What are some examples of controversial themes in psychology? There are a number of themes that are controversial (provoke debate, are unsettled, polarize opinion, or are reflected by a range of positions) in psychology. One example involves nature vs. nurture: some people think that much of our language ability is innate, while others think that very little is innate. I've fleshed this example out a little bit as an answer below. 

I will eventually gathering data on just how controversial certain themes are, as a step towards investigating what the various factors are in such differences of opinion. Until then, or a starting point, I'm happy with opinions about what you think might be controversial.    

Suggestions from various subfields of psychology are welcome, but I'm looking more for issues that most people with a psychology degree might be able to form an opinion on, rather than something that is highly controversial for a small group of specialists, which the broader community won't have much interest in. 

Currently I have a list of themes that I think are controversial, but I was wondering what people in the field in general think. In other words, there might be something obvious that I've missed, and this seems to be a reasonable way to reduce the probability that there is.
Short answer: Representations are a noteworthy controversy in embodied or situated psychological theories. Can we explain behavior without reference to representations?

Long answer: Most modern theories presume that information is represented somewhere, such as the brain, and that behavior is organized because that somewhere is organized. Anti-representational theories, such as ecological psychology (e.g., Richardson et al., 2008) or radical embodied cognitive psychology (Chemero 2009; Chemero, 2013 for a brief review) explicitly reject this assumption and say there are no representations. Fink, Foo and Warren (2009) provided an apt, and ingenious, demonstration of how we may explain a behavior, namely catching flyballs, without reference to representations. Embodied cognitive theories, such as enclothed cognition (Adam and Galinsky, 2012), are examples of hybrid approaches incorporating both representational and nonrepresentational features.

References


Adam, H., &amp; Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 918-925.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
Chemero, A. (2013). Radical embodied cognitive science. Review of General Psychology, 17(2), 145.
Fink, P. W., Foo, P. S., &amp; Warren, W. H. (2009). Catching fly balls in virtual reality: A critical test of the outfielder problem. Journal of Vision, 9(13), 14.
Richardson, M. J., Shockley, K., Fajen, B. R., Riley, M. A., &amp; Turvey, M. T. (2008). Ecological psychology: Six principles for an embodied–embedded approach to behavior. Handbook of cognitive science: An embodied approach, 161-187.