[PhDwannabe]

What do you mean by "ego?" It's just not a scientifically defined term; it's not really a construct of interest. The tripartite model is not supported. That's sort of how we view it. But you might be referring to some other phenomenon more narrowly. Awareness in general, let's say. If so, it's difficult to answer how "empirical psychology views awareness." The questions we typically ask are a bit more granular than that, so it'd be tough to answer you unless you can get much more specific.

[immortal]

Oh I see, then it is the view of a reductionist, reducing all phenomena to the empirical and to the areas of the brain. I think its important to point out for this thread that what I have explained from the beginning is the view of the old eastern psychology, I thought atleast there was some kind of a theoretical construct to it if not an empirical based one. Then according to the current empirical psychology "Pride" is something which originated from evolutionary psychology and we are hard-wired to think that way.

[PhDwannabe]

Quote

Oh I see, then it is the view of a reductionist, reducing all phenomena to the empirical and to the areas of the brain. I think its important to point out for this thread that what I have explained from the beginning is the view of the old eastern psychology, I thought atleast there was some kind of a theoretical construct to it if not an empirical based one. Then according to the current empirical psychology "Pride" is something which originated from evolutionary psychology and we are hard-wired to think that way.

This is not really what psychology is, or how psychology works. Let me try to clear a few things up:

1) Psychology, the science, is empirical. Science is empirical. That means that we, you know, gather evidence for stuff. So this statement "reducing all phenomena to the empirical" is sort of neither here nor there. We "examine phenomena empirically," like any other science does. We observe, record, make theory, test hypotheses.

2) "Reducing all phenomena to the areas of the brain" is another issue entirely, and it does not proceed necessarily from the empiricism of psychology or science. Most of us are not neuro-reductionists. I, even more than most, tend to be extremely skeptical about many of the current "findings" of neuroscience and the apparent specificity of their attempts to localize function. That's a completely different story. If you think "being scientific" in psychology means being a neuro-reductionist, you're just incorrect. You're forgiven for being incorrect, of course--this is a deduction someone "on the outside" might often make, it just doesn't happen to be true.

3) "According the the current empirical psychology pride is something which originated from evolutionary psychology and we are hard-wired to think that way?" Again: no. To be perfectly honest, most of us in psych sort of snicker at evo psych. It does some interesting things, but there are many, many limits upon the certainty of its inferences. The phrase "hard-wired" is a sort of a weasel word that doesn't really tell us anything or state anything rigorously.

4) In general, it's not really the task of psychology to tell us what something "is." No psychological researcher really sits around and asks, "what is pride," because you're asking about the "meaning" of a construct, which (depending on how meaning is construed here) not really something that the scientific method can really access all that well. If anything, we might seek to operationalize pride, to test which behaviors evoke it, to assess what personality types more commonly experience it, to vary social contingencies which might have bearing on its expression... those sorts of things. We might even attempt to delineate its characteristics--cognitive, affective, and behavioral--factor analyze them or subject them to other sorts of statistical machinery, see how they hang together. None of those things tell us what pride "is." Nor do we really need to know what it is, in many ways, in order to find out interesting things about it. It's just not what we do, or can do.

5) "Old eastern psychology" (whatever you mean by that, exactly, but I can guess) is not psychology. Alchemy was not chemistry. This is not to say that there was not (indeed, is not) value in these things. But they're not the sciences they're related to, or would influence or become--the differences between them are substantial and qualitative.

[immortal]

PhDwannabe, on 16 December 2011 - 04:35 PM, said:

This is not really what psychology is, or how psychology works. Let me try to clear a few things up:

1) Psychology, the science, is empirical. Science is empirical. That means that we, you know, gather evidence for stuff. So this statement "reducing all phenomena to the empirical" is sort of neither here nor there. We "examine phenomena empirically," like any other science does. We observe, record, make theory, test hypotheses.

2) "Reducing all phenomena to the areas of the brain" is another issue entirely, and it does not proceed necessarily from the empiricism of psychology or science. Most of us are not neuro-reductionists. I, even more than most, tend to be extremely skeptical about many of the current "findings" of neuroscience and the apparent specificity of their attempts to localize function. That's a completely different story. If you think "being scientific" in psychology means being a neuro-reductionist, you're just incorrect. You're forgiven for being incorrect, of course--this is a deduction someone "on the outside" might often make, it just doesn't happen to be true.

3) "According the the current empirical psychology pride is something which originated from evolutionary psychology and we are hard-wired to think that way?" Again: no. To be perfectly honest, most of us in psych sort of snicker at evo psych. It does some interesting things, but there are many, many limits upon the certainty of its inferences. The phrase "hard-wired" is a sort of a weasel word that doesn't really tell us anything or state anything rigorously.

4) In general, it's not really the task of psychology to tell us what something "is." No psychological researcher really sits around and asks, "what is pride," because you're asking about the "meaning" of a construct, which (depending on how meaning is construed here) not really something that the scientific method can really access all that well. If anything, we might seek to operationalize pride, to test which behaviors evoke it, to assess what personality types more commonly experience it, to vary social contingencies which might have bearing on its expression... those sorts of things. We might even attempt to delineate its characteristics--cognitive, affective, and behavioral--factor analyze them or subject them to other sorts of statistical machinery, see how they hang together. None of those things tell us what pride "is." Nor do we really need to know what it is, in many ways, in order to find out interesting things about it. It's just not what we do, or can do.

5) "Old eastern psychology" (whatever you mean by that, exactly, but I can guess) is not psychology. Alchemy was not chemistry. This is not to say that there was not (indeed, is not) value in these things. But they're not the sciences they're related to, or would influence or become--the differences between them are substantial and qualitative.

Thanks for removing most of the misconceptions that I had in the field of Psychology, I did learned something, just didn't had any idea as to how psychologists would do their field work.

[PhDwannabe]

Quote

Thanks for removing most of the misconceptions that I had in the field of Psychology, I did learned something, just didn't had any idea as to how psychologists would do their field work.

I live to give.

[Mellinia]

So what behaviors are observed to evoke pride?

[PhDwannabe]

Beats me. That's a really narrow-sounding area, and I'm a PTSD researcher. I can speak in generalities about the workings of the field as a whole, but there's no reason for me to be familiar with specific findings. I think my breadth of knowledge is enough for me to say that you're not going to find a ton on some general, quasi-emotional thing like "pride" as some kind of overarching, unitary construct. It's just not usually the way we study stuff. Trawl the databases for that term and you'll probably find little bits of tangentially-related stuff like "Ethnic pride and experiences of discrimination in elderly migrant laborers" or something. It's just the way we work. We don't sit around and ask "what's pride?"

...nonetheless, you can always count on the psychophys people to do something cute.