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10963 results in Psychology: general interest

Page 140 of 549

  • 19 - Self-Report Scales for Common Mental Disorders

  • from Part II - Specific Clinical Assessment Methods
  • Edited by Martin Sellbom, University of Otago, New Zealand, Julie A. Suhr, Ohio University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis
    Published online:
    06 December 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019, pp 263-277

  • Summary

    Self-report scales that measure the severity of common mental disorders based on subjective signs and symptoms form a critical component in clinical psychology and psychiatry. There are numerous advantages of self-report scales, including increased efficiency with respect to costs and administration time as well as being amenable to electronic administration. However, there are several disadvantages, including susceptibility to nonoptimal response strategies and cross-cultural bias. The current chapter provides an overview of some of the more widely used self-report scales for depression and anxiety in research and clinical settings, with a specific focus on their psychometric properties and cross-cultural applicability. In addition, this chapter discusses the application of modern test theory to self-report scales for common mental disorders, with the aim of improving the reliability, validity, comparability, and efficiency of self-report data.

  • 7 - Practical Applications

  • René M. Dailey, University of Texas, Austin
  • Book:
    On-Again, Off-Again Relationships
    Published online:
    02 December 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019, pp 138-148

  • Summary

    Situating the research regarding cyclical relationships within the larger sphere of relationships research, several practical applications are offered. Recommendations depend on goals partners have for their relationships. For those wanting to maintain the relationship but stop the cycling, partners might need to explicitly negotiate the rules or expectations of their relationships to ensure that the issues that led to the previous breakups are resolved. Given the increased incidence of conflict and aggression, finding more effective conflict management tactics might also aid in gaining a steadier path. For those wanting to redefine their relationship into a friendship, there are few scripts and many challenges. Frequently, at least one partner also desires reconciliation, and these partners might become overly intrusive. Although possible, post-dissolution relationships might require explicit boundary negotiation. Those wanting permanent dissolution should avoid surveilling or contact with the ex-partner, which can lead to rumination and thus exacerbate breakup distress. Additionally, reframing thoughts about the breakup to see potential positives as well as re-establishing one’s identity outside of the relationship can help ex-partners move forward.

The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence
  • 2nd edition
  • Edited by Robert J. Sternberg
  • Published online:
    13 December 2019
    Print publication:
    16 January 2020
  • Written by the foremost experts in human intelligence. It not only includes traditional topics, such as the nature, measurement, and development of intelligence, but also contemporary research into intelligence and video games, collective intelligence, emotional intelligence, and leadership intelligence. In an area of study that has been fraught with ideological differences, this Handbook provides scientifically balanced and objective chapters covering a wide range of topics. It does not shy away from material that historically has been emotionally charged and sometimes covered in biased ways, such as intellectual disability, race and intelligence, culture and intelligence, and intelligence testing. The overview provided by this two-volume set leaves virtually no area of intelligence research uncovered, making it an ideal resource for undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals looking for a refresher or a summary of the new developments.

The Cambridge Handbook of Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis
  • Edited by Martin Sellbom, Julie A. Suhr
  • Published online:
    06 December 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019
  • This Handbook provides a contemporary and research-informed review of the topics essential to clinical psychological assessment and diagnosis. It outlines assessment issues that cross all methods, settings, and disorders, including (but not limited to) psychometric issues, diversity factors, ethical dilemmas, validity of patient presentation, psychological assessment in treatment, and report writing. These themes run throughout the volume as leading researchers summarize the empirical findings and technological advances in their area. With each chapter written by major experts in their respective fields, the text gives interpretive and practical guidance for using psychological measures for assessment and diagnosis.

Relationship Maintenance
  • Theory, Process, and Context
  • Edited by Brian G. Ogolsky, J. Kale Monk
  • Published online:
    02 December 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019
  • Relationship maintenance encompasses a wide range of activities that partners use to preserve their relationships. Despite the importance of these efforts, considerably more empirical focus has been devoted to starting (i.e. initiation) and ending (i.e. dissolution) relationships than on maintaining them. In this volume, internationally renowned scholars from a variety of disciplines describe diverse sets of relationship maintenance efforts in order to show why some relationships endure, whereas others falter. By focusing on 'what to do' rather than 'what not to do' in relationships, this book paints a more comprehensive picture of the forms, functions, and contexts of relationship maintenance. It is essential reading for scholars and students in psychology, communication, human development and family science, sociology, and couple/marriage and family therapy.

On-Again, Off-Again Relationships
  • Navigating (In)Stability in Romantic Relationships
  • René M. Dailey
  • Published online:
    02 December 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019
  • In a world where we have an endless number of options to swipe through, why do many of us repeatedly return to previous romantic partners? This book addresses this question by synthesizing the research on relationships that break up and renew (i.e. 'on-again, off-again' relationships) from various disciplines including communication, social psychology, family studies, and sociology. It explicates the various types and trajectories of on-again, off-again relationships, and uncovers how these relationships are different from those that do not split up and reconcile. Because on-again, off-again relationships challenge traditional notions of relationship stability and highlight the fluctuating nature of relationships, alternative conceptualizations of stability are also reviewed. This book is a theoretical and practical resource for researchers, students, and professionals interested in understanding why partners repeatedly reconcile with ex-partners.

  • 2 - Black Consciousness

  • N. Chabani Manganyi
  • Book:
    Being Black in the World
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 20-31

  • Summary

    The marriage between the words ‘black’ and ‘consciousness’ has in some instances led to panic and consternation in certain sections of the South African public. There have been arguments, debates and naggings. It all happened so quickly that some observers have even suggested that the bogey of swartgevaar was suddenly becoming real. After this marriage it even became customary for some people of liberal bent to suggest that black South Africans were now turning racialist. In these observations, there appeared at most times to be an insinuation that black people were becoming the ungrateful people that they are known to be by putting the liberals out of work. This kind of reaction is not entirely unexpected when one considers that South African liberalism can only be a form of narcissism – a form of white self-love. People who love themselves can pity only themselves, hardly anybody else.

    What, in fact, these people were saying was that they have been fighting for the black cause for a long time, that it had since become second nature to them to do this pious work. How dare the black people disturb the scheme of things by wanting to do the spadework as well as the dirty work themselves. The extent of South African white fathering was dramatised recently when a black organisation demanded that the word ‘blacks’ be used instead of the notoriously insulting ‘non-Whites’ or ‘non-Europeans’. What happened at that time was very instructive. We were told in so many ways that we should not behave like a naughty little boy who changes his name without the explicit permission of his father. So many theoretical and semantic difficulties were immediately thrown in our faces. We were told even before the Indian population objected that they would feel insulted by being lumped into the black bag. That effort was a unique demonstration of the white people's expertise in hyperbole.

    Leaving the white reaction aside for the moment, we may now turn our attention to the actual marriage that took place between the words ‘black’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘solidarity’. Since it has been suggested that these words might mean damnation or racialism or swartgevaar, it becomes necessary to inquire into some of their meanings as understood by us. I should not be misunderstood to be saying that all black people will agree with my understanding of these concepts.

  • 45 - Healing potential

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 97-97

  • Summary

    What original insights are to be gained from Africancentred psychology studies about, say, some children's multiple traumas, cognitive development among traumatised children, aggression after a traumatic childhood?

    We hardly know, it is true. Very little research exists; that is a fact. And extremely importantly, almost nothing exists in the way of testable explanations – what is often called theory – from African-centred psychological perspectives to illuminate how societies around the world consider embodied heart-andmind suffering and embodied mind-and-heart healing.

    Aspects of Euroamerican-centred therapies, like psychoanalysis and cognitive-behavioural therapy, can and do help some people in Africa. However, having overtly, surreptitiously and unconsciously contributed to colonial rule, coloniality, apartheid and global supremacist white patriarchal capitalism, Euroamerican psychology often achieves more harm that healing. As a result, although we do not have a solid body of African-centred psychology, there is discernible potential for African-centred psychology to become a real positive force. A massive need exists for African-centred psychological work.

  • 4 - Awake to Africa

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 6-7

  • Summary

    Whereas Africa tends in large measure to be regarded in psychological studies as little more than an extractive data site, to begin by thinking of Africa and African as unspoken terms in African psychology is to awake to Africa – to the fact of being African, or of researching, teaching, doing psychotherapy, or studying in a place in Africa – as ontologically and epistemologically productive elements of the process of understanding, in psychological terms, the lives of individuals in the countries of Africa, from Algeria to Zimbabwe.

    To be able to fully realise such a situated psychology, one that authoritatively but wordlessly situates Africa and the dynamic and complex psychological lives of Africans – the cognitive, emotional, motivational, relational, experiential, cultural and behavioural aspects of their lives – at the centre of the field of psychology, is the ultimate epistemic (regarding questions of knowledge) and ontological (concerned with questions of what it means to be human and to live with other forms of life) goal of this kind of African psychology. What is that African psychology to which we are referring, after all, if not a situated psychology?

    At the same time, because African psychology demands engagement in what the black Caribbean Africana philosopher Lewis Gordon (2007: 121) calls ‘explicit adjectival techniques of appearance’, consciously centring Africa and Africans in psychology, as in all of the sciences and the arts, without uttering these terms, is something we must learn to do. To do African psychology without explicitly mentioning Africa is to clear space in the present and in history, and prevail over the erasures of Euroamerican psychology. To do psychology that assumes Africa is to claim recognition and, even more critically, to assert the fact that all of the world can be cognised from here. Because, on the whole, only a psychology that centres on a certain life lived in Western Europe and the US has so far enjoyed the power of referring to itself without the need for adjectives, and doing African psychology can mean feeling compelled to locate your work as African. The goal is to make this unnecessary, although the compulsion imposed by Euroamerican psychologists, journal editors and reviewers, and book publishers is quite real.

  • 2 - The necessary adjective

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 2-3

  • Summary

    Confusion is never far off regarding what precisely is being referred to whenever the term ‘African psychology’ is uttered. We ought to note, therefore, at this early point that there is more than one way of defining African psychology. This is how my co-authors and I have written about the multiple meanings of the term: ‘African psychology means the same thing as, for example, psychology in, by, from, or of Africa or Africans’ (Ratele et al. 2018: 332). (I should add: psychology for Africa or Africans.) That is to say, African psychology can mean psychology in Western Sahara or South Sudan. It can mean psychology practised by Egyptians or Ethiopians. Psychology from Senegal or South Africa. Psychology of Africa, or of one or other African nation. Psychology for Africans. All of this implies that we always have to ask what preposition is being elided between ‘psychology’ and ‘Africa/n’, in order to define the kind of African psychology to which we are referring. It also means that there is always a question of why there should be a need for African psychology, when the ‘science’ of psychology is said to be universal. But, fundamentally, it is the notion of universal human science – of its truthfulness and completeness – that is at stake: a human science that bears no marks of the humans who produce it, that has been shorn of values and normativity.

    It is of utmost importance to note, then, that it is not in all of African psychology that Africa and Africans are implied – only in the kind of African psychology that will be advanced here. This is African psychology sensu stricto (in the narrow sense): psychology that places Africa and Africans at its centre, while simultaneously being open and talking to a wider world.

    The psychology that tacitly places Africa and Africans at its centre is, however, the ideal. That psychology emerges from under the rubble of colonial ruins, apartheid racism and post-independence despotism. The time when a psychology student at the University of Johannesburg says, ‘I am studying psychology,’ and is immediately presumed to be referring to African psychology, is in the future.

  • 32 - Self-sabotage

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 80-80

  • Summary

    An African-centred psychologist can say, ‘I study cognitive development from an African perspective,’ of course. But the moment you utter those words, despite your conscious intention, you have already betrayed your unconscious wish and real desire. Your real desire is to persuade the audience of the rightness of your study. Your unconscious wish is for your view to be accepted. As such, you have undermined the potential influence of your study. And you will be rejected.

    The argument that when a female researcher feels compelled to state (to give another example), ‘My master's study looked at stress among first-generation middle-class women and men from an African feminist perspective,’ she has already undermined the potential influence of her study, arises from the knowledge that the most likely question that follows her declaration is not, ‘What did you find?’ but rather, ‘What is an African feminist perspective?’ This is not necessarily an unwelcome question if you are developing an African feminist perspective. But it may be distressing when you wish to talk about stress, and that is the main question in which your audience is interested.

  • 38 - Invisible Africa

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 87-88

  • Summary

    The problem of a nebulous Africa is found in all the sub-disciplines of Euroamerican psychology.

    The issue of a master knowledge – and knowledge-making tools – is not confined to psychology and its specialities. A similar problem, to a greater or lesser degree, can be observed in anthropology, economics, gender studies, geography, management studies, political science and sociology. Within psychology, the hegemony of Euroamerican-centrism and its associated master's gaze, ideas and techniques of knowledge-making is more obvious in some branches of the discipline, like psychopathology, assessment and developmental psychology, than in others, like biological psychology.

    But it is when we take a look at the less mainstream areas of psychology like community, critical, or cultural psychology that we are confronted with a deep irony: that even those who regard themselves as critics or on the margins of traditional psychology are capable of reproducing an imperialist and colonial architecture of knowledge in their relations with Africa. Thus, the problem of an invisible Africa and the marginality of African thought inheres in the core of the discipline of psychology – indeed, in the very foundations of the social sciences and humanities as a whole. The foundations of psychology, as a discipline rooted in Euroamerican-centred modernity, were built on its opposition to Africa as a primitive object, as lacking, as an absence.

    The Nigerian literary scholar and poet Harry Garuba's perceptiveness about the development of silences in the production of disciplines, and how they come to be taken up in Africa, is instructive (Garuba 2012). His insights suggest to me why, in the light of the long process of developing and consolidating the discipline of psychology, a process that began in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to appreciate the role assigned to Africa and Africans. Recognition of the need for an African-centred emancipatory psychology thus begins with an understanding of how Africa and Africans were imagined at the founding of the social sciences and humanities, and still are in these disciplines as we have them today.

  • 50 - A worldwide need

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 103-103

  • Summary

    There seem to be a number of reasons why the ethical and moral and political and existential duty to contribute to this task of realising an African-centred psychology is obscured. However, there is one major reason that reveals the problem faced by any woman or man in Africa who would call for an African psychology. That reason signals that what holds back the development of African psychology and its potential flourishing is multilayered: it is ontological, it is epistemological, it is political, it is cultural and it is psychical. That reason is the fact that some of us have absorbed the discourse that African psychology may have been necessary for Africans in America, but it was not needed for us, Africans, here at home. There is a pervasive feeling, attitude, or idea, usually unexpressed but one that can be found in action, that ‘we are in Africa and do not need an African psychology’.

    Not to overstate it: we desperately and totally do. Some of our ancestors may have been captured and enslaved to work the cotton plantations in the Americas, but the slave ideology and colonialism affected even those who escaped the slave ships. Slavery and colonialism stained the whole world, and many black people are still discoloured and disfigured by its long-term effects. We need African psychology for the world, not just for African Americans, and not just for us, here, whose ancestors escaped the slavers’ clutches. Even though they sometimes cannot put a name to this need, many African students of psychology, scholars, teachers and practitioners who continue to be privately alienated in their classes, in their writings against the whiteness and Euroamerican nature of psychology in Africa, in their lives, need what African psychology can offer them.

  • 82 - Four orientations

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 151-152

  • Summary

    Having come this far, I would now like to give an outline of my framework for (thinking about and doing and seeing) African psychology as situated knowledge and practice. Better yet, of understanding African psychology as a set of orientations. Whereas we can be forgiven for thinking of African psychology as all of psychology in Africa, about Africans, by Africans and non-Africans, the distinguishing and anchoring element of the framework is precisely this: African psychology is a set of repertoires tied to how we orient our studies, teaching and therapeutics to individuals in Africa, and, equally important, how we orient ourselves to the world from places in Africa. African psychology is, therefore, situated knowledge and practice.

    The main idea underpinning the framework is this: African psychology is composed of multiple orientations towards Africa and psychology. There are four orientations, distinguishable from each other by how you situate yourself with respect to psychology and Africa, to Africa in psychology (Ratele 2017a). The number of orientations is not definitive; the fact that there are several orientations is what matters.

    The four orientations that constitute African psychology are:

  • Euroamerican or Western-oriented African psychology;

  • psychological African studies;

  • value-based, spiritual, metaphysical, philosophical, or cultural African psychology (cultural African psychology for short); and

  • structural, materialist, political, or critical African psychology (critical African psychology for short).

    • Some of these orientations are readily graspable – such as the more Western-oriented psychology in Africa. As the mainstream, this Western-oriented African psychology is where the majority of psychologists are situated, and the literature produced from this orientation is too vast to reference. The other three orientations are represented by a handful of scholars (Mkhize 2004; Nwoye 2015; Semenya & Mokwena 2012).

  • 36 - It's African, except when it's not

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 84-84

  • Summary

    The idea of African psychology appears to be a straightforward matter, I have said, except when it is not. And the latter, not the former, is usually the state of affairs.

    It may be easy to comprehend that all of psychology done in and for Africa, about Africans, by Africans as well as non- Africans (working on topics related to Africa and Africans) is of course African psychology. However, confusion is introduced when psychologists in Africa regard themselves as not African psychologists. It would seem logical that psychologists working in Europe are European psychologists. (Except, that is, those psychologists who hold Yemeni, Nigerian or Argentinian passports, or who identify with their birth countries outside of the European community even though they may have acquired citizenship of a European country, or who are stateless, or who live in other circumstances that could nullify the professional identity ‘European psychologist’.)

    Similarly, it would seem logical that psychologists working in Africa are African psychologists. Except that it is not. One explanation is that some psychology teachers, researchers and therapists simply do not identify with Africa. A lot of work is required to undo the miseducation that created such teachers, researchers and therapists. Others feel ambivalent about their own fortunes being tied to the fortune of Africa. Some hope exists that positive light can be cast on such ambivalence. Still others, especially students and younger psychologists, may be disoriented, fearful, or lack knowledge about Africa. Among the three explanations, this is the one in which the greatest hope for the future of African psychology is to be found.

  • 63 - In and of the world

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 124-125

  • Summary

    Let me pose the question: can someone like Jan Christiaan Smuts be considered the father of African psychology? Because, I have suggested, many whites, even after generations of living in Africa, disavow or are excluded from the identity of African. Because African is confounded with blackness. The question of colonialism reappears: the colonialism in knowledge. The question of racism and its racialising effects in the development of disciplines. That is to say, in how racism turns some into whites and others into subordinate races. How are we then to think of fathers of knowledge fields in the context of colonial, racist and sexist domination and exclusion?

    In 1895 Jan Christiaan Smuts, a student at Oxford University and later twice prime minister of South Africa, completed a manuscript in which he analysed the personality of American poet Walt Whitman. Considered financially unviable for publication at the time, the manuscript ‘Walt Whitman: A study in the evolution of personality’ was eventually published in 1973 (Smuts 1973). Could Smuts be seen as the first father of African psychology?

    The answer to this question depends on, among other things, what is to be done with the racist roots of psychology in Africa. It depends, given a history in which ‘bastard’ offspring could be enslaved by their fathers, on how we want to think of white men who fathered African offspring. I am aware that whatever answer is given, it will not be unanimous. But I contend that Smuts did African psychology, if in passing, because of the mere fact that he lived in Africa. As to what kind of African psychology his study of Whitman was, that is a more interesting question.

    Nevertheless, here, then, in the picture of the young J.C. Smuts, a student at Oxford with a psychological interest in an American poet, is a sign: psychology students and psychologists from Africa have always been part of the world. They still are.

    In addition, psychology students and psychologists from other parts of the world have contributed to African psychology – even if that knowledge was not always for the good of the majority of people of the continent.

  • 12 - Overlooked perspectives

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 29-30

  • Summary

    In an article with the title ‘“Too good to be real”: The obviously augmented breast in women's narratives of cosmetic surgery’, published in 2013 in the journal Gender & Society, Debra Gimlin writes that ‘in Westernised societies, no other aspect of women's embodiment is as scrutinized or as emblematic of femininity as breasts’ (2013: 918). What this otherwise interesting article appears unaware of are the complex ways in which women's breasts are perceived among groups such as young Swati and Zulu women, in eSwatini and South Africa. This complexity is tied to the idea of Westernisation. It may well be true that women's breasts are the most scrutinised parts of their bodies in Westernised societies. At the same time, the notion of ‘Westernised societies’ referred to in this case is not unpacked. Is the reference to countries in the West? To predominantly white countries? If the intention was to speak about all Westernised societies, which includes not only countries of the West but all those societies which were colonised by Europe and therefore Westernised, then the author has excluded several societies, including those in Africa, in which the discourse on women's embodiment and femininity is denser precisely because of the existence of more than one competing discourse on femininity; where society does borrow the fetishising narrative of the breast from the West but there is also a destabilisation of such fetishisation because the society has other narratives. How is this critique, which simultaneously dismisses a whole part of the world, to be read then? Some of what the author notes may actually apply to how women's bodies are regarded in countries that are excluded from the ‘Westernised societies’ referred to. Some does not apply. And the apparent ignorance on the part of some feminist scholars about how women's bodies and femininity are perceived in Westernised African societies is yet another call to feminist and other critical African female and male scholars to ‘write African femininities and masculinities’ for the world. Even if it is just one among thousands of instances, does this example not indicate the persistent need to understand society, the body and the psyche from African-centred perspectives?

Page 140 of 549