Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science最新文献

The article explores the Trickster as a symbol of liminality, transgression, and creativity, analyzing its characteristics through mythology, folklore, and literature. The Trickster (a prankster and a "boundary-crosser") embodies ambiguity, deception, and hidden wisdom, operating at the intersection of order and disorder, of sacred and profane. Through myths such as that of Hermes, as well as the tales of fools, jesters, and clowns, the Trickster is portrayed as an agent of transformation, subversion, and innovation. It subverts social and cultural categories through play, irony, hyper-sexualization, and the absence of shame. Turner's theory of liminality and Freud's notion of the uncanny are compared to highlight how the Trickster traverses both psychosocial thresholds and the boundaries between consciousness and the repressed-generating ambiguity, anxiety, and estrangement. The Trickster's archetypal function, as elaborated by Jung, is expressed as both a collective and personal shadow-a symbol of productive chaos and unconscious creativity. This figure proves essential for understanding processes of cultural and psychic change, acting as a catalyst for innovation and symbolic renewal. This article emphasizes the importance of the Trickster as a symbol of psychic and collective processes of innovative adaptation, creativity, and transformation. But at the same time, the Trickster points to the associated risks of disorientation, unease, subversion and suffering. Through this ambivalence, the Trickster provides insights for interdisciplinary inquiry across cultural psychology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis.

This article advances a relational ontology of concepts (ROC) by synthesizing philosophy of language, cultural-historical psychology, developmental science, linguistics, and conceptual history into a single account of concepts as dynamic, multi-realized coordination patterns that are socially regulated and historically situated. Against views that treat concepts as fixed inner structures or mere labels, I first establish a single, coherent definition: concepts are purpose-oriented, public coordination patterns realized across distributed resources. I then develop a four-layer framework in which conceptual life emerges through coordination among embodied-affordance dynamics, grammatical-discursive scaffolds, social-normative participation, and institutional-historical infrastructures. Stability is explained by interlocking stabilization loops-practice canalization, grammatical regularities, norm enforcement, and codification-while flexibility is explained by recontextualization dynamics involving goal shifts, framing, dialogical realignment, and artifact or infrastructure innovation. I reinterpret Frege's sense/reference as publicly shared inferential profiles, integrate Wittgenstein's rule-following as the enactment and policing of public criteria, and develop a cultural-historical account in which internalization/externalization, the tension between conventional meaning (znachenie) and personal sense (smysl), and the interplay of everyday and scientific concepts reorganize conceptual practice across development. The framework yields methodological guidance for multi-stream evidence, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural predictions consonant with moderate linguistic relativity and thinking-for-speaking, and educational design principles that build coalitions across bodies, grammars, discourse, and inscriptions. I conclude by outlining limitations and a research program aimed at formalizing coalition reweighing and tracing how concepts become coordinates for coordinated action, understanding, and life in common. The result is a coherent, testable synthesis linking meaning, practice, and mind.

Based on the assumption that play is crucial to children's development and education, especially in the early years of the schooling process, the purpose of this article is present and discuss the role of the Anjii Play in Kindergarten in the Chinese context of schooling. We conducted research that sought to describe and analyze how the Anji Play educational model can contribute to the family-school transition and to the crossing of boundaries (symbolic, physical, pedagogical, etc.). Data was collected in a kindergarten in the city of Shanghai, China. Specifically, the research sought to describe both spontaneous and guided school activities; to analyze the planned activities on students' education; and to examine how educators plan these activities considering the process of boundary crossing, as well as how they evaluate these activities. By using the Anji Play educational method, which promotes children's enjoyment, engagement and reflection in learning through semi-structured play with natural materials, the kindergarten seeks to implement a way of teaching that emphasizes autonomy and respect for the child. In this sense, the article focuses on the relationship between spontaneous and guided activities using the Anji Play method and their repercussions on the process of boundary crossing for the young students.

This paper examines the project of cultural psychology proposed by Aaro Toomela in his recent paper (2025) through the prism of current discussions in sociology, primarily the theory of neo-structuration. This theory claims the increasing dependence of the transformation and the very survival of institutions and communities upon human agency, which is principally not determined by social environment. Toomela is right and timely in his critique of the mainstream and his call for a structural-systemic approach to psyche and culture, relying upon the ideas of Vygotsky, Luria and Anokhin, including the idea of a possible transformative stance of the individual towards the surrounding world. However, more attention should be paid to the most recent changes in socio-technical environment, primarily those brought about by the Artificial Intelligence, which entails both risks and opportunities by increasing the transformative power of human agency and becoming a producer and disseminator of cultural (or quasi-cultural) content. Considering this, we, first, suggest refinements to the definitions of "culture" and "psyche", proposed by Toomela, and, second, offer preliminary answers to the three basic questions that Toomela puts forward in his paper (2025): (1) What is the whole? (2) What are the parts or elements of the whole? (3) In which particular relationships these parts are? We argue that human agency, enhanced by novel technological tools and understood as a capacity to generate not only linguistic signs but new communities and modes of action - is an important theme for cultural psychology from both theoretical and practical points of view.

This literature review interrogates the underexplored intersection between linguistic relativity and urban perception, proposing that language is a critical yet neglected mediator of spatial experience. While urban design and spatial theory have increasingly engaged with sensory and cognitive frameworks, they often overlook how linguistic structures shape orientation, memory, affective appraisal, and symbolic engagement with urban environments. Anchored in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and extended through cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, and urban semiotics, this review synthesizes empirical and theoretical research across linguistics, psychology, geography, and urban studies. Four key mechanisms, lexical categorization, grammatical encoding, metaphorical framing, and discursive construction, are identified as primary ways through which language conditions urban perception. A critical evaluation of interdisciplinary methodologies reveals epistemic and empirical disjunctures, and calls for integrated approaches that bridge cognitive, linguistic, and spatial analysis. This paper offers a new conceptual framework to guide future research and invites urban theorists, designers, and cognitive scientists to consider language as foundational to understanding how cities are perceived, navigated, and lived.

The text reconstructs the history of Psychology in Brazil, taking as its central axis the relationship between physicians and Psychology - its theories, techniques, and, ultimately, its professionals. Recognizing that history is shaped by its context, it discusses the sociocultural conditions of Brazil's colonial period, the Empire, and the different stages of the Republic, seeking to interweave them with the medical approach to Mental Health. Against this backdrop, this paper aims at describing how medical studies appropriated the psychological knowledge developed in Europe in the late nineteenth century and it points out how, at the beginning of the following century, psychiatrists began to show interest in and make use of psychological testing, primarily to improve diagnostic discrimination. It then presents the process through which Psychology gained autonomy, following its appropriation by educators. The text later returns to the relationship between physicians and the now-established psychologists within the context of the Psychiatric Reform movement and their joint work in the Unified Health System (SUS). The conclusion points to some trends for the coming years.

This paper introduces History Therapy (HT)-an interdisciplinary framework that integrates historical knowledge with psychological and philosophical approaches to meaning-making, well-being, and happiness. HT addresses the contemporary crisis of meaning, marked by mental health issues and feelings of emptiness among diverse populations, from young people facing existential uncertainty to adults distressed by serious medical diagnoses. HT provides a method for participants to explore and analyze the worldviews of people from other eras and civilizations and compare their attitudes and beliefs with those of the past. This fosters deep self-reflection, new perspectives on life's questions, a better understanding of identity, and new meanings, all of which contribute to personal transformation and psychological well-being. Prior studies mainly focused on psychological or philosophical interventions to address the crisis of meaning. In contrast, HT provides a framework that uses curated historical "cases" to expose participants to alternative cultural worldviews, thereby catalyzing novel forms of self-reflection. This integrates historical knowledge in a structured, replicable manner and enhances meaning-centered therapies with interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, archaeology, history, and psychology. HT targets individuals seeking deeper self-knowledge and personal meaning, along with therapists and coaches interested in expanding their professional practice with historical knowledge. This article discusses future research directions and potential applications of HT to develop and consolidate the new method as a valuable addition to the humanities, social sciences, and mental health disciplines.

We comment on Aaro Toomela's article Toomela & Quo Vadis, (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 59:75, (2025), in which the author proposes using Piotr Anokhin's model of self-regulating system as a general theoretical basis for the development of cultural psychology. In light of self-regulating systems theory living systems, and social objects appear capable of maintaining homeostasis through accommodation in the context of environmental changes thanks to the predictability of environmental changes for the system. As scientific knowledge advances, great ideas formulated in the past reveal their potential for new interpretations and applications. We agree with Toomela about the relevance and potential of Anokhin's theory for actual development of cultural psychology. However, we assert the necessity along with implying the ideas of self-regulation, to introduce fundamentally different theoretical models, due to the insufficiency of homeostatic models for challenges of the contemporaneity. We argue that the world as a whole, and, first and foremost, humans and human culture, are currently undergoing significant unpredictable changes that go beyond the logics of homeostasis. Comprehending this complex reality requires enhancing the conceptual toolbox of cultural psychology with a different kind of theoretical models - those representing self-developing systems capable of changing their self-regulatory principles over the life course. The idea of ​​this type of development is not new. It echoed in Hegel's "interruption of gradualness" and in Kierkegaard's "leap". It echoes in the works of Vygotsky and Rubinstein. However, to date these ideas have not been operationalized and remain only beacons of future paths for cultural psychology. The difficulties of developing theoretical models of this kind and their relevance to the practical challenges of contemporary development are discussed.

In this article we analyse narratives of the lived experiences of three African male asylum seekers in Ireland. We examine how socio-political crises in their home countries created individual ruptures in their lives, leading them to seek refuge abroad. Two of the participants' attempts to soothe these transformative ruptures and experiences of past violence are articulated in a radically positive engagement with the precarious and uncertain reality of asylum seeking and the strongly negative societal discourse surrounding refugees. Their imagined hopeful futures for themselves in a new homeland contribute to a theorization of the power of imagination in producing utopias. The third case orientates around Victor, who was denied asylum and died by suicide. Although Victor was not a participant in our research in a traditional sense, his death permeated the lived experiences of other asylum seekers, both literally and symbolically. Victor is an encapsulation of the dystopic outcome of fleeing. By highlighting the intensively human experiences of these asylum seekers, we aim to humanize narratives surrounding global immigration, refugee status, and to problematize the derogatory discourse in Ireland surrounding "unvetted single males."