Perceiving the Other Self: An Experimental First-Person Account of Nonverbal Social Interaction

In psychology, the topics of the self and social perception in nonverbal interaction have been intensively examined but have so far been limited to certain aspects of their interdependence. The self is conceived mostly as a bundle of functions and personality traits that predominantly resist integration, except in the form of mental representations that do not allow conscious access to the processes that generate them. Similarly, in nonverbal interaction, the sending and receiving of particular social cues via different modalities are considered and usually traced back to subpersonal, especially neuronal processes. Because this does not allow the full potential of conscious self-development in social interaction to be exploited, the nexus between the two topics is examined in this study via an empirical first-person method with qualitative and quantitative aspects. A hypothesis about introspectively observable mental activity occurring in dyadic nonverbal interaction is developed and experimentally investigated. The results show that previous theoretical models can be supplemented by a sublayer of potentially conscious mental interaction that, because of its invariance regarding partial personality aspects, suggests a holistic and dynamic concept of the self.

Active Contemporary Citizenship as a Research Mode

Active citizenship is a form of civil participation in which direct involvement is emphasized over distanced reflection. As such it seems to be in juxtaposition to the role of the researcher who is typically an external spectator and observes, documents, and analyzes phenomena from outside. This quality of remaining in a state of professional distance and scholarly reflection can pose a dilemma when the multitude of problems in the world is obvious and the need for direct intervention becomes undeniable. Are active citizenship and scientific enquiry opposing modes of participation or can they be complementary? For the duration of 11 months, we pursued a first-person study, seeking to deepen a sense of engagement with the challenges of the time while simultaneously maintaining our role as researchers. We aggregate our findings into four categories—“feelings,” “insights,” “changes in perspective” and the “wrestling to find a balance between inertia and conscience.” The results are contextualized within the broader literature of the self, pointing to facets of identity that encompass both a local and a global form of “active” or “contemporary” citizenship.

Dualistic and Trichotomic Approaches in Psychological Enquiry

Abstract. While the trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit has been part of different folk-psychological and contemplative traditions over the millennia, more recently these concepts have ceded to a dualistic approach by which the physical world is distinguished from a more broadly conceptualized mental realm. In the current paper, we propose a renewed trichotomic distinction on the basis of epistemological considerations about the nature of thinking – which we will apply to the question about the “true self” as a paradigmatic case-study. We differentiate between a representational and an immersive type of thinking – a distinction which we argue can help illuminate facets of the (true) self that remain elusive to a dualistic perspective. We sketch a roadmap toward an empirical enquiry of the self on the basis of a trichotomic distinction and discuss implications of this approach for the study of psychological phenomena in more general terms.