Catalina Kopetz - Böcker

Twenty years ago, a group of investigators joined forces to propose a new conceptual paradigm based on a cognitive approach to motivation. This approach, referred to as goal systems theory, offered a broad perspective on behavioral phenomena and inspired research programs in diverse domains of psychological science. This volume collects the rich body of insights and findings that the goal systemic approach has yielded over the last two decades. Using the major cognitive architectures of goal systems, leading researchers from some of the world's most renowned universities push the envelopes of their respective fields to discover new psychological phenomena and relationships through applications. These include fundamental topics such as attitude-behavior relations, intrinsic motivation, consumer behavior, violent extremism, addiction, and interpersonal relations among others. In all those domains, applications of goal systemic analyses provide novel insights and guide real world interventions. Chapters in this volume present the authors' work in these varied domains of application thus offering concrete illustrations of the theory's reach and usefulness.

This ground-breaking book introduces a new model of extremism that emphasizes motivational imbalance among individual needs, offering a unique multidisciplinary exploration of extreme behaviors relating to terrorism, dieting, sports, love, addictions, and money. In popular discourse, the term ‘extremism’ has come to mean largely ‘violent extremism’, but this is just one of many different types: extreme sports, extreme diets, political and religious extremisms, extreme self-interest, extreme attitudes, extreme devotion to a cause, addiction to substances, or behavioral addiction (to videogames, shopping, pornography, sex, and work). But do these descriptions have a deeper meaning? Do they reveal a common psychological dynamic? Or are they merely a mode of things about phenomena that have little in common? Bringing together world-leading psychologists from a variety of disciplines, the book uses a brand-new model to examine different expressions of extremism, at different levels of analysis (brain, hormones, and behavior), in order not merely to describe such behaviors but also to explain their occurrence, and the conditions under which they may be likely to emerge.Also including suggestions for ways in which extremism could be counteracted, and to what extent it appears to be harmful to individuals and society, this is essential reading for students and academics in psychology and behavioral sciences.