197,337 research outputs found
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Negotiating hegemonic masculinity: imaginary positions and psycho-discursive practices
No full textIn this paper we provide a critical analysis of the concept of hegemonic masculinity. We argue that although this concept embodies important theoretical insights, it is insufficiently developed as it stands to enable us to understand how men position themselves as gendered beings. In particular it offers a vague and imprecise account of the social psychological reproduction of male identities. We outline an alternative critical discursive psychology of masculinity. Drawing on data from interviews with a sample of men from a range of ages and from diverse occupational backgrounds, we delineate three distinctive, yet related, procedures or psycho-discursive practices, through which men construct themselves as masculine. The political implications of these discursive practices, as well as the broader implications of treating the psychological process of identification as form of discursive accomplishment, are also discussed
The multitasking framework: the effects of increasing workload on acute psychobiological stress reactivity
No full textA variety of techniques exist for eliciting acute psychological stress in the laboratory; however, they vary in terms of their ease of use, reliability to elicit consistent responses and the extent to which they represent the stressors encountered in everyday life. There is, therefore, a need to develop simple laboratory techniques that reliably elicit psychobiological stress reactivity that are representative of the types of stressors encountered in everyday life. The multitasking framework is a performance-based, cognitively demanding stressor, representative of environments where individuals are required to attend and respond to several different stimuli simultaneously with varying levels of workload. Psychological (mood and perceived workload) and physiological (heart rate and blood pressure) stress reactivity was observed in response to a 15-min period of multitasking at different levels of workload intensity in a sample of 20 healthy participants. Multitasking stress elicited increases in heart rate and blood pressure, and increased workload intensity elicited dose–response increases in levels of perceived workload and mood. As individuals rarely attend to single tasks in real life, the multitasking framework provides an alternative technique for modelling acute stress and workload in the laboratory
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Constructing Subjects, Producing Subjectivities: Developing Analytic Needs in Discursive Psychology
No full textThe publication of Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) blueprint for a discursive
social psychology was a pivotal moment in the discursive turn in psychology.
That transformational text went on to underpin much contemporary discursive
psychology; paving the way for what has become an enriching range of
analytic approaches, and epistemological and ontological arguments
(Wetherell, Taylor and Yates, 2001a; 2001b). Twenty years on, and as
discursive psychology continues to develop, the approaches it encompasses are
becoming more vibrantly contested and a range of positions are forming
around what one might appropriately designate a discursive psychology, and
what form that discursive psychology should take (Wetherell, forthcoming,
2007).
In this exploratory paper I pursue some of these debates insofar as they
offer analytic resources for my PhD study of women’s accounts of success and
failure. I outline two different strands in discursive psychology; an
epistemological constructionism concerned with how meaning is established in
interaction; and an ontological constructionism, which takes this somewhat
further by looking at the implications of constructions for subjects and
subjectivity. I consider a range of resources available for a discursive
psychology attentive to the everyday practices of lived lives, to the
intersubjective production of meanings and to the theorisation of individual
history and individual differences. As part of this, I explore the potential
contribution of a psycho-social discursive psychology, significant for the
inextricable connection it makes between individual and society, and for how it
might inform notions of a dynamic, acting, individual. In this, however, I query
whether a discursive psycho-social psychology must necessarily draw upon
traditional psychoanalytic architectures
The Emotional Psychologist: A Critical Discursive Analysis of Psychologists’ Talk about Their Emotions within the Therapeutic Relationship
No full textWhile psychologists’ own emotional management is an integral part of psychological therapy, it is often assumed rather than discussed; the affective expectations for the profession are unarticulated. In this research I explore how psychologists talk about their patterns of emoting within the therapeutic relationship in order create an account of the profession’s expectations for emotional expression and to open up a space for a critical examination of these expectations. I understand emotion as affective practices which are both being constituted actively as people carry out the practice and shaped over time as past practice carves out grooves of emoting that become familiar and habitual (Wetherell, 2012). This understanding of emotions attends to both patterns, and points of tension or contestation. I asked practising psychologists about their emotional practices within the therapeutic relationship in four small focus groups and 11 follow up individual interviews. I use the variety of discourse analysis developed within critical social psychology (Billig, 1987; Edley, 2001; Wetherell, 1998) to examine how participants made meaning around their emotions within the therapeutic relationship by drawing on different affective-discursive repertoires. The analysis includes an account of how psychologists have come to construct their emotions in dilemmatic ways in the context of clinical psychology as a profession (which has gone through many iterations in the years since its inception in the first part of the 20th century), and well as a consideration of how participants spoke about trying to resolve these points of tension and dilemma. I also consider participants’ talk about when professional feelings go awry, how they work on themselves in order manage ‘unprofessional’ emotions, and the implications of these affective-discursive identity negotiations for their constructions of self. I suggest that that the exchange of certain emotions for remuneration within this profession becomes hidden within the individuals’ subjectivity. I consider some of the wider social power relations that both hold these practices in place and are reproduced as psychologists emote in prescribed ways. Finally I reflect on whether an affective practices understanding of emotions could be used as a rhetorical tool to help psychologists look more critically at the functions of their emotions within the therapeutic relationship
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Discursive psychology and the study of gender: a contested space
No full text[From book introduction] In Chapter 11, Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell identify a particular challenge for discursive psychology, that is, to fruitfully combine analytical principles from both branches – in the face of critics who maintain that macro-analysis of discourse patterns works at the expense of micro-analysis of the interactional context of talk (Wooffitt, 2005). They claim that an expanded and integrative discursive psychology that assumes a broad understanding of constructionism and aims to work across both the micro and the macro would in principle combine a focus on ‘how speakers construct (and use) gender categories and how they are constructed – as gendered beings – by those very categories’
A discursive psychology analysis of emotional support for men with colorectal cancer
No full textRecent research into both masculinity and health, and the provision of social support for people with cancer has focussed upon the variations that may underlie broad assumptions about masculine health behaviour. The research reported here pursues this interest in variation by addressing the discursive properties of talk about emotional support, by men with colorectal cancer - an understudied group in the social support and cancer literature. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight men with colorectal cancer, and the transcripts analysed using an intensive discursive psychology approach. From this analysis two contrasting approaches to this group of men’s framing of emotional support in the context of cancer are described. First, talk about cancer was positioned as incompatible with preferred masculine identities. Second, social contact that affirms personal relationships was given value, subject to constraints arising from discourses concerning appropriate emotional expression. These results are discussed with reference to both the extant research literature on masculinity and health, and their clinical implications, particularly the advice on social support given to older male cancer patients, their families and friends
Imagined futures: young men's talk about fatherhood and domestic life
No full textAs part of an extensive series of interviews about men and masculinity, small groups of 17 to 18-year-old male students were invited to look forward to their future romantic and domestic lives. Their responses were analysed using the approach and methods of discourse analysis in order to examine both the interpretative resources used within their accounts and to look at how the young men attempted to manage the ‘ideological dilemma’ (Billig, Condor, Edwards, Gane, Middleton & Radley, 1988) that was framed by these cultural themes. The analysis describes three such strategies while paying particular attention to the ‘action orientation’(Heritage, 1984) of these constructions. Finally, the paper moves on to discuss, albeit briefly, the broader implications of this research
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