Short abstract:

Here, I examine the role of nature-based therapeutic practices (‘forest bathing’ or shinrin-yoku) in psychological culture. I argue that such practices rely on a particular psycho-politics, in which unstable modernity is contrasted with the psychic and moral certainty of the pre-modern world

Long abstract:

In recent years, nature-based therapeutic practices (sometimes called ‘forest bathing’ or shinrin-yoku) have taken up significant space in psychological and psychotherapeutic culture globally. These practices center on a claim that being surrounded by nature is critical to properly functioning psychology; that absence of nature is a major psychological risk (Berman, 2019). The practice has been bolstered by the emergence of fields like environmental neuroscience, with significant research interest in measuring how nature contact produces a measurable effect on neurobiological states. Though data is patchy, we know that forest therapy has grown rapidly in the last decade and is a central part of the public culture of mental health in several countries (Fraccaroli et al, 2021). In this paper, I report on pilot work (fifteen semi-structured interviews, with site visits and mobile methods) among forest bathing practitioners, focused on how practitioners configure forest therapy practice within psychological and political culture. Through thematic analysis, I show that a particular form of nostalgic or regressive temporality is central to forest bathing’s account of itself: at the individual scale, participants report, forest therapy returns the subject to a state of childlike wonder and moral innocence. At the collective scale, it returns humankind to the psychic and moral stability of the pre-modern world. I argue that, in mobilizing such temporalities, forest bathing becomes legible through a reactionary politics of return, and I analyze this novel psychological practice through literature on the role of environmental and ‘wellbeing’ horizons in contemporary far right mobilization (Crockford, 2021).

Short abstract:

This paper examines how psychological expertise on sleep is constructed in the coverage of sleep in the Uruguayan media over the last 20 years. Drawing on articles from newspapers, weeklies and television programmes, it explores the contemporary process of the psychologization of sleep.

Long abstract:

Sleep has occupied psychology since its beginnings as a discipline. But over the years psychology's interest in sleep has been contested by the sleep sciences, more closely linked to the biomedical approach. Since the mid-20th century, these sleep sciences have established themselves as the main sources of knowledge about sleep and the main providers of treatments for sleep problems and disorders. In fact, much of the knowledge about sleep that circulates today at the popular level results in a medicalised and healthitized vision of sleep that is directly linked to biomedicine and particularly to sleep medicine, a relatively recent sub-speciality. However, psychology has still managed to maintain some of its prerogatives over the field of sleep, and psychologists continue to be called upon as experts when it comes to presenting a scientific vision of sleep to the general public.

This paper examines how psychological expertise on sleep is constructed in the coverage of sleep in the Uruguayan media over the last twenty years. Drawing on articles from newspapers, weeklies and television programmes, it explores the contemporary process of the psychologization of sleep and its relationship to the processes of medicalization and healthitization driven by sleep medicine. It also analyzes how psychology contributes to making sleep a public health problem closely linked to the moralization of people's sleep habits.

Short abstract:

This presentation focuses on the circulation of knowledge about adult’s giftedness in France. I discuss the diffusion of that concept, how it operates a syncretism between clinical and neurocognitive concepts and how its popularization is a result of the evolution of mental health organization.

Long abstract:

This presentation explains how “gifted adult” (I.Q above 130) became a concept used in a therapeutic context. The concept of “gifted adult” has become more and more used in popular psychology since 2008 in France. Self-help books and clinical psychologists point out that giftedness is linked with personality traits (like sensitivity or empathy) and a different cognitive organization which can lead to difficulties or unsuitability. Within a few years, “gifted adult” became an important concept describing people in specific psychological needs. Based on a dataset of a corpus analysis of thirteen books about adult’s giftedness, an analysis of twelve interviews with gifted adults and an ethnography of online groups of gifted adults, I show that:

(i) Conceptions about adult giftedness are the extension of a French mobilization of gifted children’s parents. While this mobilization aims at getting school adjustments for the diagnosed child, for adults the diagnosis is used by therapists in a clinical context for people feeling unsuitable.

(ii) The conceptualization of giftedness as a clinical object always operates a syncretism between clinical and neurocognitive knowledge: if the “gifted brain” is often discussed in books as well as in interviews, clinical aspects (like suffering or feeling of unsuitability) are the main constituent of the discourses centered around giftedness.

(iii) The popularization of adult’s giftedness is also a result of the evolution of the mental health organization in France: the diagnostic conditions are in line with the mutations of the professional organization and a new conceptual framework in psychiatry.

Short abstract:

This paper explores how indiviuals come to believe in NLP, an assemblage of mutiple psychology-related knowledge and techniques.And it demonstrates how this process influences their understanding of psychology, the mind-body relationships and themselves.

Long abstract:

Neuro Linguistic Programming（NLP）is a knowledge system developed in the United States in the 1970s, which attempts to understand the activities of the human mind and behavior patterns by combining various psychological, psychiatric and psychotherapeutic insights and techniques. Though it has long been claimed as “pseudo-science” by the scientists, it still flourished within the wave of the New Age Movement. It was introduced to Taiwan in the 90s. Today, it and its related technologies are practiced across fields including personal growth, business management, and psychotherapy in Taiwan, and also widely combined with various local knowledge systems.

With my field work and in-depth interview in two local NLP teaching institutions, this paper aims to understand how does the NLP make users "believe" in its explanatory power and effectiveness. The analysis focusses on three aspects. First, the boundary work from the NLP trainers through the performances and disclosures in their lectures. Second, the material configurations and group settings inside the classroom that allow students to gain embodied experiences through practice, and the meaningful evidence derived therefrom. Third, the changes in practitioners’ daily lives and their views on people, minds and behaviors after developing a new identity of “NLPer”.

This article will demonstrate how NLP, a fringe knowledge that has been excluded by academic psychology, plays an important role in the lay's understanding of psychology and their imagination of what it is to be a person.

Short abstract:

Trauma-centred care have been introduced as response to negative birth experiences in Swiss maternities. We examine the knowledges used and produced by caregivers to frame birth experiences in these care pathways and how the trauma framing overshadows the concurrent framing of obstetric violence.

Long abstract:

Drawing from a feminist-STS framework, based on an ethnography in Swiss maternity units and on a controversy analysis of scientific literature and mass media, this presentation will analyse the role of the psychological framing of negative birth experiences within current debates about obstetric violence. Whereas mass media focus on both obstetric violence and psychological framing of negative experiences, psychological framing is at the forefront of knowledge-making and practices in maternity units.

Our fieldwork documents how scientific literature on birth trauma is circulated and transformed by non-psychologist in day-to-day communication and practices. The midwife-led debriefing has increasingly become a care pathway proposed to users who express dissatisfaction about their birth. This consultation is presented as an opportunity for parents to discuss their experience and as a tool to prevent and screen for birth-related PTSD. We will analyse how the debriefing reflects a situated selection of the growing literature on trauma-centred care. In addition, we will describe how expertise and knowledge are produced within the debriefing sessions and how they reframe the debates on obstetric violence. Whereas 'obstetric violence' refers to problematic care, situated within the continuum of gender-based violence, 'traumatic birth' relates to psychological reactions to the unfolding of birth. The framing of dissatisfaction in psychological terms provides a handle for professionals dealing with suffering and/or complaining users, while limiting the potential for structural change in care practices. We aim to open the discussion on how this framing contributes to reproductive injustice by producing ignorance concerning problematic aspects of care.

Short abstract:

A professional approach to violence and aggression, de-escalation brings psychological knowledge to a host of different situations. Through ethnographic engagement with de-escalation practices and trainings, I query how psychological knowledge is put to work in this context, and to what effects.

Long abstract:

De-escalation is frequently practiced, trained and mandated in German health and social welfare services to mitigate the risk of staff injury and improve care provision. As a professional approach to violence and aggression, de-escalation brings psychological knowledge to a host of different situations, providing explanatory models of aggression and giving a language to neurophysiological, embodied and social processes that precede a violent incident. In this contribution, I draw on ethnographic engagement with de-escalation practices and trainings to query how psychological knowledge is put to work in de-escalation efforts, and to what effects.

I show that psychological knowledge takes on specific shapes when it is mobilized to respond to escalating situations as unique, urgent and highly contextual. Trainers foster experiential, pragmatic, and heuristic modes of knowing through psychological theories by working with examples, exercises and a plurality of explanatory models. In this sense, the shape of psychological knowledge attunes to context. However, psychology also serves to contextualize escalating situations: It is mobilized by trainers to locate aggression not simply in individual persons, but understand its genesis in the context of what is often described as ‘structural violence’, thus drawing attention to tension and frustration inherent in institutional life and in relations of power and dependency. Yet again, as a situated intervention, de-escalation furthermore targets emotions such as anger as potential security risk, with trainers referencing stress research and advising particular communication strategies to reduce risk. Following material-semiotic approaches, I examine psychological knowledge in de-escalation in terms of these different (de-)contexualizing moves.

Short abstract:

This presentation aims to offer a better understanding of the way men who batter use psychological knowledge and psychologists in order to make sense of their story, to blame their partner, and to contest judiciary rulings when they are in their disadvantage.

Long abstract:

In this paper I wish to discuss the way men who batter make sense of their experience using psychological language, provided by the psychologists they see —either willingly or after having been condemned. During the course of a PhD work, I have interviewed over twenty men who have been condemned for intimate partner violence. The omnipresence of psychological professionals in these men’s account of their own life points toward the normalization of therapy as a problem-solving arena, but also as a practice which shapes one’s reflexivity. Far from being limited to men who batter, this movement points to the way ‘‘mass psychological culture’’ (Schwartz, 2011) has shaped our understanding of various issues.

Then I wish to focus on the popularization of psychological notions such as ‘narcissists’, ‘trauma’, or ‘reactive violence’. These notions can be used by the men I’ve interviewed in order to absolve themselves of their own violence and blame their partner, described as a narcissist or a psychopath, trying to incite violence.

However, it has to be said that ‘‘psychological culture’’ is not only something that shapes the way the men I’ve interviewed tell and understand their story, but also something that provides ressources and tools in order to settle disputes. They indeed use psychologists in order to contest judiciary ruling, for example by asking for a psychiatric evaluation of the partner in order to prove that she is either lying or not of sound mind, often in order for these men to gain custody of the children.

Short abstract:

This paper examines the role of psychological expertise in the case of prevention programs against gender-based violence in North America.

Long abstract:

The research on which this article is based examines educational programs, inspired by psychological approaches, generally designed to be delivered in schools, universities or workplaces, to prevent the occurrence of sexist and sexual violence by learning various communication techniques and sociological and psychological knowledge. We have studied this prevention project in the context of Quebec regarding specific intervention practices, and more broadly in North America regarding the research supporting these programs and the grey literature of these initiatives often carried out by non-profit, public and private organizations.

I analyze the knowledge and expertise mobilized by professionals in violence prevention and examines the role of psychology in public action against gender violence in North America. Borrowing from the questions and methods of feminist science studies, the data collected is subjected to a critical analysis of the practices, theories, tools, and various bodies involved in the scientific and institutional construction of gender and sexuality. This approach, applied to an atypical hybrid object, enables us to grasp the issues involved in the scholarly constructions studied and their social effects. These programs can thus be seen as the deployment of feminist and psychological expertise on gender-based violence, this expertise itself being the product of this conflict of expertise. The feminist approach to science thus serves to clarify the modalities of elaboration, implementation and expected effects of the violence prevention project by considering it as a "mosaic" composed of actors with diverse expertise and more or less convergent objectives.

Short abstract:

Situational judgment tests (SJTs) are psychometric tests used in medical school admissions in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere. I argue that SJTs reinforce the prominence of psychometric expertise by both constructing notions of character and proposing methods of evaluating character.

Long abstract:

I investigate a new testing technology used in medical school admissions processes in the U.S., Canada, and other countries. It is a called a situational judgment test, and is a type of test that uses challenging everyday scenarios to learn about the courses of action an individual would take if confronted with them, thereby drawing inferences about the individual’s behavioral traits and procedural knowledge. These tests were developed in the past 15 years, and grow out of the use of similar, less sophisticated tests in non-professional job screening. SJTs are important to investigate because they introduce quantification practices to the assessment of character and fit in admissions processes. While studying the success of educational tests is generally the province of educational researchers and test developers, given the understandings of the consequences of quantification developed by scholars in STS, a narrow psychometric frame is insufficient for understanding the implications of these new tests for admissions processes. The critical approach to psychometrics I articulate investigates the ‘social life’ of situational judgment tests by examining how they are actually used in admissions processes. I combine interview data with a rhetorical analysis of test development and marketing materials to produce a critical analysis of validity claims and underlying theories of behavior in SJTs. I argue that the introduction of situational judgement tests into admissions processes consolidates and reinforces the prominence of psychometric expertise by both constructing notions of character and proposing methods of evaluating character.

Short abstract:

Exploring the dynamics of psychopathic tests from inception to dissemination, including traditional use in medico-legal contexts and emergence in general population settings. Additionally, the proliferation of self-administered tests beyond clinical institutions is examined.

Long abstract:

This communication delves into the intricate dynamics of psychopathic tests, drawing insights from a range of sources, such as the analysis of bibliometric data, examination of psychological magazine archives, and interviews with researchers. Through these diverse methodologies, I aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the production, circulation, and scientific dissemination of these tests. This approach illuminates the various applications of psychopathic assessments in fields such as neuroscience, developmental psychology, and scientific dissemination. Beyond their traditional application in medico-legal contexts, psychopathic tests have increasingly permeated general population settings, facilitated by the availability of self-administered tests. This proliferation signifies a pivotal moment in efforts by some in the psychological field to destigmatize the category of psychopathy, shaping public discourse and potentially influencing policy decisions. By exploring these dynamics, this presentation contributes to broader discussions on the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and social perception.

Short abstract:

[Social] psychologists' individual actions as producers of knowledge in the field demonstrate the cultural orientation of the field more broadly. This association has implications for scientific practice, improvements in the outcomes of psychological science, and possibilities for radical change.

Long abstract:

I have argued (Brown, 2020) that psychologists should work to engage a new unit of analysis, one capacious enough to acknowledge the simultaneous instantiation of social structures as lived experiences/social lives, not as influential and external. In interviews with researchers studying social identity, I asked them to reflect on their scientific processes in addition to their own biographies (i.e., racialized individuals reflecting on how they study race as members of a scientific discipline and as racialized members of broader society). While some interviews functioned as brief conversations wherein qualitative data could be collected, others were a site to examine self-structure singularity (Brown, 2020). Participants confronted the inner workings of their discipline as made manifest through their own individual actions and the connection between disciplinary practices and the (re)production of neoliberalism, racism, etc. They then reflected on the nature of their disciplinary methods to make sense of contemporary realities related to social identity scholarship. In this paper I examine the interview experiences of two researchers of color, one occupying each of the positions I’ve articulated, as revelatory of the complex dynamics of selves and structures. I present interview data as well as my own reflections on the interview process. Through analyzing these data and reflecting on my own experiences, I present the space of the interview as a type of encounter where disciplinary practices are reflected upon (or ignored), radical change is imagined (or not considered), and the self is challenged (or not) as a conduit for perpetuating detrimental structural realities.

Short abstract:

This paper examines the diffusion of the psychological science of resilience from the US military into community and immigrant psychological clinics, illuminating its gendered qualities of personhood characterized by the self as shield and battlefield, and ready for action rather than peace.

Long abstract:

Resilience has become a frame for the temporal life of a world in which injury and disaster are anticipated. Closely analyzed as a trope in climate change in “natural” disaster experiences in which the bios and material infrastructures are targets of intervention, its gendered forms and logics are now deeply instantiated in the arsenal of psychological brain science and clinical intervention. Resilience practice and science create imaginaries of personhood in which instability and future harm are expected. This paper first examines the rise of the psychology of resilience in the US military in the 1980s, tracing it to the military’s new focus on repairing combat soldiers so they can return to battle. Undergirded by a scientific conception of soldiers that conceptualized them in strongly cognitive and material ways, soldier bodies and minds were understood to be flexible, such that they could train for and withstand repeated injury. In part two, I trace the genderraced conceptions of the self in resilience science in two laboratory clinics in New York and Massachusetts, one serving low-income communities and the other immigrants, illuminating three qualities of resilient personhood: the body and mind as shields; life as a battlefield; and the disallowance of the broken, permanently debilitated, and hope-less, the latter of which are arrays of living that both co-exist with resilient thriving, and which draw attention to the causes of injury and harm, not just forms of coping with it. The paper contributes to new conceptualizations of technopersonhood situated in militarized and precarious worlds.

Short abstract:

‘Art as Psychological Record’ pulls together three case studies from the history of psychology to analyse the ways in which drawings and paintings are registered and understood as medical and psychological records.

Long abstract:

The broad field of psychology has a curious relationship with art, which has been operationalised as an object of study, a communication device, a therapeutic tool, and a record of mental states. This paper studies how artworks have historically been used as psychological objects ripe for interpretation and how the interpretation of art has intersected with methodologies hoping to concretely register psychological processes and states, such as diagnostics, psychometric testing, laboratory observation, and psychoanalytic interpretation. In the interconnected, yet distinct fields of art therapy, psychoanalysis and mental testing, artworks were positioned as available for analysis.

This project focuses on the multiple uses of artworks made in the Netherne Hospital’s art therapy programme, focusing on how psychiatric staff pictured art as scientific evidence and used them as case records. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein understood drawing as the practical mode of communication with children, comparing the process to talk therapy with adults. Like the language of her patients, the drawings were figured as insights into the unconscious phantasies and projections made by children. Finally, drawing has been used in widely in psychometric testing, here I focus specifically tests like Draw-A-Person and the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, which were designed to quickly register a child’s intellectual or creative capacities. Though these three case studies emerged from largely disparate places (asylums, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and mental testing), they still similarly posit that the marks made on paper can be interpreted psychologically.

Short abstract:

A dramaturgical analysis of a celebrated experimental scene in cognitive neuroscience research illustrates how a mistrust of the experimental subject shaped logics and methods for social psychology--and subsequently cognitive neuroscience--experimental design.

Long abstract:

To The Things, Them Cells!

Pannill Camp (2007) suggested that the 18th century development of proscenium theatres shaped subsequent models for apperception and consciousness. Theatre architectures where the proscenium—the “first frame”—was designed to vanish in the perception and experience of an audience have been particularly evocative in drawing my attention to elements of laboratory experiments that are designed to recede so that the phenomena of interest—"the things themselves”—can be captured.

In post-WWII social psychology experiments, while researchers’ interest lay in modes of human intersubjectivity, their studies were theatrically designed to circumvent the knowing, sense-making subject to reveal the psychological or physiological mechanisms hidden beneath. Milgram’s notorious obedience experiments, for example, were merely a particularly provocative instantiation of an otherwise widely accepted norm of “deceptive” experimental design in social psychology. In this experimental dramaturgy, the “human subject at the centre”—to whom a world appears as meaningful and actionable (Oliver Sacks 1985)—is actively bracketed out as a reliable interpreter. While some have argued that this mode of experimental social psychology has become obsolete, I suggest that its legacies and strategies—its ways of getting to the things themselves—are bequeathed to and refracted through cognitive neuroscience research on social minds.

Here, I present a dramaturgical analysis of a celebrated experimental scene in cognitive neuroscience research: a monkey study investigating neural mechanisms of human intersubjectivity. I draw out not only how this experiment was staged, but also what sorts of presences and absences it required and the different types of narration and interpretation it afforded.

Short abstract:

This paper deals with the social conditions of production of a psychological label from an STS perspective. It shows the ambivalent role of scientific arguments in the (de)legitimization of a controversial label. It questions more broadly the nature of expertise within the “therapeutic culture”.

Long abstract:

This paper aims to show the interest of using an STS perspective for understanding the circulation and the success of psychological labels. More precisely, it examines the case of the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) label, which was first coined in 1996 by an American psychotherapist, Elaine Aron, in her book The Highly Sensitive Person. How to Thrive when the World Overwhelms You (Aron 1996). This self-help book quickly became an international bestseller (for instance, it is translated in 2005 in French) and more and more people all around the world began to testify to the great awakening and transformation they felt when they discovered their high sensitivity. This social phenomenon can thus refer to what Ian Hacking calls a process of “making up people” (Hacking 1999).

This case study is of great interest from the STS perspective because the label of HSP has the distinctive feature of being a contested and emerging label. It is therefore particularly relevant to examine the various ways in which different actors seek to bring this label into existence and making it credible (Shapin 1995). The scientific argument plays a special role in this context: in particular, the neurobiological basis of high sensitivity functions as the main legitimizing authority for experts (with the argument of the “highly sensitive brain” for instance). The success of this “travelling” label (Prieur et al. 2016) also questions the nature of expertise (Eyal 2013) in the “therapeutic culture”: how and why do professionals use their “high sensitivity” in their work?