Validity and reliability of the agentive steadfastness index

Agentive steadfastness is a hitherto unarticulated and unmeasured construct, although clinicians may have drawn intuitively on it in anticipating clients' prognosis and anticipated responsiveness to adverse events. Following the conceptualisation and articulation of the agentive steadfastness construct and a measure thereof, the current study examined the validity and reliability of the agentive steadfastness index (ASI) among responding adult social media users (n = 511). Results confirmed convergent validity between agentive steadfastness and closest related psychological constructs, which were resilience (r = .715) and character strength (r = .704). Its discriminant validity was observed with other related but notably distinct psychological constructs, which were anxiety (r = -.599) and ego-strength (r = -.244). Temporal stability was confirmed over a period of 6 months (r = .763). The ASI showed good internal (Cronbach alpha = .937) and split-half reliability (r = .838) and a low standard error of measurement of 7.57 points within a theoretical range of 190 points. These results suggest that the ASI is a valid and a reliable measure of agentive steadfastness. Equipped with the ASI, further research is enabled on agentive steadfastness as a psychotherapeutic target and its relations with various aspects of personality, prognosis and adversity.

For a Society Beyond Justice

The first part of the paper suggests a minimalist framework for integrating the discipline of psychology. Such a framework must rest on the principle of parsimony, build on fewest and simplest possible axiomatic assumptions and yet be able to contain, sustain and benefit from the enormous diversity of its interests and approaches, its ever-widening research enterprise and its unique relationship to neuroscience that situates it felicitously between natural and human sciences. I take the Kantian questions about the human condition as the starting point to link the concepts of reason, work and autonomy to the idea of self as transformative agency that straddles the domains of nature and society the way psychology does. The second part of the paper takes Rawls’ idea of society beyond justice, with reference Marx, to show why justice must act as the placeholder for equality in formal procedural democracies and to chart the direction that psychology should follow to meet the challenge of becoming more relevant for human welfare in this neoliberal age of deepening inequalities and mounting social, political and personality crises.

Mechanisms in psychology: The road towards unity?

The focus of this special issue of Theory & Psychology is on explanatory mechanisms in psychology, especially on problems of particular prominence for psychological science such as theoretical integration and unification. Proponents of the framework of mechanistic explanation claim, in short, that satisfactory explanations in psychology and related fields are causal. They stress the importance of explaining phenomena by describing mechanisms that are responsible for them, in particular by elucidating how the organization of component parts and operations in mechanisms gives rise to phenomena in certain conditions. We hope for cross-pollination between philosophical approaches to explanation and experimental psychology, which could offer methodological guidance, in particular where mechanism discovery and theoretical integration are at issue. Contributions in this issue pertain to theoretical integration and unification of psychology as well as the growing importance of causal mechanistic explanations in psychological science.

From Psychological Science to the Psychological Humanities: Building a General Theory of Subjectivity

The development of psychology as a science and the struggle for scientific recognition has disrupted the need to interrogate the discipline and the profession from the perspective of the humanities, the arts, and the concept-driven social sciences. This article suggests that some of the humanities contribute significantly to an understanding of human subjectivity, arguably a core topic within psychology. The article outlines the relevance of the psychological humanities by reclaiming subjectivity as a core topic for general psychology that is grounded in theoretical reconstruction, integration, and advancement. The argument relies on a variety of disciplines to achieve a deeper understanding of subjectivity: Philosophy provides conceptual clarifications and guidelines for integrating research on subjectivity; history reconstructs the movement of subjectivity and its subdivisions; political and social theories debate the process of subjectification; indigenous, cultural, and postcolonial studies show that Western theories of subjectivity cannot be applied habitually to contexts outside of the center; the arts corroborate the idea that subjective imagination is core to the aesthetic project; and science and technology studies point to recent developments in genetic science and information technology, advances that necessitate the consideration of significant changes in subjectivity. The implications of the psychological humanities as an important, justifiable tradition in psychology and for a general theory of subjectivity are discussed.

Character Adaptation Systems Theory: A New Big Five for Personality and Psychotherapy

Although personality theory and psychotherapy were originally closely linked, the past several decades have witnessed surprising gaps between these domains. This article seeks to close that gap via character adaptation systems theory (CAST), which is a formulation derived from Henriques's (2011) unified approach to psychology that links recent developments in personality theory with integrative visions of psychotherapy via the explication of 5 systems of character adaptation: (a) the habit system, (b) the experiential system, (c) the relationship system, (d) the defensive system, and (e) the justification system. This article delineates the nature of these systems of adaptation and how they connect to modern personality theory and the major systems of individual psychotherapy, as well as how they relate to important domains in human psychology and can be applied in the context of psychotherapy.

Why Psychology Isn't Unified, and Probably Never Will Be

Over the past few decades, a large literature has emerged on the question of how one might unify all or most of psychology under a single, coherent, rigorous framework, in a manner similar to that which unified physics under Newton's Laws, or biology under Darwin's theory of natural selection. It is argued here that this is a highly unlikely scenario in psychology given the contingent and opportunistic character of the processes that brought its original topics together into a new discipline, and the nearly continuous institutional, social, and even political negotiating and horse-trading that has determined psychology's “boundaries” in the 14 decades since. Psychology, as the field currently stands, does not have the intellectual coherence to be brought together by any set of principles that would enable its phenomena to be captured and explained as rigorous products of those principles. If there is a kind of unification in psychology's future, it is more likely to be one that, paradoxically, sees it broken up into a number of large “super-subdisciplines,” each of which exhibits more internal coherence than does the current sprawling and heterogeneous whole.

Unifying Psychology: Shared Ontology and the Continuum of Practical Assumptions

Critics have described psychology as a science impaired by disunity. The most recent special issue of Review of General Psychology sought to specifically address this concern, seeking perspectives from a wide range of theorists, each of whom offered their tradition's approach to how psychology as a whole may be integrated into a more unified whole. To continue this discussion, this article draws upon examples from the special issue, the disunity crisis literature, and wider writings in the philosophy of science, to explore the theoretical and conceptual divisions that foster ambiguity, confusion, and apparent irreconcilable differences between the disparate fields of psychology. The authors conclude that the majority of contemporary, scientific psychology is oriented toward a shared physical ontology, which can serve as a common grounding point from which the conceptual and theoretical differences of disparate fields may be meaningfully framed and evaluated. To this end, this article proposes that the various research traditions of psychology can be understood through their positions along a continuum of practical assumptions, which embodies the inherent conflict between two scientific priorities: metaphysical certainty (the safe end of the continuum) and practical experimental predictions (the risky end of the continuum). Three theoretical perspectives offered in the unification special issue are examined under this framework: situational realism (a distinctly safe approach), developmental evolutionary psychology (an intermediate approach), and the Tree of Knowledge unified theory (a relatively risky approach). The authors explore how the recommendations of each approach can be seen as a function of its position on the continuum of practical assumptions, and the implications of this understanding for future integrative efforts is discussed.