Functionalism offers an account of the relations that hold between behavioural functions, information and neural processing, and conscious experience from which one can draw two inferences: (1) for any discriminable difference between qualia there must be an equivalent discriminable difference in function; and (2) for any discriminable functional difference within a behavioural domain associate...

Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the m...

Mental internalists hold that an individual’s mental features at a given time supervene upon what is in that individual’s head at that time. While many people reject mental internalism about content and justification, mental internalism is commonly accepted regarding such other mental features as rationality, emotion-types, propositional-attitude-types, moral character, and phenomenology. I con...

Psychoanalytic theory has been criticized for decontextualizing individual development. While recognizing the historical neglect of sociocultural context in psychoanalytic theory, this article raises attention to psychoanalytic contributions to the exploration of sociocultural issues in psychotherapy and calls for a systematic inclusion of cultural competence as a core area of emphasis of psych...

Investigations of immigrant families enable researchers to trace family processes and children's psychological adjustment in the presence of trenchant sociocultural change, cultural conflict, family dislocation, and the need for readjustment to new social environments. This special issue of 15 articles presents psychosocial research on immigrant families and children residing in Canada, Germany...

Current public discourse calls for America to act more interdependently in the world or act more like a conjoint agent. America and American selves, however, are typically associated acting independently or disjoint agency. Since nation is a significant sociocultural source of self, the authors examine what happens to American selves if America is instead associated with conjoint agency. Study ...

Starting from two accounts of psychological change in therapeutic settings, based respectively on the analysis of metaphors (Faccio et al. 2011, this issue) and on transformative moments in self narratives (Ribeiro and Gonçalves 2011, this issue), this paper examines core processes of psychological change. Drawing on sociocultural psychology, the paper first argues that core processes of change...

OBJECTIVES The Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL) Sociocultural Ancillary Study aims to examine associations between sociocultural and psychosocial factors and cardiovascular disease (CVD) and metabolic syndrome prevalence in Hispanics/Latinos. The conceptual framework is based on the Reserve Capacity and Lifespan Biopsychosocial Models, which emphasize multiple risk an...

BACKGROUND Studies are increasingly examining the role of sociocultural values, beliefs, and attitudes in cancer prevention. However, these studies vary widely in how sociocultural constructs are defined and measured, how they are conceived as affecting cancer beliefs, behaviors, and screening, and how they are applied in interventions. METHODS To characterize the current state of this resear...