Vygotsky’s Hamlet: the dialectic method and personality psychology

The Psychology of Hamlet

Shakespeare’s Hamlet ominously begins with Horatio and Marcellus discussing the appearance of a ghostly apparition that strangely resembles the King of Denmark. As the play unfolds, we learn that it is, in fact, the ghost of Hamlet Sr., the King of Denmark. Immediately, the play begins with a sense of foreboding danger for all of those involved who have a direct connection with his son Hamlet, ...

Personality and Social Psychology

Research examining the influence of affect on self-focused attention has concentrated exclusively on the valence dimension (i.e., negative-positive) of affect. The authors propose that the dimension of affect orientation (i.e., reflective-social) illuminates considerably this relation.A reflective orientationrefers to a tendency for inaction, whereas a social orientation refers to a tendency fo...

Personality and Social Psychology

In a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article, Sedikides, Gaertner and Vevea (2005) presented two meta-analyses that included eight papers to investigate the question of whether people from Eastern cultures self-enhance more for traits that they view to be important compared to those that they view as unimportant. The results supported their hypothesis: Self-enhancement appears to b...

The Social Psychology of Personality

Personality and Social Psychology Review