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Dynamical Systems in Social Psychology by Robin R. Vallacher,Andrzej Nowak Pdf
A dynamical system refers to a set of elements that interact in complex, often nonlinear ways to form coherent patterns. Because of the complexity of these interactions, the system as a whole may evolve over time in seemingly unpredictable ways as new patterns of behavior emerge. This metatheory has proven useful in understanding diverse phenomena in meteorology, population biology, statistical mechanics, economics, and cosmology. The book demonstrates how the dynamical systems perspective can be applied to theory construction and research in social psychology, and in doing so, provides fresh insight into such complex phenomena as interpersonal behavior, social relations, attitudes, and social cognition.
Dynamical Social Psychology by Andrzej Nowak,Robin R. Vallacher Pdf
Traditional approaches to social psychology have proven highly successful in identifying causal mechanisms underlying human thought and behavior. With the recent advent of the dynamical approach, it is now possible to assemble sets of such mechanisms into coherent systems. This book uses innovative concepts and tools to illuminate the processes by which individuals, groups, and societies evolve and change in a systemic, self-sustaining manner, at times seemingly independent of external influences. Readers learn how the dynamical approach facilitates novel predictions and insights into such social psychological phenomena as attitudes, social judgment, goal-directed behavior, attraction, and relationships. Featuring a wealth of charts and figures derived from original research and computer simulations, the volume is grounded in classic and contemporary theories of social psychology.
The Dynamic Perspective in Personality and Social Psychology by Robin R. Vallacher,Stephen John Read,Andrzej Nowak Pdf
Recent years have witnessed the ascendance of a new way to conceptualize and investigate the nature of dynamism at different levels of psychological reality. Areas of inquiry as diverse as cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, organizational behavior, and political sociology are being reframed in terms that allow rigorous and precise insight into basic dynamic processes. There are signs that this new approach to dynamics is emerging as a potentially integrative paradigm for personality and social psychology as well. This special issue highlights this new paradigm and illustrates its relevance to a broad spectrum of topics in personality and social psychology.
Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations by Robin R. Vallacher,Peter T. Coleman,Andrzej Nowak,Lan Bui-Wrzosinska,Larry Liebovitch,Katharina Kugler,Andrea Bartoli Pdf
Conflict is inherent in virtually every aspect of human relations, from sport to parliamentary democracy, from fashion in the arts to paradigmatic challenges in the sciences, and from economic activity to intimate relationships. Yet, it can become among the most serious social problems humans face when it loses its constructive features and becomes protracted over time with no obvious means of resolution. This book addresses the subject of intractable social conflict from a new vantage point. Here, these types of conflict represent self-organizing phenomena, emerging quite naturally from the ongoing dynamics in human interaction at any scale—from the interpersonal to the international. Using the universal language and computational framework of nonlinear dynamical systems theory in combination with recent insights from social psychology, intractable conflict is understood as a system locked in special attractor states that constrain the thoughts and actions of the parties to the conflict. The emergence and maintenance of attractors for conflict can be described by means of formal models that incorporate the results of computer simulations, experiments, field research, and archival analyses. Multi-disciplinary research reflecting these approaches provides encouraging support for the dynamical systems perspective. Importantly, this text presents new views on conflict resolution. In contrast to traditional approaches that tend to focus on basic, short-lived cause-effect relations, the dynamical perspective emphasizes the temporal patterns and potential for emergence in destructive relations. Attractor deconstruction entails restoring complexity to a conflict scenario by isolating elements or changing the feedback loops among them. The creation of a latent attractor trades on the tendency toward multi-stability in dynamical systems and entails the consolidation of incongruent (positive) elements into a coherent structure. In the bifurcation scenario, factors are identified that can change the number and types of attractors in a conflict scenario. The implementation of these strategies may hold the key to unlocking intractable conflict, creating the potential for constructive social relations.
Computational Social Psychology by Robin R. Vallacher,Stephen J. Read,Andrzej Nowak Pdf
Computational Social Psychology showcases a new approach to social psychology that enables theorists and researchers to specify social psychological processes in terms of formal rules that can be implemented and tested using the power of high speed computing technology and sophisticated software. This approach allows for previously infeasible investigations of the multi-dimensional nature of human experience as it unfolds in accordance with different temporal patterns on different timescales. In effect, the computational approach represents a rediscovery of the themes and ambitions that launched the field over a century ago. The book brings together social psychologists with varying topical interests who are taking the lead in this redirection of the field. Many present formal models that are implemented in computer simulations to test basic assumptions and investigate the emergence of higher-order properties; others develop models to fit the real-time evolution of people’s inner states, overt behavior, and social interactions. Collectively, the contributions illustrate how the methods and tools of the computational approach can investigate, and transform, the diverse landscape of social psychology.
From a person's monetary impulses to a society's values and norms, the diversity of social psychology makes for a fascinating discipline, but it also presents a formidable challenge for presentation in a manner that is coherent and cumulative rather than fragmented and disordered. Using an accessible and readable style, the author shows how the field's dizzying and highly fragmented array of topics, models, theories, and paradigms can best be understood through a coherent conceptual narrative in which topics are presented in careful sequence, with each chapter building on what has already been learned while providing the groundwork for understanding what follows in the next chapter. The text also examines recent developments such as how computer simulations and big data supplement the traditional methods of experiment and correlation. -- From publisher's description.
This textbook provides a thorough insight into the discipline of social psychology, creating an integrative and cumulative framework to present students with a rich and engaging account of the human social experience. From a person’s momentary impulses to a society’s values and norms, the diversity of social psychology makes for a fascinating discipline, but it also presents a formidable challenge for presentation in a manner that is coherent and cumulative rather than fragmented and disordered. Using an accessible and readable style, the author shows how the field’s dizzying and highly fragmented array of topics, models, theories, and paradigms can best be understood through a coherent conceptual narrative in which topics are presented in careful sequence, with each chapter building on what has already been learned while providing the groundwork for understanding what follows in the next chapter. The text also examines recent developments such as how computer simulations and big data supplement the traditional methods of experiment and correlation. Also containing a wide range of features, including key term glossaries and compact "summing up and looking ahead" overviews, and covering an enormous range of topics from self-concept to social change, this comprehensive textbook is essential reading for any student of social psychology.
Additional Resource Materials Human behavior would not be interesting to us if it remained the same from one moment to the next. Moreover, we tend to be sensitive to changes in people's behavior, especially when such change impacts on our own, and other's, behavior. This book describes a variety of techniques for investigating change in behavior. It employs conventional time series methods, as well as recently developed methodology using nonlinear dynamics, including chaos, a term that is not easy to define, nor to confirm. Although nonlinear methods are being used more frequently in psychology, a comprehensive coverage of methods, theory and applications, with a particular focus on human behavior, is needed. Between these covers, the reader is led through various procedures for linear and nonlinear time series analysis, including some novel procedures that allow subtle temporal aspects of human cognition to be detected. Analyses of reaction times, heart-rate, psychomotor skill, decision making, and EEG are supplemented by a contemporary review of recent dynamical research in developmental psychology, psychopathology, and human cognitive processes. A consideration of nonlinear dynamics assists our understanding of deep issues such as: Why is our short-term memory capacity limited? Why do chronic disorders, and also cognitive development, progress through stage-like transitions? Why do people make irrational decisions? This book will be of particular interest to researchers, practitioners, and advanced students in a variety of areas in psychology, particularly in human experimental and physiological psychology. Data analyses are performed using the latest nonlinear dynamics computer packages. A comprehensive WWW resource of software and supplementary information is provided to assist the reader's understanding of the novel, and potentially revolutionary, procedures described in the book.
Dynamical Cognitive Science by Lawrence M. Ward Pdf
An introduction to the application of dynamical systems science to the cognitive sciences. Dynamical Cognitive Science makes available to the cognitive science community the analytical tools and techniques of dynamical systems science, adding the variables of change and time to the study of human cognition. The unifying theme is that human behavior is an "unfolding in time" whose study should be augmented by the application of time-sensitive tools from disciplines such as physics, mathematics, and economics, where change over time is of central importance. The book provides a fast-paced, comprehensive introduction to the application of dynamical systems science to the cognitive sciences. Topics include linear and nonlinear time series analysis, chaos theory, complexity theory, relaxation oscillators, and metatheoretical issues of modeling and theory building. Tools and techniques are discussed in the context of their application to basic cognitive science problems, including perception, memory, psychophysics, judgment and decision making, and consciousness. The final chapter summarizes the contemporary study of consciousness and suggests how dynamical approaches to cognitive science can help to advance our understanding of this central concept.
Analysis of Dynamic Psychological Systems by H.E. Fitzgerald,R.L. Levine Pdf
Drawing on sources from a wide range of disciplines, this first volume of a two volume tutorial on systems theory focuses on non-linear dynamical techniques for analysis of feedback processes, information flow, decision making, control theory, and modeling of human behavioral systems.
Over the past several decades, the sciences have witnessed a significant paradigm shift. Our traditional notions of order, energy, causality and methodology have all been upended. A new set of views has arisen that enables us to better understand and examine the complexity of nature. In this perspective, behavior is nonlinear, order emerges spontaneously and responses are best understood as the movement of trajectories through multi-dimensional space. This book examines the role that dynamical systems, complexity science, networks, and fractals play in helping to explain the most difficult thing of all: ourselves.
Target in Control by Andrzej K. Nowak,Robin R. Vallacher,Agnieszka Rychwalska,Magdalena Roszczyńska-Kurasińska,Karolina Ziembowicz,Mikolaj Biesaga,Marta Kacprzyk-Murawska Pdf
This concise monograph introduces and examines social influence from the perspective of the so-called target, rather than from the source, thus providing for the first time a bidirectional account of this pervasive social phenomenon, further bridging simple micro-level dyadic interaction rules with macro-level properties of the (social) system. This integrative approach allows for advanced models of influence to be developed in both the social and natural sciences (e.g. social animals). In particular, when used to investigate emergent properties of social change, this approach shows that social transitions occur as “bubbles of new” in the “sea of old.” While in the traditional view influence is synonymous with achieving power and control over others, the present approach to social influence puts the emphasis on the target’s motives and strategies. Here, the target may actively seek out influence to help forge opinions and achieve guidance regarding courses of action. In this process, the target observes others, models their thought and behavior, and asks for information and opinions. In this broadened perspective, the processes of social influence enables those being influenced (the targets) to use the knowledge and processing capacity of influence sources to maximize their access to information, minimize their processing effort, while optimizing their own functioning and that of the social system in which they evolve. This short text addresses above all scientists interested in social influence in the fields of psychology, sociology, economy, marketing, and biology. However, also researchers interested in modeling social processes, especially opinion dynamics and social change, such as computer scientists, physicists and applied mathematicians will benefit from the insights provided.
Coordination: Neural, Behavioral and Social Dynamics by Armin Fuchs,Viktor K. Jirsa Pdf
One of the most striking features of Coordination Dynamics is its interdisciplinary character. The problems we are trying to solve in this field range from behavioral phenomena of interlimb coordination and coordination between stimuli and movements (perception-action tasks) through neural activation patterns that can be observed during these tasks to clinical applications and social behavior. It is not surprising that close collaboration among scientists from different fields as psychology, kinesiology, neurology and even physics are imperative to deal with the enormous difficulties we are facing when we try to understand a system as complex as the human brain. The chapters in this volume are not simply write-ups of the lectures given by the experts at the meeting but are written in a way that they give sufficient introductory information to be comprehensible and useful for all interested scientists and students.
foreword by Hermann Haken For the past twenty years Scott Kelso's research has focused on extending the physical concepts of self- organization and the mathematical tools of nonlinear dynamics to understand how human beings (and human brains) perceive, intend, learn, control, and coordinate complex behaviors. In this book Kelso proposes a new, general framework within which to connect brain, mind, and behavior.Kelso's prescription for mental life breaks dramatically with the classical computational approach that is still the operative framework for many newer psychological and neurophysiological studies. His core thesis is that the creation and evolution of patterned behavior at all levels--from neurons to mind--is governed by the generic processes of self-organization. Both human brain and behavior are shown to exhibit features of pattern-forming dynamical systems, including multistability, abrupt phase transitions, crises, and intermittency. Dynamic Patterns brings together different aspects of this approach to the study of human behavior, using simple experimental examples and illustrations to convey essential concepts, strategies, and methods, with a minimum of mathematics. Kelso begins with a general account of dynamic pattern formation. He then takes up behavior, focusing initially on identifying pattern-forming instabilities in human sensorimotor coordination. Moving back and forth between theory and experiment, he establishes the notion that the same pattern-forming mechanisms apply regardless of the component parts involved (parts of the body, parts of the nervous system, parts of society) and the medium through which the parts are coupled. Finally, employing the latest techniques to observe spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity, Kelso shows that the human brain is fundamentally a pattern forming dynamical system, poised on the brink of instability. Self-organization thus underlies the cooperative action of neurons that produces human behavior in all its forms.
Modeling Love Dynamics by Sergio E. T. Al RINALDI Pdf
This book shows, for the very first time, how love stories -- a vital issue in our lives -- can be tentatively described with classical mathematics. Focus is on the derivation and analysis of reliable models that allow one to formally describe the expected evolution of love affairs from the initial state of indifference to the final romantic regime. The models are in full agreement with the basic philosophical principles of love psychology. Eight chapters are theoretically oriented and discuss the romantic relationships between important classes of individuals identified by particular psychological traits. The remaining chapters are devoted to case studies described in classical poems or in worldwide famous films.