Wherever we undertake the task of ministering not only to the body but to the mind, our working basis must be psychology. In social work this psychology must be more particularly social psychology, for we are dealing with human beings as members of society. We are considering the physical welfare of individuals merely as a contributory factor to their social welfare. All social work, then, shou...

This chapter reviews sources of variation in decision making and choice that arise within the individual, and discusses the possible signifi cance of such variation for the development of an evolutionarily plausible account of decision making. Different sources of within-individual variation are reviewed, including noise, general cognitive ability and life span changes, mood, and personality. T...

Network analysis holds promise for community psychology given the field's aim to understand the interplay between individuals and their social contexts. Indeed, because network analysis focuses explicitly on patterns of relationships between actors, its theories and methods are inherently extra-individual in nature and particularly well suited to characterizing social contexts. But, to what ext...

Do positive psychology interventions—that is, treatment methods or intentional activities aimed at cultivating positive feelings, positive behaviors, and/or positive cognitions—enhance wellbeing and ameliorate depressive symptoms? A meta-analysis of 51 such interventions with 4,244 individuals was conducted to address this question and to provide practical guidance to clinicians. The results re...

In this paper we assess the construct validity and theoretical emdeddedness of agent-based models of normative behaviour drawing on experimental social psychology. We contend that social psychology and agentoutcomes of the interaction of individual agents. The paper focuses on two from a taxonomy of agent-based models of normative behaviour. This enables the identification of the assumptions th...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this paper is to outline the contribution of two strands of discursive research, glossed as 'macro' and 'micro,' to the field of health psychology. A further goal is to highlight some contemporary debates in methodology associated with the use of interview data versus more naturalistic data in qualitative health research. METHOD Discursive approaches provide a way of anal...

In previous writings, I have set forth a rationale for the foundational knowledge value in psychology and psychotherapy of (a) the individual, systematic case study, and (b) inductive generalizations derived from databases of large numbers of such case studies. This rationale is build upon the epistemology and ontology of contemporary philosophical pragmatism and social constructionism as appli...

In today’s society, information has become so readily and instantly available that the search engine, Google, has been incorporated into the English vernacular. With this explosive growth of information availability, however, comes increasing concern for security. Today’s information security systems are designed to be highly secure, yet information is leaked anyway, and many of these security ...

Evolutionary psychology is an emerging paradigm for the social sciences that offers a powerful metatheoretical framework for personality psychology and, as I attempt to demonstrate in this article, for the psychology of religion as well. I argue that religion is not an evolved adaptation; rather, the diverse range of beliefs, behavior, and experience that we collectively refer to as religion em...

This paper addresses a very salient feature of rural life and landscapes in Australia, natural disasters, and offers a psychological perspective on individual and community perceptions, responses, preparedness and planning. The convergent perspective offered reflects research and practice findings and insights from social and environmental psychology, as well as clinical, health and community p...