the understanding of the semiotic mediation of human experience, with particular emphasis on how cognition and affect are intertwined. Simultaneously, the application of Cultural Psychology to health contexts remains notably less developed, particularly in relation to the study of conditions involving multiple therapeutic demands within medical treatment. In this context, the present study aims to understand the configuration of the experience of medical treatment in Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus through the analysis of the organization, regulation, and interaction of affective semiosis and meaning-making processes. Methodologically, an idiographic perspective was adopted through the microgenetic analysis of in-depth interviews within a case study. The analysis is developed through the use of metaphors, understood as semiotic configurations that articulate the experience of the Self. A central metaphor, “the daily roulette”, and four peripheral metaphors serving structuring and operational functions were identified. Results show that experience is organized around an affective field of contingency that guides the interpretation of bodily variations. Processes of meaning-making are identified as operating through micro-stabilizations of meaning making orienting action in concrete situations. The study deepens the theoretical understanding of the articulation between the body, affective semiosis, and meaning-making, suggesting specific properties of signs regulation of experience. Within Cultural Psychology applied to the field of health, it also offers insights into how individuals regulate their experience of treatment in contexts of bodily uncertainty, thereby informing the development of approaches more attuned to patients’ affective dynamics.
Research with children and families is shaped by epistemic assumptions, methodological choices and ethical responsibilities. Each of these influence how human lives are rendered knowable. This paper examines the ethical and epistemological foundations of research practice by drawing on empirical work conducted across three distinct contexts from India: street dwelling Pamaria families, children in government school classrooms, and the seasonal life worlds of Agariya salt-pan workers. Across these settings, research emerges not as a neutral process of data collection but as a relational, interpretive and ethically charged encounter. The paper advances four interrelated commitments for research in the human sciences. Ethics is approached as epistemic ground rather than procedural compliance; Care is a foundational stance that structures attentiveness and humility; Methodology is understood as emergent and responsive to fluid and often precarious conditions, and Reflexivity is positioned as an ongoing ethical practice that shapes interpretation and representation. Together these commitments reframe research as a situated process of co-presence and meaning-making rather than extraction. While some of these may already be a part of global research, it is critical to acknowledge that such practices are not the norm across diverse geographical settings. By foregrounding relational ethics, care and epistemic responsibility, the paper contributes to debates in cultural psychology and research on how knowledge about children and families can be produced.
Empathy is frequently studied in isolation in research-yet when considered alongside other psychological components, an entirely different picture emerges of how it operates. Its interaction with personality dimension and its potential role as a risk factor for depression have received limited attention. This theoretical review argues that empathy operates along a spectrum - both excess and deficiency carry distinct risks -and that these risks manifest differently depending on whether affective or cognitive empathy predominates in an individual's personality spectrum.Drawing on a synthesis of literature retrieved from PsycINFO, PubMed, and Google Scholar with no year restriction, this paper examines how empathy intersects with introversion-extraversion continuum and creates different pathways toward depression. In individuals high in introversion, where affective empathy predominates, the tendency to experience others' feelings as one's own leads to emotional overload, gradual numbing, and identity loss. In individuals with higher extraversion levels, where cognitive empathy predominates, reliance on external validation as an emotional resource creates vulnerability when social attention diminishes. In both cases, the resulting depression is not acute but cumulative and insidious in character - advancing unnoticed until the individual has already drifted significantly from their prior level of functioning.This paper further argues that one of the most observable consequences of this process is a decline in reading performance. Individuals scoring high on the extraversion scale continue to read but without comprehension; those at the introverted end of the spectrum find sustained reading increasingly difficult due to fragmented attention. This paper proposes a theoretical framework examining the effect of functional depression - which empathy may give rise to through certain personality dimensions - on cognitive functioning, and in particular on a process as fundamental as reading.
This theoretical review explores the intricate dynamics of emotional regulation within social interactions, specifically focusing on aversive contexts where social threats necessitate regulatory intervention. Drawing on the Dual-Process Model and Pessoa’s integrative neurobiological framework, the article examines how the brain negotiates between the “impulsive system” and the “reflective system.” While classical literature promotes affect labeling as an effective implicit regulator that dampens physiological arousal, recent findings suggest a potential paradoxical effect: emotional crystallization. It is hypothesized that this process can transform fluid emotional experiences into rigid categories, potentially increasing cognitive load and hindering social flexibility. By integrating Bourdieu’s Habitus with neuro-sociological insights, the review proposes a shift toward “Plural Rationality.” It concludes that successful social regulation may require maintaining “cognitive fluidity” rather than mere linguistic categorization, ensuring that rationalization serves as a tool for cooperation rather than a shackle that fossilizes emotional responses.
This article proposes using formal theory to specify models for confirmatory Configural Frequency Analysis (CFA). Statement calculus is used from the perspective of relevance logic. Under this perspective, patterns are identified that are 'true', that is, that are conform with a priori made statements. Among the true patterns, there also are patterns that reflect true statements although the premise is false - the well known 'ex falso sequitur quodlibet'. These patterns are considered irrelevant, because there is no substantive connection between premise and outcome. This distinction has major implications for the selection of cells to be tested in confirmatory CFA: irrelevant cells are not considered as in support of a hypothesis. This is discussed for the operators conjunction and implication. For CFA, this approach requires an additional step. After performing standard CFA, tests are performed that examine the cells that support a hypothesis and the cells that are in contradiction to the hypothesis or irrelevant. If a hypothesis is confirmed, the cells supporting it contain more cases than expected under the CFA base model. Empirical data examples are given with data from a study on the effects of intimate partner violence.
This study proposes a relational-dynamic theoretical framework aimed at the "creative transformation" of "Dao", a core concept in Chinese philosophy. Shifting from a substance to a process ontology, we reconceptualize Dao not as a static entity but as a generative field of dynamic relations. Synthesizing insights from process philosophy, cultural psychology, and cognitive science, the model introduces a symbolic heuristic of four interdependent dimensions: Heavenly Dao (symbolized as 1 for truth), Earthly Dao (symbolized as 0 for goodness), Human Dao (symbolized as Φ for beauty as dynamic equilibrium), and Worldly Dao (symbolized as φ for emergent holism). At its core is the generative logic of Human Dao (Φ), conceptualized formally as the cumulative temporal integration of the dialectical interaction between truth-seeking (1) and goodness-seeking (0) drives, capturing the dialectical interaction and cumulative integration between truth-seeking and goodness-seeking drives within concrete situations. The model posits a dynamic, harmonious "attractor" state, employing the principle of "asymmetric balance" inherent in the Golden Ratio as a structural metaphor for optimal psychological coordination. From this framework, we derive a key and novel psychological construct: the “Dao-Relational Quotient” (DRQ)—defined as a form of processual meta-competence for navigating complex moral-cognitive-affective situations through situated dialectical synthesis, distinct from static trait-based character-focused constructs such as IQ, EQ, or MQ. Finally, we propose a theoretically grounded, four-stage educational pathway for cultivating DRQ, positioning this processual model of Dao as a resource for addressing contemporary challenges in moral development, ethical leadership, social-emotional learning, and cross-cultural understanding, thereby fostering interdisciplinary dialogue.
Interpersonal phobias-used here as an analytic label for enduring aversive orientations toward persons or groups, such as xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and ageism-are often framed primarily as fear- or anxiety-driven. That view captures vigilance and avoidance, but it does not fully explain why such aversions are also expressed in the language of contamination, revulsion, exclusion, social cleansing, and sometimes violence. I argue that interpersonal phobias are better understood through a distinction among fear, anger, and disgust than through a fear-centered account alone. Fear is most relevant when the target is appraised as dangerous under uncertainty, thereby motivating vigilance, mitigation, and avoidance. Anger is most relevant when the target is appraised as obstructive yet changeable, thereby motivating confrontation, punishment, and aggression. Disgust is most relevant when the target is appraised as contaminating, offensive, or fundamentally incompatible and as unlikely to change, thereby motivating severance, exclusion, expulsion, and, in its most radical form, exterminative violence. To organize this argument, I apply the Interaction Discrepancy Model (IDM) as a theoretical extension. Holding accountability to the other constant, uncertainty should favor fear/anxiety and mitigative avoidance, whereas offensiveness combined with low perceived changeability should favor disgust and severance. Anger and disgust can co-occur, but they do different work: anger energizes attack, whereas disgust frames the target as something to remove altogether. I derive falsifiable predictions, outline experimental and experience-sampling designs, and discuss implications for intervention, including the limits of purely anxiety-reduction approaches and the need to target disgust, dehumanization, and appraisals of changeability.
Identity is a multi-level integrative process involving coordinated development across affective, symbolic, and embodied systems—a process of progressive self-organization that is biologically paced, relationally embedded, and irreducibly enacted through lived experience. This paper proposes a three-level developmental framework—Emotional Validation, Conceptual Identity, and Integrated Identity—and examines the structural conditions under which symbolic development outpaces embodied integration. This dynamic arises across the full range of identity-reorganizing experiences: adolescence, migration, parenthood, career disruption, relational loss, and recovery from trauma, among others. Significant disruption to self-continuity, including trauma, provides high-contrast visibility of these processes, but the framework describes features of identity reconstruction that operate universally wherever substantial reorganization of self is required. Drawing on semiotic mediation theory, narrative identity research, and neurobiological integration frameworks, the paper introduces the concept of semiotic overextension to describe the premature consolidation of self-organization around symbolic coherence in the absence of behavioral reorganization. Contemporary environmental amplifiers—including digital tools and artificial intelligence—are addressed as current intensifiers of a structurally persistent developmental dynamic. The framework is situated within the broader tradition of cultural-developmental psychology and invites developmental and clinical scholars to reconsider assessment practices that conflate conceptual fluency with functional integration.
Early social development exhibits a qualitative transition: children move from predicting and coordinating with others to treating certain regularities as binding standards that license correction, protest, and third-party enforcement. This paper proposes that the transition is driven by symbolic closure, a stabilization operation through which pre-symbolic social coupling and practice participation yield deontically binding representations. Normative bindingness is defined as the emergence of scope-sensitive invariance in a child's deontic evaluation map: stability under perturbations that preserve a norm's legitimate scope, paired with principled divergence at scope boundaries. Bindingness is operationalized as a perturbation profile of deontic stability and summarized by a compact Normative Closure Index (NCI), defined as one minus the expected divergence of deontic evaluations under task-relevant perturbations. This formulation recasts established developmental paradigms, joint pretense and game norm enforcement, authority contingency, group membership manipulations, monitoring and incentive shifts, and third-party perspective probes, as structured tests of perturbation profiles rather than isolated endorsement measures. The framework yields testable predictions, including domain-by-perturbation dissociations that express the moral-conventional distinction as differences in invariance class, and a developmental pattern in which within-scope stability increases and then plateaus while boundary sensitivity is preserved. Symbolic closure thus provides a minimal perturbation grammar for identifying when and how "what people do" becomes "what one ought to do," while remaining compatible with multiple learning routes.
Childcare facilities are a vital social infrastructure that supports children's development and enables parents to balance work and family life. Ensuring children's safety in these settings is therefore a fundamental social responsibility. Research on safety in childcare settings has accumulated, but it has largely developed around separate themes such as injury, incident prevention, and maltreatment. As a result, fatal incidents in childcare facilities have rarely been examined as temporal processes across multiple cases. Therefore, this study aimed to examine how institutional, organizational, and practical conditions were involved in the course of fatal incidents in licensed childcare facilities in Japan and to provide a theoretical understanding of the processes through which such incidents occurred. The analysis employed Trajectory Equifinality Modeling (TEM), a qualitative method that enables the visualization of multiple trajectories, obligatory passage points, bifurcation points, and equifinality points. Ten publicly available investigation reports on fatal incidents in licensed childcare facilities in Japan were qualitatively analyzed. The findings showed that fatal incidents should not be understood simply as failures occurring immediately before death. Rather, they were formed through processes in which institutional, organizational, and practical conditions accumulated and converged over time. Across cases, loss of psychological leeway among childcare staff and inadequate supervision systems emerged as recurrent obligatory passage points. Beyond these points, adult-centered caregiving that seeks to make children comply and blind spots left unchecked functioned as bifurcation points separating trajectories toward fatal incidents from trajectories toward safe childcare. TEM analysis also suggested that childcare that ensures children remain visible and the prevention of abusive childcare practices may support a contrasting trajectory toward safe childcare. These findings suggest that fatal incidents in licensed childcare facilities cannot be reduced to individual error alone, but need to be understood in relation to institutional, organizational, and practical conditions.
This article examines how dominant ideologies, integrated with Western psychological frameworks, influenced education in postcolonial India. Decolonizing psychology in the educational domain requires addressing the hierarchies of culture, power relations and dominant social identities. In that sense, remodelling the psychology of education requires a critical framework and conceptual foundation grounded in the metatheory of social justice. The debate, activism, and research over many decades aimed at understanding how formal education is rooted in our minds implies a need for a new resistance to the dominant assumptions. It plays a vital role in transforming the educational system. The role of critical social sciences with a decolonial approach offers pragmatic solutions for critically engaging with the educational domain and addressing issues related to neoliberalism and methodological individualism. To make the education system accessible to socially and economically disadvantaged individuals, researchers, scholars, teachers, parents, and students must move beyond mainstream representations of educational psychology and anxieties, toward critical inter-dialogues and self-reflexivity. Decolonial and decolonization, if uncritically applied, pose the danger of homogenizing educational concepts and masking the disadvantaged's history with reductive dichotomies of powerful social identities.
This paper offers a theoretical re-situating of extreme experiences in response to Dominik Mihalits’ (2025) multidimensional model. While acknowledging the value of Mihalits’ effort to de-pathologize extreme experiences, it is argued that many of the phenomena he seeks to conceptualize have long been addressed within earlier traditions of psychological and existential thought. Drawing on Karl Jaspers’ analysis of boundary situations and Abraham Maslow’s theory of peak and plateau experiences, the paper reconstructs the existential and developmental significance of extreme experiences beyond their descriptive classification. It is proposed that such experiences are not merely defined by intensity but involve disruptions of ordinary selfhood and openings toward value-laden modes of perception. Building on this reinterpretation, the paper introduces an embodied perspective to clarify how these transformations are lived. By focusing on the dynamics of the lived body and body schema, extreme experiences are conceptualized as embodied threshold phenomena in which habitual patterns of perception, action, and agency are temporarily suspended and reorganized. From this perspective, Mihalits’ six dimensions can be understood as descriptive markers of deeper existential, developmental, and embodied processes rather than as a wholly novel framework. The paper concludes that extreme experiences should be approached not as marginal anomalies but as moments in which the fundamental structure of human existence becomes particularly visible.
This paper proposes Integrative Intelligence as an operative mode of human judgment in which temporal integration (past-present-future), contextual integration (roles, relationships, life domains), and embodied integration (body, emotion, thought, meaning-making) function simultaneously without fragmentation. It is not introduced as a new ability or developmental stage but as a mode already latent in ordinary judgment that becomes legible under particular conditions. Unlike psychometric or multiple-intelligences frameworks, this study reframes intelligence as a situationally emergent configuration of judgment under constraint rather than a stable capacity distributed across individuals. Using an autoethnographic N=1 methodology with multiple data sources-mountaineering activity logs, physiological data, AI dialogue records, and retrospective reflections-the study develops four analytic lenses that do not constitute independent frameworks but form a single coupled cycle through which one judgment phenomenon becomes observable from different analytical angles: (1) the internal protocol, a minimal operative structure in which temporally differentiated perspectives participate simultaneously in judgment through a Three-Person Conference and a non-regulatory Metacognitive Camera; (2) the Resonant Internal Dialogue Protocol (RIDP), in which AI functions as a reflective surface rendering the internal protocol observable, with breakdown redefined as the absence of a synchronization protocol rather than capacity deficit-while explicitly addressing critical concerns regarding AI's formative and averaging influence on human judgment; (3) Multifaceted Shishuku, a process of selectively extracting and non-adopting qualities from multiple reference frames to form internal mentors that stabilize judgment structure; and (4) integrative-intelligence mountaineering, selected as an observation domain because it reliably satisfies four structural conditions under which integrative judgment becomes structurally unavoidable-prolonged isolated judgment, continuous environmental change, nature as non-personal third party, and body-originated serial circuit. Three mountaineering case studies demonstrate that identical constraint structures produce distinct operational modes (introspective, relational, immediate), supporting the claim that Integrative Intelligence is a context-sensitive operative mode of judgment, not a deterministic algorithm. Rather than statistical generalization, this study advances theoretical generalization by specifying transferable condition structures under which integrative judgment becomes observable-structures further instantiated through the author's founding of the Institute of Integrative Intelligence as a within-N=1 theory-to-practice data point. The paper articulates this framework through four analytic lenses that together connect formation, mechanism, activation conditions, and observational interface.
The paper examines Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit through the framework of Trauma theory, highlighting the emotional and psychological consequences of hiding one’s Dalit identity in a rigidly hierarchical society. This study offers a thorough analysis of the psychological pain caused by caste-based discrimination and the lasting impacts of social marginalisation. It underscores how caste discrimination engenders internalised fear, humiliation, and identity disintegration, resulting in persistent psychological distress. This paper examines how Dutt’s young teenager experiences of concealing her identity, informed by Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development and psychotraumatology, specifically its phases of personal identity versus role confusion and closeness against isolation, impeded the establishment of a coherent sense of self. Presenting oneself as a “higher caste” functions as a survival strategy, simultaneously intensifying feelings of isolation and cognitive dissonance. Her decision to publicly identify as Dalit represents a crucial milestone for confronting and resolving trauma, fostering self-acceptance and empowerment. This study emphasises the effects of systematic oppression on societal progress, mental health, and identity formation, highlighting the necessity of recognising caste-based trauma as a significant psychological concern.
Although artificial intelligence has exploded for the last couple of years, the idea of comparing the human mind with a computer is not new. One may say that Alan Turing started this movement, and this idea got off to a flying start in psychology through the symposium arranged by the "Special Interest Group in Information Theory" at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sept. 10-11, 1956. This symposium was sponsored by IBM, and Noam Chomsky presented for the first time his ideas about a transformational generative grammar. There were several contributors to the cognitive revolution, but Chomsky's presentation of a linguistic system with a level of precision comparable with mathematics was symptomatic for how a cognitive model for the human mind aimed to be conceptualized. This has brought the question about artificial intelligence to the core of psychology, namely how it can be understood as a model for the human mind. Psychology and its understanding of the human mind have changed along the last 500 years of the Western psychology. After a short presentation of some of the premises for artificial intelligence of today and some aspects of the idea behind the computational mind, these perspectives are compared with the very early use of the term 'psychology' in the early 16th century. The role of classical logic as a model for the human mind was at stake back then and one of the main factors that paved the way for psychology was that Aristotelian logic was criticized and questioned as a model for the human mind. On the other hand, the importance of classical logic has never been completely outdated Consequently, for the last 500 years Western psychology can in many ways be characterized as an incessant battle about the role of logic in the understanding of the human mind. However, the conclusion is that AI of today presupposes an understanding of the human mind that has been outdated for more than 500 years.
As Tsikandilakis et al. (2025) illustrate, an intense back and forth scientific debate on the existence and scope of unconscious processing has existed for at least 2000 years and within the field of psychology for well over 100 years. The focus of my commentary highlights important contributions from signal detection theory, which my work was based upon, beginning over 30 years ago (Haase, 1994). Much more research has been done in the last 30 years as interest in the topic has grown and achieved a higher degree of respect within psychology and related disciplines. The controversy is obviously not resolved, but ideas are offered for making progress, some of which are emphasized in Tsikandilakis et al. (2025). Other approaches may have merit as well, based on experimental and observational data that acknowledge and emphasize the importance of subjective principles such as weak or fragmentary conscious experiences of masked prime stimuli that continue to "haunt" interpretations of unconscious perception.
