The “Spirit of New Orleans” : translating a model of intervention with maltreated children and their families for the Glasgow context

Peer reviewedPreprin

Linking differences in action perception with differences in action execution.

Successful human social interactions depend upon the transmission of verbal and non-verbal signals from one individual to another. Non-verbal social communication is realized through our ability to read and understand information present in other people's actions. It has been proposed that employing the same motor programs, we use to execute an action when observing the same action underlies this action understanding. The main prediction of this framework is that action perception should be strongly correlated with parameters of action execution. Here, we demonstrate that subjects' sensitivity to observed movement speeds is dependent upon how quickly they themselves executed the observed action. This result is consistent with the motor theory of social cognition and suggests that failures in non-verbal social interactions between individuals may in part result from differences in how those individuals move

Personality psychology: Lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts reveal only half of the story—Why it is time for a paradigm shift

This article develops a comprehensive philosophy-of-science for personality psychology that goes far beyond the scope of the lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts that currently prevail. One of the field’s most important guiding scientific assumptions, the lexical hypothesis, is analysed from meta-theoretical viewpoints to reveal that it explicitly describes two sets of phenomena that must be clearly differentiated: 1) lexical repertoires and the representations that they encode and 2) the kinds of phenomena that are represented. Thus far, personality psychologists largely explored only the former, but have seriously neglected studying the latter. Meta-theoretical analyses of these different kinds of phenomena and their distinct natures, commonalities, differences, and interrelations reveal that personality psychology’s focus on lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts entails a) erroneous meta-theoretical assumptions about what the phenomena being studied actually are, and thus how they can be analysed and interpreted, b) that contemporary personality psychology is largely based on everyday psychological knowledge, and c) a fundamental circularity in the scientific explanations used in trait psychology. These findings seriously challenge the widespread assumptions about the causal and universal status of the phenomena described by prominent personality models. The current state of knowledge about the lexical hypothesis is reviewed, and implications for personality psychology are discussed. Ten desiderata for future research are outlined to overcome the current paradigmatic fixations that are substantially hampering intellectual innovation and progress in the field

Motherhood, evolutionary psychology and mirror neurons or: ‘Grammar is politics by other means’

Through a close analysis of socio-biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work on motherhood and ‘mirror neurons’ it is argued that Hrdy’s claims exemplify how research that ostensibly bases itself on neuroscience, including in literary studies ‘literary Darwinism’, relies after all not on scientific, but on political assumptions, namely on underlying, unquestioned claims about the autonomous, transparent, liberal agent of consumer capitalism. These underpinning assumptions, it is further argued, involve the suppression or overlooking of an alternative, prior tradition of feminist theory, including feminist science criticism