Hubert Hermans

Last updated
Hubert Hermans Hubert Hermans.JPG
Hubert Hermans

Hubert J.M. Hermans (born October 9, 1937) is a Dutch psychologist and Emeritus Professor at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, internationally known as the creator of dialogical self theory.

Contents

Biography

Hermans was born as son of a baker family in Maastricht, The Netherlands. He studied psychology at the Radboud University Nijmegen, where he became staff member at the psychological laboratory of the same university in 1965.

In 1973 he became associate professor of psychology at the University of Nijmegen and in 1980 full professor at the same university. From 2002 till 2018 he was president of the International Society for Dialogical Science (ISDS) and since 2019 he is editor of the section Dialogical Self Theory of Journal of Constructivist Psychology. For his merits for the Dutch society, he was appointed as Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw (Knight in the Society of the Netherlands Lion) in 2002. His 2006 Dutch book Dialoog en Misverstand (Dialogue and Misunderstanding) was used in the preparation of the Dutch government in 2007. He is honorary associate of the TAOS Institute (from 2012). In 2017 he was elected as foreign member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Art.

From 1961-2007 Hubert Hermans was married to Els Hermans-Jansen, a psychotherapist, with whom he cooperated in the development of the Self-Confrontation Method (SCM). The couple has two children and two grandchildren. From 2008-2013 he was married to Agnieszka Hermans-Konopka, who wrote a dissertation (Warsaw, 2006) on the relationship between self and emotions. The couple continues to cooperate on the further development of Dialogical Self Theory in the International Institute for the Dialogical Self (IIDS).

Work

Hermans is considered a key figure in narrative psychology. [1] His dissertation (1967) was on Motivation and achievement and resulted in two psychological tests: The Achievement Motivation Test for adults (1968; published in English in 1971; and in German in 1976) and The Achievement Motivation Test for children (1971; published in German in 1976). Both test belong since then to the most frequently used psychological tests in the Netherlands.

As a reaction to the static and impersonal nature of psychological tests, he developed a Self-Confrontation Method (SCM; 1974; book published in English in 1995). Application of this method in practice led to the establishment of the Dutch Association for SCM Consultants that counted around 260 members in 2013.

In the nineties of the last century he developed the dialogical self theory, inspired by the American pragmatism of William James and the dialogical school of the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. [2] [3]

Dialogical self theory

Hermans’s, basing on ideas of M.M. Bakhtin, W. James, purpose is to contribute to research and development of dialogical relationships, not only between individuals, groups, and cultures, but also between different I-positions within the dialogical self of the individual person. He does so in the conviction that dialogical relationships between individuals, groups, and cultures cannot exist in separation of productive dialogical relationships which individuals develop with themselves.

On the basis of this purpose, bi-annual International Conferences on the Dialogical Self are organized: in Nijmegen (2000), Ghent, Belgium (2004); Warsaw, Poland (2004), Braga, Portugal (2006), Cambridge, United Kingdom (2008), Athens, Greece (2010), Athens, Georgia, USA (2012), The Hague, The Netherlands (2014), Braga, Portugal (2016), Lublin, Poland (2018), Barcelona, Spain (2021), and Tallinn, Estonia (2023).

From 2006 till 2018 Hermans was chief editor of the International Journal for Dialogical Science (IJDS). Since 2018 he is editor of the Dialogical Self Theory section of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology. A number of his publications have been translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Polish, Russian and Japanese.

Bibliography

Books
Articles and chapters

Bibliography about Hubert Hermans’s work

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Educational psychology</span> Branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of human learning

Educational psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of human learning. The study of learning processes, from both cognitive and behavioral perspectives, allows researchers to understand individual differences in intelligence, cognitive development, affect, motivation, self-regulation, and self-concept, as well as their role in learning. The field of educational psychology relies heavily on quantitative methods, including testing and measurement, to enhance educational activities related to instructional design, classroom management, and assessment, which serve to facilitate learning processes in various educational settings across the lifespan.

An operational definition specifies concrete, replicable procedures designed to represent a construct. In the words of American psychologist S.S. Stevens (1935), "An operation is the performance which we execute in order to make known a concept." For example, an operational definition of "fear" often includes measurable physiologic responses that occur in response to a perceived threat. Thus, "fear" might be operationally defined as specified changes in heart rate, galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, and blood pressure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerome Bruner</span> American psychologist and scholar

Jerome Seymour Bruner was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a BA in 1937 from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1941. He taught and did research at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Humanistic psychology</span> Psychological perspective

Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective that arose in the mid-20th century in answer to two theories: Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory and B. F. Skinner's behaviorism. Thus, Abraham Maslow established the need for a "third force" in psychology. The school of thought of humanistic psychology gained traction due to key figure Abraham Maslow in the 1950s during the time of the humanistic movement. It was made popular in the 1950s by the process of realizing and expressing one's own capabilities and creativity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transpersonal psychology</span> School of psychology

Transpersonal psychology, or spiritual psychology, is a sub-field or school of psychology that seeks to integrate the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience with the framework of modern psychology. The transpersonal is defined as "experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond (trans) the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos". It has also been defined as "development beyond conventional, personal or individual levels".

Within personality psychology, personal construct theory (PCT) or personal construct psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality and cognition developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s. The theory addresses the psychological reasons for actions. Kelly proposed that individuals can be psychologically evaluated according to similarity–dissimilarity poles, which he called personal constructs. The theory is considered by some psychologists as forerunner to theories of cognitive therapy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathematical psychology</span> Mathematical modeling of psychological theories and phenomena

Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dialogical self</span>

The dialogical self is a psychological concept which describes the mind's ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in close connection with external dialogue. The "dialogical self" is the central concept in the dialogical self theory (DST), as created and developed by the Dutch psychologist Hubert Hermans since the 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cultural psychology</span> How cultures reflect and shape their psychology

Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.

Kenneth I. Pargament is an emeritus professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E. Tory Higgins</span>

Edward Tory Higgins is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology and Business, and Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. Higgins' research areas include motivation and cognition, judgment and decision-making, and social cognition. Most of his works focus on priming, self-discrepancy theory, and regulatory focus theory. He is also the author of Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works, and Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cross-cultural psychology</span>

Cross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions. Through expanding research methodologies to recognize cultural variance in behavior, language, and meaning it seeks to extend and develop psychology. Since psychology as an academic discipline was developed largely in North America and Europe, some psychologists became concerned that constructs and phenomena accepted as universal were not as invariant as previously assumed, especially since many attempts to replicate notable experiments in other cultures had varying success. Since there are questions as to whether theories dealing with central themes, such as affect, cognition, conceptions of the self, and issues such as psychopathology, anxiety, and depression, may lack external validity when "exported" to other cultural contexts, cross-cultural psychology re-examines them using methodologies designed to factor in cultural differences so as to account for cultural variance. Some critics have pointed to methodological flaws in cross-cultural psychological research, and claim that serious shortcomings in the theoretical and methodological bases used impede, rather than help the scientific search for universal principles in psychology. Cross-cultural psychologists are turning more to the study of how differences (variance) occur, rather than searching for universals in the style of physics or chemistry.

Leslie Samuel Greenberg is a Canadian psychologist born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is one of the originators and primary developers of Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals and couples. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at York University in Toronto, and also director of the Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic in Toronto. His research has addressed questions regarding empathy, psychotherapy process, the therapeutic alliance, and emotion in human functioning.

In psychology, constructivism refers to many schools of thought that, though extraordinarily different in their techniques, are all connected by a common critique of previous standard approaches, and by shared assumptions about the active constructive nature of human knowledge. In particular, the critique is aimed at the "associationist" postulate of empiricism, "by which the mind is conceived as a passive system that gathers its contents from its environment and, through the act of knowing, produces a copy of the order of reality".

Harry J.G. Kempen was a Dutch cultural psychologist, and associate professor at the Nijmegen Cultural Psychology Group (NCPG) of the Radboud University Nijmegen, known for his work with Hubert Hermans on the Dialogical self theory.

Vittorio Filippo Guidano was an Italian neuropsychiatrist, creator of the cognitive procedural systemic model and contributor to constructivist post-rationalist cognitive therapy. His cognitive post-rationalist model was influenced by attachment theory, evolutionary epistemology, complex systems theory, and the prevalence of abstract mental processes proposed by Friedrich Hayek. Guidano conceived the personal system as a self-organized entity, in constant development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Juan Pascual-Leone</span>

Juan Pascual-Leone is a developmental psychologist and founder of the neo-Piagetian approach to cognitive development. He introduced this term into the literature and put forward key predictions about developmental growth of mental attention and working memory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-confrontation method</span>

In psychology, the self-confrontation method (SCM) is a technique for examining people's behavior modification. It relies on people's inconsistent knowledge and dissatisfaction with their own values, motivation, behaviors, or with their personal systems and those of significant others to make a change that patient needs to change. Self-confrontation psychology is based on two theories which are valuation theory and dialogical-self theory.

The Journal of Constructivist Psychology is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering psychology from the perspective of constructivism. It was established in 1988 as the International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, obtaining its current name in 1994. Originally focused heavily on George Kelly's personal construct psychology, the journal was renamed to indicate that its scope had broadened to include other types of constructivist psychology. It is published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Constructivist Psychology Network and the International Society for Dialogical Science, the two organizations for which it is the official journal. The co-editors are Robert A. Neimeyer and Jonathan D. Raskin. The associate editors are Hubert J.M. Hermans, David Winter, and Clare Mason. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2020 impact factor of 1.100.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans-Herbert Kögler</span> German-American philosopher

Hans-Herbert Kögler, is a German-American philosopher.

References

  1. Key figures in narrative psychology
  2. Review article Dialogical Self Theory
  3. For the history of the Self-Confrontation Method and Dialogical Self Theory, see: H.J.M. Hermans (2006). "Moving through three paradigms, yet remaining the same thinker Archived 2011-07-24 at the Wayback Machine ". In: Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 2006, 19, pp.5-25.