This book presents a longitudinal study dealing with developmental changes within and between self-concepts and their relation to personal functioning. Within the psychological literature -- and the developmental literature in particular -- the interest in the ideas people hold about themselves and their relation with personal functioning is rapidly growing. This interest is reinforced by the emphasis on individuality in Western society. The self-system is now thought to consist of a collection of self-concepts in which a distinction is made between domain-specific self-concepts -- the real and ideal -- and context-related self-concepts -- the academic, the athletic and the social. It is also considered to be subjective rather than objective. This subjective self involves characteristics such as continuity and distinctiveness from others. These characteristics have been the primary focus of recent research. In existing literature on the development of the self-system, little is known about the structural characteristics -- that is, developmental changes in the interrelationships among domain-specific and context-related self-concepts, or between and within self-concepts. Similarly, little information is available about the relationships between individuals' real and ideal self concepts, their perceived concepts of others, and the actual ideas others have about the same individuals. This book integrates hitherto separate and different components or aspects of self-knowledge into one encompassing, multidimensional self-system.

What are the characteristics and dimensions of the self? Is there a "best" way to measure the self? How does the researcher's definition of the self affect the choice of research measure and methods? These are the questions addressed by this book. Unlike previous books on the self, this one provides a systematic analysis of the theoretical and methodological issues involved. It offers a description of several alternative methods for studying the self, and discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches. Emphasized here are the phenomenological and experiential nature of the self, its multidimensionality and hierarchical structure, and the relationship between defining and measuring the self. Among the methodological issues addressed are the impact of significant others on the self, the factors that affect the process of reporting about the self, between-group comparison of self-structure, the structure of the self in relationship to others, and the effects of differing cultural contexts.

Organized by Gordon’s Functional Health Patterns, this unique care plan text is packed with outstanding features—it’s the resource students will turn to again and again. They’ll find everything they need to create and implement great care plans across the lifespan.

In November 2001, James E. Loder Jr., Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Education for forty years at Princeton Theological Seminary, suddenly died. He was a creative and profound thinker who had just completed a promising book. In it he developed a compelling interdisciplinary model to disclose how the divine Spirit affirms, reconstitutes, and transforms the human spirit to bring new energy and creativity into human experience. He called it redemptive transformation. You now hold that book in your hands. Those who know Loder's work are confident that Educational Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit, though delayed for over fifteen years, will still become the best introduction to his complex thought. More important, it offers the imaginative means by which we may learn to attune ourselves and our faith communities to what God is doing in our fractured, distracted, and self-destructive world to bring about a revolution of love--the fruit of Christ's Spirit and the center of our human vocation.

How diverse or potentially overlapping are the numerous self-models, self-theories, and directions of self-research? It has become clear that the processes associated with the self are complex and diverse, and that many of the approaches associated with the self have been pursued in isolation. Moreover, the fact of there being different traditions within developmental and social psychology, as well as different traditions in Europe and North America, has also led to a certain cacophony when we examine the self-field as a whole. The chapters here confront these differences, trying to come to terms with phenomena that are overarching, that extend through the dimensions of developmental psychology, social psychology, motivation psychology, and parts of clinical psychology. The book as whole gives a clear presentation of the issues, questions and phenomena that surface in research fields known as self psychology.

Reconsidering Johannine Christianity presents a full-scale application of social identity approach to the Johannine writings. This book reconsiders a widely held scholarly assumption that the writings commonly taken to represent Johannine Christianity – the Gospel of John and the First, Second and Third Epistles of John – reflect the situation of an introverted early Christian group. It claims that dualistic polarities appearing in these texts should be taken as attempts to construct a secure social identity, not as evidence of social isolation. While some scholars (most notably, Richard Bauckham) have argued that the New Testament gospels were not addressed to specific early Christian communities but to all Christians, this book proposes that we should take different branches of early Christianity, not as localized and closed groups, but as imagined communities that envision distinct early Christian identities. It also reassesses the scholarly consensus according to which the Johannine Epistles presuppose and build upon the finished version of the Fourth Gospel and argues that the Johannine tradition, already in its initial stages, was diverse.

A volume dedicated to the life and work of Francisco Varela, this is an issue of the journal "Cybernetics and Human Knowing".

This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists, which includes oneself as a proper part of it, and that all of us share together with the rest of life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world, as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations, internal pictures, or sense-image models, pure figments and virtual objects, none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors.