Dynamic Systems Theory

Baumert and colleagues argued that research on between-and within-individual differences and expression of personality processes in context should be integrated. We applaud this effort and their focus on developmental processes but felt that their descriptions remained too unspecific. This comment highlights six issues that may contribute to a fruitful debate of future personality research: (a) induction time, (b) co-development of disorder states, (c) theory testing, (d) non-ergodicity and inferences at the within-individual level, (e) development as a complex dynamic system and (f) integration of literatures from neighboring scientific disciplines.

Dynamic systems theories, such as complexity and nonlinear dynamic systems theories, provide increased flexibility in approaching psychological phenomena with a less rigid, more fluid sensibility. They provide us with process language that moves away from linear directionality in construing psychoanalytic action in favor of a sensibility of emergence. This paper situates the concept of mirroring within the realms of systems

The properties of the firm are crucial starting points for developing theories on economy and management. The aim of this study is to propose a general theory of the social organization of production, mapping the essential conditions for its creation, development, and growth. In order to do so, we propose an evolutionary theory in which the relations of the organization's sociotechnical system manifest themselves through a self-perpetuating dynamic where leaders take on the role of social attractors and their viable outline is defined by their capacity for regeneration and by the flows of resources and information that pass through them. This goes against the finalist conceptions of the firm, in which the scope is to meet external demands. In this type of dynamics, the objective of the structure is to ensure its own organization and the realization of its identity and autonomy.

As one of the more mature marriage and family therapy (MFT) models, strategic family therapy has a distinguished and colorful history. Part of that history includes an era when strategic therapy was considered by some to be manipulative and even unethical. Recent advances in our understanding of the behavior of complex natural systems via dynamic systems theory may shed new

It inludes chapter on Graph Theory and Small-World Networks, Chaos, Bifurcations and Diffusion, Complexity and Information Theory, Random Boolean Networks, Cellular Automata and Self-Organized Criticality, Darwinian evolution, Hypercycles and Game Theory, Synchronization Phenomena and Elements of Cognitive System Theory.

This article examines development in children with neurogenetic disorders in the context of dynamic systems theory. Use of the dynamic systems framework enables researchers to view development in neurogenetic disorders
as an ongoing process of self-organization in a complex system with many interacting components. We present a review of three principles of self-organization from a dynamic systems framework—attractor states, developmental cascades, and phase transitions—and explore how these principles may inform the study of phenotypic development in children with
neurogenetic disorders. Implications for future work on development and behavioral phenotypes in this population are discussed.

With many countries now implementing multilingual educational initiatives in schools, there is a need to reconfigure training programs and encourage teachers to develop a multilingual identity so that they can better promote multilingualism among their students. At present, monolingual ideologies dominate the language education landscape, particularly disadvantaging non-native speaker teachers (NNSTs), who are proficient multilinguals by default and who might best embody the successful language learner model for emergent multilinguals. Studies on NNSTs, however, have traditionally focused on their status as deficient native speakers instead of exploring their multilinguality, although this has started to change in recent years. This study represents a critical review of empirical studies (n = 84) from 2009-2018 that reflect this change. The review indicates that a growing number of studies have started to document NNSTs' unique affordances and multilingual practices in the classroom globally, that NNSTs can develop a reactive multilingual identity in response to native-speakerism, and that learners, when engaged by researchers, do recognize the multilingual affordances of NNSTs. The study's findings should contribute to the growing body of research on multilingual teacher identity, affordances, and practices, especially as this concerns NNSTs.

Few readily identify Maslow as a developmental psychologist. On the other hand, Maslow's call for holistic/systemic, phenomenological, and dynamic/ relational developmental perspectives in psychology (all being alternatives to the limitations of the dominant natural science paradigm) anticipated what emerged both as and in the subdiscipline of developmental psychology. In this article, we propose that Maslow's dynamic systems approach to healthy human development served as a forerunner for classic and contemporary theory and research on parallel constructs in developmental psychology that provide empirical support for his ideas—particularly those affiliated with characteristics of psychological health (i.e., self-actualization) and the conditions that promote or inhibit it. We also explore Maslow's adaptation of Goldstein's concept of self-actualization, in which he simultaneously: (a) explicated a theory of safety versus growth that accounts for the two-steps-forward-one-step-back contiguous dynamic that realistically characterizes the ongoing processes of being-in-becoming and psychological integration in human development/maturity and (b) emphasized being-in-the-world-with-others with the intent of facilitating the development of an ideal society

Though the realm of biology has long been under the philosophical rule of the mechanistic magisterium, recent years have seen a surprisingly steady rise in the usurping prowess of process ontology. According to its proponents, theoretical advances in the contemporary science of evo-devo have afforded that ontology a particularly powerful claim to the throne: in that increasingly empirically confirmed discipline, emergently autonomous, higher-order entities are the reigning explanantia. If we are to accept the election of evo-devo as our best conceptualisation of the biological realm with metaphysical rigour, must we depose our mechanistic ontology for failing to properly “carve at the joints” of organisms? In this paper, I challenge the legitimacy of that claim: not only can the theoretical benefits offered by a process ontology be had without it, they cannot be sufficiently grounded without the metaphysical underpinning of the very mechanisms which processes purport to replace. The biological realm, I argue, remains one best understood as under the governance of mechanistic principles.

This study aimed to investigate the link between Foreign Language Enjoyment, Foreign Language Anxiety and Willingness to Communicate in Denisa and Anda, two high school learners of English as a Foreign Language in Romania. Qualitative data were collected during a school semester including lesson observations, a written task and semi-structured interviews with the aim of obtaining retrodictive data in order to gain a better understanding of the nature and amount of fluctuation and change in participants' Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in English over time. The approach is strongly influenced by Dynamic System Theory and is based on the concept of constructed emotions. The study revealed that WTC was related to the uniquely constructed emotions of Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) and Foreign Language (Classroom) Anxiety (FLCA) in dynamic, idiosyncratic ways, that took root during the first contact with English, extending into the present and the future. Learners' personality and their experiences inside and outside the English classroom shaped their emotions which had direct and indirect repercussions on their WTC. The paper concludes that case studies into and WTC offer a crucial complement to quantitative studies as they highlight the fact that emotions cannot be essentialized and that their relationship with WTC can fluctuate sharply over the short term and develop over the longer term, depending on a range of interacting learner-internal and contextual variables. FLE and FLCA do remain useful concepts at a super-ordinate level.

The article explores the prerequisites of embodied “conversations” in the improvisational pair dance tango argentino. Tango has been characterized as a dialog of two bodies. Based on first- and second-person phenomenological methods I investigate the skills that enable two dancers to move as a super-individual ensemble, to communicate without time lag, and to feel the partner’s intention at every moment. How can two persons walking in opposite directions with partly different knowledge remain in contact throughout, when every moment can be an invention? My first objective is to analyze these feats through the lens of image schemas such as BALANCE, FORCE, PATH, and UP-DOWN (Johnson 1987). Technique-related discourse and didactic metaphors are replete with image-schematic vectors, geometries, and construal operations like profiling. These enable the tango, from posture – via walking technique and kinetics – to attention and contact skills: Dancers who individually organize their muscles efficiently (e.g. through core tension) and respect postural “grammar” (e.g. a good axis) enable the embodied dialog by receptivity to the partner and maneuverability. Super-individual imagery that defines “good states” to stick to as a couple, relational attention management, and kinetic calibration of a joint walk turns the dyad into a single action unit. My second objective is a micro-phenomenological analysis of joint improvisation. This requires a theory that explains dynamic sensing, how repertory knowledge combines with this, and how both are managed in small increments. Dancers strategically sense for specific action affordances (Gibson 1979) or recognize and exploit them “on-the-fly”. Dynamic routines allow them to step-wise negotiate workable configurations, assisted by the knowledge of node points where tango elements are most naturally connected and rerouted. The paper closes with general lessons to be learnt from highly structured embodied improvisation skills, especially regarding certain blind spots of current social cognition theorizing.

This study investigated how the lexical and syntactic features
of two Hungarian advanced English as a Foreign Language
(EFL) learners’ writing evolved over a period of four months
from a dynamic systems theory (DST) perspective. The
participants provided data in the form of written essays which
were analysed computationally by software packages (CohMetrix
2.0, Coh-Metrix 3.0 and Synlex L2 Complexity
Analyzer). It was found that both lexical and syntactic indices
showed interindividual and intraindividual variability. The log
frequency for content words index showed a gradual decline
which suggests that both participants started to use less
frequent lexical items in their writing. When measure of textual
lexical diversity (MTLD) was plotted against mean length of Tunit
(MLTU) and MTLD against dependent clause per T-unit
(DC/T), it was found that both participants concentrated on
lexical complexity rather than on syntactic complexity which
was also confirmed by the interview data. The largest rate
change occurred for coordinate phrases per T-unit (CP/T) for
both participants.

Although contemporary metaphysics has recently undergone a neo-Aristotelian revival wherein dispositions, or capacities are now commonplace in empirically grounded ontologies, being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, a central Aristotelian concept has yet to be given serious attention – the doctrine of hylomorphism. The reason for this is clear: while the Aristotelian ontological distinction between actuality and potentiality has proven to be a fruitful conceptual framework with which to model the operation of the natural world, the distinction between form and matter has yet to similarly earn its keep. In this chapter, I offer a first step toward showing that the hylomorphic framework is up to that task. To do so, I return to the birthplace of that doctrine - the biological realm. Utilising recent advances in developmental biology, I argue that the hylomorphic framework is an empirically adequate and conceptually rich explanatory schema with which to model the nature of organisms.

Within the abstract framework of dynamical system theory we describe a general approach to the Transient (or Evans-Searles) and Steady State (or Gallavotti-Cohen) Fluctuation Theorems of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Our main objective is to display the minimal, model independent mathematical structure at work behind fluctuation theorems. Besides its conceptual simplicity, another advantage of our approach is its natural extension to

Dynamic systems theory (DST) is presented in this article as a suitable approach to research the acquisition of second language (L2) because of its close alignment with the process of second language learning. Through a process of identifying and comparing the characteristics of a dynamic system with the process of L2 learning, this article illustrates that L2 development is indeed a dynamic process. This article argues that DST has not only broadened the theoretical perspective, but also enriched the practical and methodological approaches in the second language developmental research enterprise. DST has the potential to bridge the gap between reductionist and holistic research practice in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) field and to advance our understanding of L2 acquisition and development. This article argues that incorporating DST into cross-disciplinary inquiries will strengthen its practical application. It concludes by pointing out some directions to apply this framework and to expand beyond its current state. Humans' natural predisposition toward effortless acquisition of a mother tongue has always marvelled the inquisitive mind. The loss of such ease in any subsequent language learning has also been the centre of debate for decades, especially in the second language acquisition (SLA) enterprise. Different schools of thought offer different perspectives on language learning issues. While the nativists attach much importance to the innate ability to acquire language and argue against the significance of habit formation in language learning as purported by behaviourists, the interactionists maintain that language acquisition and its subsequent development are the result of interactions between the individual and the environment in which the language is learned and used. Each argument stands on the extreme ends of a continuum without a bridging arch to reconcile them or to offer a more converging lens to look at second language development. In this article, the author propose that dynamic systems theory (DST) is a promising meta-theory to embrace both perspectives and form a more