Subject collection: Psychology (246 titles, 1978–2015)

A face strikes us immediately as sad, and so, too, do a mourner, a willow tree, a house on a prairie, and a group of onlookers. The spontaneous emergence of affective and other qualities of people, things, places, and events falls under the heading of physiognomy, a phenomenon discussed since at least Aristotle, and a key feature of evolutionary theory, psychology, and perception as well as professional practice (“profiling”) and popular talk. However, physiognomy is a controversial topic because of a suspect history, and is often renamed as non-verbal communication.

The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered examines this venerable, attractive, and contentious topic within the unique perspective of research-oriented psychology. Included are the processes involved, primarily perceptual; origins, mainly evolutionary; and social-cultural factors as supplements. Discussed within a holistic-experiential (phenomenological)-aesthetic framework are physiognomy’s ties to the arts as well as emotions, synesthesia, learning, development, and personality. Empirical investigations are summarized, including the author’s.

Intended for philosophically minded psychologists and psychologically minded philosophers, this book identifies the ways that psychology has hobbled itself by adhering too strictly to empiricism, this being the doctrine that all knowledge is observation-based. In the first part of this two-part work, we show that empiricism is false. In the second part, we identify the psychology-relevant consequences of this fact. Five of these are of special importance: (i) Whereas some psychopathologies (e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorder) corrupt the activity mediated by one’s psychological architecture, others (e.g. sociopathy) corrupt that architecture itself.

(ii) The basic tenets of psychoanalysis are coherent.

(iii) All propositional attitudes are beliefs.

(iv) Selves are minds that self-evaluate.

And:

(v) It is by giving our thoughts a perceptible form that we enable ourselves to evaluate them, and it is by expressing ourselves in language and art that we give our thoughts a perceptible form. (Series A)

This volume offers an ontogenetic perspective on research on L3, multilingualism and multiple languages acquisition and a conceptually updated picture of multilingualism studies and third/multiple language acquisition studies. The contributions by prominent scholars of multilingualism present state-of-the-art accounts of the significant aspects in this field. This unique collection of articles adopts a broad-spectrum and synthesized view on the topic. The volume, largely theoretical and classificatory, features main theories, prominent researchers and important research trends. The articles also contain factual and historical material from previous and current decades of research and offer practical information on research resources. For lecturers, students, educators, researchers, and social workers operating in multilingual contexts, The Exploration of Multilingualism is manifestly relevant.

Written for the psychologist, philosopher, and layperson interested in consciousness, Exploring Inner Experience provides a comprehensive introduction to the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method for obtaining accurate reports of inner experience. DES uses a beeper to cue participants to pay attention to their experience at precisely defined moments; participants are then interviewed to obtain high-fidelity accounts of their experience at those moments. Exploring Inner Experience shows (a) how DES uncovers previously unknown details of inner experience; (b) how the implications of this method affect our understanding of inner experience and the human condition more generally; (c) how DES avoids the traps that destroyed the introspections of the previous century; (d) why DES reports of inner experience should be considered reliable and valid; and (e) how to use the DES method. This book will be basic reading for all psychologists, philosophers, and students interested in consciousness, as well as anyone who is seriously concerned with understanding the human condition.(Series B)

Emotional Cognition gives the reader an up to date overview of the current state of emotion and cognition research that is striving for computationally explicit accounts of the relationship between these two domains. Many different areas are covered by some of the leading theorists and researchers in this area and the book crosses a range of domains, from the neurosciences through cognition and formal models to philosophy. Specific chapters consider, amongst other things, the role of emotion in decision-making, the representation and evaluation of emotive events, the relationship of affect on working memory and goal regulation. The emergence of such an integrative, computational, approach in emotion and cognition research is a unique and exciting development, one that will be of interest to established scholars as much as graduate students feeling their way in this area, and applicable to research in applied as well as purely theoretical domains. (Series B)

The relationship between language and conceptualization remains one of the major puzzles in language research. This monograph addresses this issue by means of an in depth corpus based and experimental investigation of the major types of expressions of epistemic modality in Dutch, German and English. By adopting a systematic functional orientation, the book explains a whole range of peculiarities of epistemic expression forms (synchronically and diachronically), and it offers a clear perspective on which cognitive systems are needed to get from the concept of epistemic modality to its linguistic expression. On that basis the author postulates a sophisticated, layered view of human conceptualization. This book is of interest both to scholars working on modality and related semantic dimensions, and to the interdisciplinary field of researchers concerned with the cognitive systems involved in language use.

Errors are information. In contrastive linguistics, they are thought to be caused by unconscious transfer of mother tongue structures to the system of the target language and give information about both systems. In the interlanguage hypothesis of second language acquisition, errors are indicative of the different intermediate learning levels and are useful pedagogical feedback. In both cases error analysis is an essential methodological tool for diagnosis and evaluation of the language acquisition process. Errors, too, give information in psychoanalysis (e.g., the Freudian slip), in language universal research, and in other fields of linguistics, such as linguistic change.This bibliography is intended to stimulate study into cross-language, cross-discipline and cross-theoretical, as well as for language universal, use of the numerous, but sometimes hard to come by, error analysis studies. 5398 titles covering the period 1578 up to 1990 (with work in more than 144 languages and language families) are cited, cross-referenced, and described. The subject areas covered are numerous. For example: Theoretical Linguistics (Linguistic Typology, Cognitive Linguistics), Historical Linguistics (Language Change), Applied Linguistics (e.g. Speech Disorders), Translation, Mother Tongue Acquisition, Foreign Language Learning (Negative Transfer, Intralingual and Interlingual Errors), Psychoanalysis (Slips of the Tongue), Typography, Shorthand, Clinical Linguistics and Speech Pathology, Reading Research, Automatic Error Detection, Contact Linguistics (Code-switching, Interference), etc.

Fac simile edition with a Foreword by E. F. K. Koerner and an Introduction by David J. Murray. The appendix contains Erwin A. Esper’s A Contribution to the Experimental Study of Analogy (1918).