Self-reflection has historically depended on temporal transformations that no one had to arrange: memory faded and reworked what it returned, the standpoint from which the past was met shifted, and other people changed alongside the person reflecting. Conversational AI separates these transformations from the person’s own. Transcripts and selective system memory may change technically, yet they persist across the interval without undergoing it as lived time, and a responsive interlocutor answers without the relational time of a history shared with the person. Drawing on cultural psychology’s premise that psychological processes unfold in irreversible time and on the phenomenology of time-consciousness, the paper describes the conditions of self-reflection as a temporal ecology of memory, standpoint, other people, and artefacts, related through their differing movement across time. Externalising part of one’s past into conversational systems converts regulation that once proceeded tacitly into time work: deciding whether, when, in what order, and how often to return to earlier formulations. Such work draws on attention and judgement; where it is left to defaults, it is performed by those who design and govern the systems. A system that remembers and answers may also lend earlier formulations a witness’s authority. The freedom to change, once protected by the coupling of fading and inaccessibility, thus comes to depend on regulatory work distributed between persons and infrastructures, and agency over one’s own past, as experienced and as exercised, becomes partly a matter of governance. The paper derives empirical questions and implications for society, wellbeing, education, and personal development.
Counselling theories have traditionally been conceptualised within psychological, therapeutic, and developmental frameworks while learning theories have largely evolved as a separate field of inquiry. Although both domains are concerned with personal change, adaptation, and the development of new understandings, explicit theoretical integration between counselling and learning remains relatively limited. This article explores whether counselling may be usefully understood through the lens of learning theory and examines the extent to which key learning concepts can illuminate processes commonly associated with counselling. Drawing on major traditions in learning theory, including behaviourist, cognitive, constructivist, social, experiential, transformative, and humanistic perspectives, the paper develops a conceptual framework for analysing counselling as a context in which intensive personal learning frequently occurs. Rather than proposing an equivalence between counselling and learning, the analysis identifies significant areas of conceptual overlap and highlights how counselling may facilitate changes in knowledge, self-understanding, behaviour, meaning making, and identity. Attention is given to the roles of reflection, experience, dialogue, agency, and relational processes in supporting learning-oriented forms of personal development. The article concludes that a learning perspective offers a valuable complementary lens for understanding counselling processes and provides a basis for strengthening interdisciplinary dialogue between counselling theory and learning theory. Implications for theory development, research, and professional practice are discussed, alongside the limitations of the present conceptual analysis.
Experiences can organize attention and action before they are readily explained, while articulation and later interpretation may alter what is noticed or felt. Psychology offers sophisticated but partly incompatible accounts of bodily affect, implicit experiencing, symbolization, and narrative meaning. This article develops a process-differentiation framework that compares four analytically distinct, potentially overlapping domains: embodied-affective orientation, implicit situational integration, symbolic articulation, and interpretive reconfiguration. Narrative configuration is treated as a form of interpretation, not an additional stage. The analysis is a purposive theoretical synthesis drawing on phenomenology, experiential process theory, emotion science, philosophy of symbolic forms, and narrative and psychotherapy research. Domains are compared by unit of analysis, function, medium, observational timescale, and evidentiary signature. Core affect and subcortical affective theories are treated as competing or complementary explanations rather than dismissed by definition. Experimental findings from affect labeling and reappraisal constrain specific propositions but do not validate the full framework. The proposed research program separates construct discrimination from the testing of possible cross-domain couplings, including their direction, timing, and contextual conditions. This approach aims to support integrative psychological inquiry without turning explanatory differences into a universal temporal sequence.
Thus Final Editorial depicts the experiences by the Editor-in-Chief of two decades of leading the Journal, and outlines its major challenges facing its future: growing information noise partly aggravated by the proliferation of AI, bureaucratization of academic evaluation systems that make bold new ideas risky to public. Since its re-construction in 2007 the Journal has witnessed major changes in the publication styles over the two decades. These changes can be viewed as a result of political and economic transformations in academic institutions around the World. The hope that the Journal will stay on its course to promote integration of theoretical ideas is crucial for its future.
This paper examines the cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms underlying the transformation of the fairy figure: from a dangerous entity in medieval folklore to an aestheticized symbol of digital culture. The central research question addresses why the aesthetic appeal of a mythological image increases its subjective plausibility and how this process contributes to the long-term evolution of folkloric representations. Drawing on a narrative review covering three key periods – the medieval era, the Victorian period, and the digital age – the study proposes that this transformation can be explained through the interaction of three mechanisms: an evolutionary mechanism (the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, HADD), a neuroaesthetic mechanism (activation of reward-related neural systems in response to attractive stimuli), and a psychological mechanism (escapism as a coping strategy). The analysis suggests that in medieval culture, the fairy functioned as a cognitive tool for structuring threat and explaining unpredictable events. During the Victorian era, under the influence of escapism and the commercialization of folklore, the image underwent aestheticization: its miniaturization and increased visual appeal reduced perceived threat. In the digital age, this process has been reinforced through aesthetics such as Cottagecore and Fairycore, where the fairy figure serves a psychological regulatory function in the context of urbanization and information overload. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a preliminary cognitive model of mythological transformation, describing a progression from HADD activation, through the halo effect, to the engagement of dopaminergic reward systems.
