Review of General Psychology

Latinjak, Alexander T.; Morin, Alain; Brinthaupt, Thomas M.; Hardy, James; Hatzigeorgiadis, Antonis; Kendall, Philip C.; Neck, Christopher; Oliver, Emily J.; Puchalska-Wasyl, Małgorzata M.; Tovares, Alla V.; Winsler, Adam

doi: 10.1177/10892680231170263pmid: N/A

The present work synthesises the self-talk literature and constructs a transdisciplinary self-talk model to guide future research across all academic disciplines that engage with self-talk. A comprehensive research review was conducted, including 559 self-talk articles published between 1978 and 2020. These articles were divided into 6 research categories: (a) inner dialogue, (b) mixed spontaneous and goal-directed organic self-talk, (c) goal-directed self-talk, (d) spontaneous self-talk, (e) educational self-talk interventions, and (f) strategic self-talk interventions. Following this, critical details were extracted from a subsample of 100 articles to create an interdisciplinary synthesis of the self-talk literature. Based on the synthesis, a self-talk model was created that places spontaneous and goal-directed organic self-talk as well as educational and strategic self-talk interventions in relation to variables within their nomological network, including external factors (e.g. task difficulty), descriptive states and traits (e.g. emotions), behaviour and performance, metacognition, and psychological skills (e.g. concentration).

Daher, Marianne; Rosati, Antonia; Cifuentes, Sofía

doi: 10.1177/10892680231170018pmid: N/A

From a critical community psychology approach, this article seeks to visibilize social interventions that exhibit failings, thus exerting epistemic violence, by critically analyzing a microfinance project executed in India by an emblematic international research center of the Global North. Through fieldwork and interviews, we identified four shortcomings of the intervention: issues affecting the participants, implementation problems, limited effects of the project, and dissatisfaction with the intervention. This case illustrates how the prioritization of research objectives to the detriment of a proper implementation of the underlying social interventions constitutes epistemic violence as well as academic and epistemic extractivism. Based on this information, we intend to advance an expanded notion of epistemic violence, going beyond data analysis and taking into account the conditions of knowledge production in applied research, exemplified by a social program evaluation and their consequences for participants. This approach allows us to visibilize the importance of report failure and propose the concept of epistemic integrity, which is aimed at generating socially relevant knowledge while democratizing said knowledge, encouraging power redistribution, and promoting social justice. Regarding applied research, we discuss specific considerations for epistemic integrity.

Krettenauer, Tobias; Stichter, Matt

doi: 10.1177/10892680231170393pmid: N/A

The acquisition of virtue can be conceptualized as a self-regulatory process in which deliberate practice results in increasingly higher levels of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life. This conceptualization resonates with philosophical virtue theories as much as it converges with psychological models about skill development, expertise, goal motivation, and self-regulation. Yet, the conceptualization of virtue as skill acquisition poses the crucial question of motivation: What motivates individuals to self-improve over time so that they can learn from past experience, correct mistakes, and expand their ethical knowledge to new and unfamiliar circumstances? In this paper, it is argued that the motivation to increase one’s level of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life is supported by a specific identity goal, namely the goal to be a moral person. However, this moral identity goal needs to carry specific goal characteristics in order to effectively provide this motivation. It needs to be sufficiently abstract, internally motivated and promotion- rather than prevention-oriented. Research in developmental psychology suggests that the moral identity of children is rather concrete, externally motivated, and prevention-oriented. With development, higher levels of abstraction, internal motivation, and promotion-orientation gain importance providing an important motivational basis for a self-regulated process of virtue acquisition.

Legha, Rupinder K; Martinek, Nathalie N.

doi: 10.1177/10892680231155132pmid: N/A

This paper introduces a historically informed antiracist approach to psychological practice aimed at disrupting American psychology’s legacy of racism by first saying “No More” to the whiteness engulfing it. Its end goal is to detour psychological practices away from enduring legacies of oppression, reimagine psychological practice as an antiracist endeavor, and extricate the deep-seated structural whiteness rotting the profession at its core. No more building resiliency takes aim at the White discourses directing people suffering under the weight of White supremacy to bear it instead of compelling mental health professions to dismantle the systems of oppression causing the harm. Seven historical themes reveal how organized psychology has shaped and been shaped by racism and whiteness since its inception. By identifying the language and strategies used to cover up and sustain the racist harm by design, the themes provide starting points for antiracist psychological practices that interrogate and dismantle both forms of oppression. They issue the imperative for a critical, transparent, and transgressive psychology of the future, one that requires not a revision of existing practices, rather a complete redo. The closing section imagines where we go from here by offering immediate action steps for bringing this antiracist future closer within reach.

Wang, Dongmei; Gao, Zhipeng

doi: 10.1177/10892680231166681pmid: N/A

This article examines the complex, sometimes conflicting, influences of China’s Communist movement on psychotherapy and mental illness. The study is centered around the diary of a Chinese woman who simultaneously received therapeutic treatment of neurasthenia while remolding her consciousness as part of the “thought reform” campaign at the Shanghai Police School. Additionally, the study situates this diary within the broader history of psychotherapy in Communist China with highlight on the eventful life of Jiayin Huang, China’s leading psychotherapist who helped the neurasthenic patient before being forced out of the therapeutic profession. This contextualized case study produces several findings. It is found that psychotherapy and thought reform converged in several aspects, including their diagnostic and interventional functions. Meanwhile, psychotherapy and thought reform also faced irreconcilable theoretical and normative discrepancies that eventually led to the decline of psychotherapy. Finally, it is argued that China’s Communist movement exerted seemingly paradoxical impact on the neurasthenic patient. On the one hand, it pathologized the patient’s psychology on an ideological ground; on the other, it promised the possibility of spiritual salvation through dedication to the revolutionary cause.