Valences, traces and new synthesis in social representing. Commentary of J. Valsiner’s Creating sign hierarchies

Based on a chemical metaphor, Valsiner's (2013) model proposes to consider social representations as semiotic processes regulating developmental dynamic. In this paper I pursue this exploration by considering situations in which people's trajectories lead them to confront with conflicting social representations. Based on the two cases of young women's war experience, I suggest (i) that social representation have, for a given person, different "weight" than others, because they have longer story for him or her; (ii) that social representations might have positive or negative "valences", due to their emotional resonance; and that (iii) the existence of specific conditions of "natural laboratories" might help us to account for the processes by which people nonetheless engage into new forms of representing.