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Proportion of article types with theory-related terms (Table 4B, all six terms). The blue line represents the average proportion of 44.9% based on the total of 2,046 articles.
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Contemporary psychology regards itself as an empirical science, at least in most of its subfields. Theory building and development are often considered critical to the sciences, but the extent to which psychology can be cast in this way is under debate. According to those advocating a strong role of theory, studies should be designed to test hypoth...
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... However, they also characterized developmental attachment research as generally rather closed-off to other research fields, for all that they could identify specific researchers as exceptions, with obstacles to the circulation of new knowledge into and out of attachment research. Most apparent was the notion that the attachment field might be ''unscientific'' in an undue indebtedness to theory, within a context in which a primary role for theory has fallen out of favor within academic psychology and is even treated with a certain degree of suspicion, as contrary to methodological and empirical openness (Beller & Bender, 2017;Berghaus, 2011). ...
Based on interviews with leading researchers and researcher-clinicians in fields allied to attachment research, this paper describes participants’ perceptions of contemporary attachment research in the developmental tradition. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 13 research leaders in applied disciplines cognate to attachment research. Participants perceived attachment research as having played a foundational role for developmental science, including highlighting the importance of a developmental perspective and attention to early caregiving experiences. They also identified important contemporary strengths in developmental attachment research, including the observational acuity and insightfulness of its measures, its attention to dyadic processes in contrast to much of biomedicine, the development of a number of attachment-based interventions with well-articulated mechanisms of action, and the capacity of developmental attachment concepts to resonate with clinical and popular audiences. However, participants suggested that the developmental tradition is also perceived as having a comparatively high “cost of entry,” and consequently they warned that it has become somewhat separated from wider developmental science, with its growing prominence of biological research, scalability of methods, and less reliance on theory. Participants perceived both strengths and weaknesses to contemporary developmental attachment research. However they felt that the classic concerns of developmental attachment research were placing the field potentially at odds with current trends in developmental science.
... Corpus-based analytical approaches are considered as big data analysis; its sources of big data (Christ et al., 2019) are natural languages (NLs) that are compiled to become corpus from enormous texts and discourses (Koops & Lohmann, 2015;Brindle, 2016;Beller & Bender, 2017;Chen et al., 2020). Statistics-based algorithm corpus analysis studies are indispensable in today's digital era. ...
... Attachment has subsequently become one of the most popular theories of human socioemotional development, with a global research community and widespread interest from clinicians, child welfare professionals, educationalists, and parents. A striking feature of attachment research is that it has remained a distinct theoretical paradigm with an active research community over a period that has seen the rapid decline of psychological theory (Beller & Bender, 2017). For instance, in a survey conducted by the British government of organizations working with children in need of help and protection, attachment theory was, by a large margin, cited as the most frequently used underpinning perspective (Department for Education, 2018). ...
Mary Ainsworth’s legacy continues to shape the social and developmental sciences well after her death. The Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure has, for decades, not only provided the underpinning methodology of attachment research, but also the frame of reference for theory. This has produced conditions where, as in psychoanalysis, debates about the future of the paradigm also entail a struggle to claim and negotiate the legacy of a founding figure. To date, historians have only looked at attachment research up to the 1980s. Interviews with 15 leading contemporary attachment researchers revealed Ainsworth’s importance to later research, but also laid bare the challenges of claiming her inheritance in responding to the current challenges facing this area of research.
... But its emphasis on positive emotion and its focus on what is already good do little to help people overcome the obstacles to making valuable contributions to society. Although promoting prosocial behavior is a central topic in social psychology, the field currently suffers from the intertwined problems of irreproducible findings (e.g., Klein et al., 2018) and the lack of a strong theoretical foundation (Beller & Bender, 2017;Stroebe, 2019). Most other areas of psychology focus on describing the mind instead of improving it. ...
People’s intentional pursuit of prosocial goals and values (i.e., well-doing) is critical to the flourishing of humanity in the long run. But some of the most socially-beneficial pursuits are often neglected because they are unintuitive. To choose such pursuits people have to apply critical thinking and far-sighted decision-making in the service of excellent moral values. This approach can be taught and facilitated. But there is only very little psychological research on effective well-doing and how it can be promoted. This makes developing interventions for promoting effective well-doing one of the most valuable contributions psychology can make in the 21st century. To seize this opportunity, we need to better understand the determinants and psychological mechanisms of effective well-doing, as well as the barriers to effective well-doing and how they can be overcome through interventions and personal development. We review relevant previous work and highlight important open questions. To stimulate more research on these questions, we propose a tentative list of 20 grand challenges for understanding and promoting well-doing, fostering personal growth, and reducing ill-doing. Finally, we survey some emerging approaches to these challenges.
... Generally, it is perceived that the theory foundation in any scientific field is the main platform for the growth and the survival of the discipline; and IS field is not an exemption. A theory is mainly perceived as a systematic explanatory scheme for describing the patterns and regularities in a discipline [12]. ...
The way a scientific field applies theories shapes its intellectual structure and determines its development and survival as a discipline. Information Systems (IS) with its multidimensional nature and innovatory essence has a different contingence with its original theories, which are basically rooted in a diverse spectrum of fields. This research is designed to investigate which theories have been deployed in different IS research streams in the last decade, and by analyzing the perceived gap, how it might be changed in the future. To this aim, a data-driven method for analyzing the published papers’ cited references in the top two IS journals is designed and implemented. This study is directed based on the co-citation network analysis, text analysis, and investigation of the highly cited references in MISQ and ISR from 2009 to 2018. The analysis of the top-cited references co-citation network revealed six distinct clusters representing the research areas in our field including IS Value, IS Research, E-commerce, IS in Organization, Social Network Analysis, and IS Usage. Further, text analysis and interpretations disclosed the main and the dominant theoretical foundation in each cluster and their linkages. By examining the relationships between the clusters and their theories, the eminent theoretical gap in E-commerce cluster is distinguished. Subsequently, some fact-based hypotheses about what would be changed in this cluster in the future are represented. Considering a wider timespan, including data from basket of 8 journals and deeply analyzing all clusters, this study could be continued.
... In this sense, cognitive science is portrayed as "a textbook case of failed interdisciplinarity," especially when compared to "mature fields" like the natural sciences or psychology (N uñez et al., 2019, p. 788). It may well be an empirical question whether a random sample of, say, biologists from across the subfields would reach greater consensus on research questions, paradigms, and methods; and when extending this thought experiment to social scientists (including psychologists), not even major theories (Beller & Bender, 2017;Mischel, 2009) or the core subject of the very discipline (Brumann, 1999;de Munck & Bennardo, 2019) is consensual anymore. ...
A recent article (Núñez et al., 2019) claims that cognitive science, while starting off as a multidisciplinary enterprise, has "failed to transition to a mature inter-disciplinary coherent field." Two indicators reported in support of this claim target one of the two journals of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science, depicting cognitive science as an increasingly monodisciplinary subfield which is dominated by psychology. With a focus on the society's other journal, Topics in Cognitive Science, the present commentary reveals a greater degree of interdisciplinarity and discusses the relative values of diversity and integration for the field.
... Este principio ubica la investigación psicológica en la hegemonía de la praxis fundamentada bajo una política de la evidencia. De ahí que el desarrollo teórico y conceptual de la disciplina constituye un recurso de discusión, revisión y análisis (Beller & Bender, 2017). ...
Este estudio propone analizar las dinámicas de producción científica de las comunidades académicas que se conforman a través de la Revist a Interamericana de Psicología. Este análisis da cuenta del proyecto interamericano de una psicología para las Américas originado por la Socied ad Interamericana de Psicología . Para este estudio se contó con un corpus empírico de 664 artículos publicados durante el periodo 2000- 2016. Se utilizaron métodos bibliométricos (aná lisis de redes y análisis de referencias) para caracterizar la estructura de producción científic a de las comunidades académicas. Los resultados muestran que la Revista Interamericana de Psicología constituye un canal fundamental para internacionalizar y v isibilizar el proyecto interamericano de psicología. La investigación científica que se reflejan muestra una comunidad académica activa con los desafíos que exige el proyecto de unidad de la psicología en las Américas. La Revista se ha mantenido fiel a su misión de apostarle a la región además su fortaleza estriba en un trabajo conjunto con la Sociedad Interamericana de Psicología quienes -a su turno- juegan un papel decisivo en el desarrollo de la psicología inter -americana.
... However, the protoagency theory cannot (yet) explain the cultural differences in the floating setting, where the causal assignments of German and Tongan speakers co-vary with the manipulations in linguistic cues, but generally differ in the entity on which they focus as mainly causative. For a better understanding of such cultural influences, we thus not only require more empirical data, but also advancement in theoretical models (Beller and Bender, 2017). ...
Linguistic cues may be considered a potent tool for focusing attention on causes or effects. In this paper, we explore how different cues affect causal assignments in German and Tongan. From a larger screening study, two parts are reported here: Part 1 dealt with syntactic variations, including word order (agent vs. patient in first/subject position) and case marking (e.g., as ergative vs. non-ergative in Tongan) depending on verb type (transitive vs. intransitive). For two physical settings (wood floating on water and a man breaking a glass), participants assigned causality to the two entities involved. In the floating setting, speakers of the two languages were sensitive to syntactic variations, but differed in the entity regarded as causative. In the breaking setting, the human agent was uniformly regarded as causative. Part 2 dealt with implicit verb causality. Participants assigned causality to subject or object of 16 verbs presented in minimal social scenarios. In German, all verbs showed a subject (agent) focus; in Tongan, the focus depended on the verb; and for nine verbs, the focus differed across languages. In conclusion, we discuss the question of domain-specificity of causal cognition, the role of the ergative as causal marker, and more general differences between languages.
Cornerstones of Attachment Research re-examines the work of key laboratories that have contributed to the study of attachment. In doing so, the book traces the development in a single scientific paradigm through parallel but separate lines of inquiry. Chapters address the work of Bowlby, Ainsworth, Main and Hesse, Sroufe and Egeland, and Shaver and Mikulincer. Cornerstones of Attachment Research utilises attention to these five research groups as a lens on wider themes and challenges faced by attachment research over the decades. The chapters draw on a complete analysis of published scholarly and popular works by each research group, as well as much unpublished material.
