Looking back

Abstract

We have passed a long way from the delineation of psychological explanations, the place of psychophysiology in psychology, notions of situation, personality, and activation, to the empirical demonstrations of research programs that make considerable use of the ideas and methodological characteristics of a differential psychophysiology. Based on the emergentist biopsychological mind-body position and a critical constructivist epistemological view, the stance of this book was that (1) psychological phenomena should be treated as hypothetical constructs and (2) studied by seeking empirical generalizations and law-like structures from knowledge expressable in behavioral terms. It was argued that “behavior” also includes activation processes, that is, the integrated efferent activity initiated and formed by various levels of the organismic system. The concept of “the situation” was found central for such an endeavor, since it enters in various guises (e.g., as the physico-biological and the functional situation) into the formation of activation. The demonstration of subtle and replicable differentiations between profiles of activation during different kinds of experimental situations, that is, of a highly differentiated physiological state-space or map, empirically confirmed this claim.