Within the Ideological Surround Model of the social sciences and religion, so-called “universal” perspectives within the psychology of religion can dialogically clarify and be clarified by the “particular” elements of Muslim commitment. This study developed new scales for operationalizing the experience and behavior of Pakistani Muslims during Ramadan. In a sample of university students, one set of experiential factors apparently facilitated, whereas another interfered with the practices of Ramadan. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Personal Religious Orientations correlated with greater (...) and the Extrinsic Social motivation with lower levels of involvement in Ramadan. Relative to these religious orientation measures, Ramadan experience scales displayed incremental validity by explaining additional variance in Ramadan behavior. Women proved to be more religious than men. At the most general level, these data further supported the dialogic assumptions of the Ideological Surround Model of research in the psychology of religion. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} In the course of the founding history of America, the American Sacred Ground has been a contested territory where people who do not share a single history or a single religious tradition have engaged in the common tasks of civil society to broaden the contours of religious (...) pluralism in the US. This paper studies the post 9/11 phase of the public debate on America’s religious identity as the Muslim moment in the long-standing pilgrimage in American religious history towards participatory pluralism. It underscores the challenges that both Americans and American Muslims have had to face to help one another make sense of the startling religious diversity incurred by the 1965 immigration reforms. My contention is that, compared to the Jewish and Catholic experiences, it is only since 9/11 that American Muslims have carried through the traditional role of religious outsiders, abiding by the principles of the American Sacred Ground. (shrink)

As an exploration of 'beautiful behavior' in theory and practice, this ground-breaking volume explores the incredible diversity and dynamism of Islam in Southeast Asia, both past and present. Amid the dazzling complexity of Islamic civilization, the concept of adab provides Muslims with a shared sense of sacred history, identity, and morality. In the context of Islamic ethics, adab defines the rules of personal and public etiquette: good manners, moral conduct, civility, humaneness, beautiful behavior. Spotlighting the interdisciplinary research of (...) ten prominent scholars, the book offers new perspectives on adab's multiple meanings and myriad applications for Muslim communities in Malaysia and Indonesia. The chapters examine a wide range of texts including the writings of key Muslim thinkers and contexts, focusing on the everyday experiences of lay Muslims. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and methodological lenses, the essays reveal how 'beautiful behavior' impacts local institutions, cultural practices, and religious imaginations via politics and law, spirituality and piety, ethics and experience. (shrink)

In this exploratory qualitative study, the open-ended responses of 71 Turkish–Muslim university students regarding their religious socialization experiences were coded by NVivo 8. Results indicate that both parents play a major role in their offspring's religious socialization. However, participants perceive their same-sex parents in particular as being more influential. Parents’ methods for transmitting religious values and practices include having religious talks with their children, answering their questions about Islam, sending them to mosques, reinforcing and/or punishing their behaviours. Peers, siblings, (...) and cousins are other important religious socialization agents whom the participants generally perceive as partners in religious activities. Some religious peer groups, same-sex siblings and cousins play a significant role in the participants’ religious learning. In Turkish–Muslim families, the oldest siblings exert a major influence on the religious socialization of their younger brothers and sisters as do grandparents, aunts and uncles. (shrink)

In this exploratory qualitative study, the open-ended responses of 71 Turkish–Muslim university students regarding their religious socialization experiences were coded by NVivo 8. Results indicate that both parents play a major role in their offspring’s religious socialization. However, participants perceive their same-sex parents in particular as being more influential. Parents’ methods for transmitting religious values and practices include having religious talks with their children, answering their questions about Islam, sending them to mosques, reinforcing and/or punishing their behaviours. Peers, siblings, (...) and cousins are other important religious socialization agents whom the participants generally perceive as partners in religious activities. Some religious peer groups, same-sex siblings and cousins play a significant role in the participants’ religious learning. In Turkish–Muslim families, the oldest siblings exert a major influence on the religious socialization of their younger brothers and sisters as do grandparents, aunts and uncles. (shrink)

In humans, conscious perception and cognition depends upon the thalamocortical complex, which supports perception, explicit cognition, memory, language, planning, and strategic control. When parts of the T-C system are damaged or stimulated, corresponding effects are found on conscious contents and state, as assessed by reliable reports. In contrast, large regions like cerebellum and basal ganglia can be damaged without affecting conscious cognition directly. Functional brain recordings also show robust activity differences in cortex between experimentally matched conscious and unconscious events. This (...) basic anatomy and physiology is highly conserved in mammals and perhaps ancestral reptiles. While language is absent in other species, homologies in perception, memory, and motor cortex suggest that consciousness of one kind or another may be biologically fundamental and phylogenetically ancient. In humans we infer subjective experiences from behavioral and brain evidence. This evidence is quite similar in other mammals and perhaps some non-mammalian species. On the weight of the biological evidence, therefore, subjectivity may be conserved in species with human-like brains and behavior. (shrink)

Chris Voparil’s Reconstructing Pragmatism builds the best case to date that the neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty decisively and productively reshaped the lineage of pragmatist philosophy. In developing new directions for pragmatism, the book seeks to press past a number of recent debates. One such debate concerns the relative priority of experience and language as methodological starting points for pragmatist philosophy. While Voparil seeks to abandon this debate as outworn, this review argues that the issue of pragmatism’s methodological apparatus cannot (...) be easily set aside. Only by addressing head-on the disadvantages of experience-first pragmatism and language-first pragmatism can a next iteration of pragmatist philosophy properly develop a third methodological option, tantalizingly noted by Voparil, of a practice-first pragmatism. (shrink)

If consciousness has no influence on my behaviour,what shall I do with it ? In this paper it is contended, that even if neuroscience is right, if some conscious experiences such as emotional experiences have no influence on our behavior, they still constitute a significant part of our world, our existence. For understanding the significance of conscious experiences we should go beyond behaviour, biology and biological evolution. This paper and its understanding of consciousness and natural science is based on (...) an idealist philosophy maintaining, that only conscious experience is real. Conscious experience is supposed to be known directly or intuitively, it cannot be explained. Key words: Consciousness as existence; behaviour; communication; language; free will; idealist philosophy; collective conscious experience; cognition. (shrink)

The multiplicity of Islamic interpretations is reflected in the heterogeneous nature of the Romanian Muslim communities. The internal fragmentation and disunity of Muslim communities, intra-Islamic difficulties, ideological and sectarian rivalry, success of Salafism among certain groups, the absence of stronger and more visible Islamic alternative discourses and the lack of interest in finding adequate mechanisms to facilitate the integration of the new Muslims in society are some of the general problems of the Romanian Muslims. Local Islamic revival has (...) an ethno-cultural dimension, a religious and even a political one as external disputes are imported in the Romanian context and affects the way Muslims define and practice Islam. Some Rroma and indigenous Tatar-Turkish adopted the neo-traditionalism consolidated in the second half of the last century and promoted by the most active Sunni NGOs in Romania. Some converts emancipated from the ideological control by conservative and neoconservative Islamic currents and are in search of progressive or mystical interpretations; other new Muslims found safety in the Salafi’s certitudes and rigid rules. Case study findings presented in this article may suggest that the more it depends on formal rituals, external behavior and rigid canonical displays of religiosity, the more fragile the Muslim identity becomes. A vulnerable constructed Self conceives differences and alterity as an attack against personal identity, hence the increasing aggressive and intolerant, superior Salafi attitudes. The more it is built on universal values, inner experience, ethical convictions, the more open and capable of integrating alterity and fostering positive relations with people of different religions becomes Muslim identity. (shrink)

It has been hypothesized that psychedelic experiences elicit lasting psychological benefits by altering narrative selfhood, which has yet to be explicitly studied. The present study investigates retrospective reports (n = 418) of changes to narrative self that participants believe resulted from, or were catalysed by, their psychedelic experience(s). Responses to open-ended questions were analysed using inductive and deductive thematic coding and interpreted within agent-centred approaches to development and well-being. Themes include decentred introspection, greater access to self-knowledge, positive shifts in (...) self-evaluation processes, greater psychological and behavioural autonomy, and enhanced connectedness with others and the world. While this explorative qualitative study offers some initial support for the explanation that changes to narrative self are a cornerstone of psychedelics' therapeutic and transformative potential, methodological and recruiting limitations preclude the ability to make objective claims and generalizations. Future scientific research is necessary to further elucidate this hypothesized mechanism. (shrink)

As physicians encounter an increasingly diverse patient population, socioeconomic circumstances, religious values and cultural practices may present barriers to the delivery of quality care. Increasing cultural competence is often cited as a way to reduce healthcare disparities arising from value and cultural differences between patients and providers. Cultural competence entails not only a knowledge base of cultural practices of disparate patient populations, but also an attitude of adapting one's practice style to meet patient needs and values. Gender roles, relationship dynamics (...) and boundaries are culture specific, and are frequently shaped by religious teachings. Consequently, religion may be conceptualised as a cultural repertoire, or dynamic tool-kit, by which members of a faith adapt and negotiate their identity in multicultural societies. The manner in which Islamic beliefs and values inform Muslim healthcare behaviours is relatively under-investigated. In an effort to explore the impact of Islam on the relationship between patients and providers, we present an Islamic bioethical perspective on cross-gender relations in the patient-doctor relationship. We will begin with a clinical scenario highlighting three areas of gender interaction that bear clinical relevance: dress code, seclusion of members of the opposite sex and physical contact. Next, we provide a brief overview of the foundations of Islamic law and ethical deliberation and then proceed to develop ethicolegal guidelines pertaining to gender relations within the medical context. At the end of this reflection, we offer some practice recommendations that are attuned to the cultural sensitivities of Muslim patient populations. (shrink)

Ethology brought some crucial insights and perspectives to the study of behavior, in particular the idea that behavior can be studied within a comparative-evolutionary framework by means of homologizing components of behavioral patterns and by causal analysis of behavior components and their integration. Early ethology is well-known for its extensive use of qualitative observations of animals under their natural conditions. These observations are combined with experiments that try to analyze behavioral patterns and establish specific claims about animal (...) behavior. Nowadays, there is still disagreement about the significance of observation and experiments and their relation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHate crimes in the United States have drastically increased since 2015, particularly for the American Muslim population. There was a 17% hike in hate crimes against American Muslims in 2017...

Does motor behavior early in development have the same signatures of habituation, dishabituation, and Spencer-Thompson dishabituation known from infant perception and cognition? And do these signatures explain the choice preferences in A not B motor decision tasks? We provide new empirical evidence that gives an affirmative answer to the first question together with a unified neural dynamic model that gives an affirmative answer to the second question.In the perceptual and cognitive domains, habituation is the weakening of an orientation response (...) to a stimulus over perceptual experience. Switching to a novel stimulus leads to dishabituation, the re-establishment of the orientation response. In Spencer-Thompson dishabituation, the renewed orientation response transfers to the original stimulus. The change in orientation responses over perceptual experience explains infants' behavior in preferential looking tasks: Familiarity preference early during exposure and novelty preference late during exposure. In the motor domain, perseveration in the A not B task could be interpreted as a form of familiarity preference. There are hints that this preference reverses after enough experience with the familiar movement. We provide a unified account for habituation and patterns of preferential selection in which neural dynamic fields generate perceptual or motor representations. The build-up of activation in excitatory fields leads to familiarity preference, the build-up of activation in inhibitory fields leads to novelty preference. We show that the model accounts for the new experimental evidence for motor habituation, but is also compatible with earlier accounts for perceptual habituation and motor perseveration. We discuss how excitatory and inhibitory memory traces may regulate exploration and exploitation for both orientation to objects and motor behaviors. (shrink)

Parents play a critical role in their child’s personal development and day-to-day experiences. However, as digital technologies are increasingly embedded in most New Zealand children’s everyday life activities parents face the task of ensuring their child’s online safety. To do so, they need to understand the way their child engages with and through these tools and make sense of the rapidly changing, and more technically complex, nature of digital devices. This presents a digital parenting dilemma: maximising children’s online opportunities while (...) minimising online risks and potential harm. This factsheet presents evidence about digital parenting in New Zealand based on nationally representative data collected from parents, caregivers and whānau and their children aged 9-17. It uses measures from the Global Kids Online project to explore the prevalence of different practices used by New Zealand parents to influence or mediate children’s internet use. (shrink)

Religion is among the determinants of human beliefs and values in various societies, shaping people’s behaviours in a range of life aspects, including the workplace. In view of the influence of religion in Malaysia, this issue becomes highly significant. With regard to the profound impact of religion on creating individual and collective behaviours, the present study aims to investigate the effects of religious behaviours (RBs) on organisational commitment (OC) among Malaysian healthcare workers (HCWs) in 2022, by a survey method implemented (...) using standardised questionnaires for data collection. The statistical population comprised of 2500 HCWs from 10 hospitals in Kuala Lumpur, Georgetown and Malacca, Malaysia, selected by the simple random sampling among the Muslim staff. The data analysis was further fulfilled using the AMOS software package for structural equation modelling (SEM). In general, the study results demonstrated a significant and positive relationship between RBs and OC among Malaysian HCWs (p-value = 0.84, t-statistic = 6.50).Contribution: As demonstrated by the study results, it is possible to inspire OC among employees through strengthening RBs and take advantages of the results. Thus, RBs shown by employees can definitely bring positive results to organisations; therefore, OC in Malaysian HCWs improves. (shrink)

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Corruption continues to be a considerable challenge for internationally active companies. In this article, we examine personal and socioenvironmental antecedents of corrupt behavior in organizations. In particular, we aim to illuminate the links between Machiavellianism, on-the-job experience with corrupt behavior at work, neutralization, and the attitude of business professionals toward corruption. The empirical analysis is based on the responses of 169 professionals. At first, a positive relationship between both Machiavellianism and on-the-job experience and the acceptance of (...) corruption appears in the model. However, an in-depth mediation analysis shows that neutralization is the keystone linking both Machiavellianism and on-the-job experience to the likelihood to condone corruption. Based on these results, we offer avenues for further research and implications for practitioners. (shrink)

Research suggests that the experience of meaningless work is prevalent in various occupations, and that it is destructive for organizations and individuals, making this an issue of major ethical importance. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study based on interviews with Canadian public servants who self-identified as experiencing meaninglessness at work. Our main goal is to better understand participants' responses to the experience of meaningless work and the broader implications their experiences had on the (...) rest of their lives. We surface and explore the harms inflicted on participants through their experiences with meaningless work and suggest that these harms may have been made worse by structural features of our study's public-sector setting. We contribute to organization studies literature by showing the intersection of meaningless work with three related concepts: bullshit jobs, empty labour, and functional stupidity and argue that our empirical findings complement and complicate these frameworks by presenting the complex but hidden emotional experiences that can accompany outwardly observable workplace behaviours. (shrink)

As physicians encounter an increasingly diverse patient population, socioeconomic circumstances, religious values and cultural practices may present barriers to the delivery of quality care. Increasing cultural competence is often cited as a way to reduce healthcare disparities arising from value and cultural differences between patients and providers. Cultural competence entails not only a knowledge base of cultural practices of disparate patient populations, but also an attitude of adapting one's practice style to meet patient needs and values. Gender roles, relationship dynamics (...) and boundaries are culture specific, and are frequently shaped by religious teachings. Consequently, religion may be conceptualised as a cultural repertoire, or dynamic tool-kit, by which members of a faith adapt and negotiate their identity in multicultural societies. The manner in which Islamic beliefs and values inform Muslim healthcare behaviours is relatively under-investigated. In an effort to explore the impact of Islam on the relationship between patients and providers, we present an Islamic bioethical perspective on cross-gender relations in the patient-doctor relationship. We will begin with a clinical scenario highlighting three areas of gender interaction that bear clinical relevance: dress code, seclusion of members of the opposite sex and physical contact. Next, we provide a brief overview of the foundations of Islamic law and ethical deliberation and then proceed to develop ethicolegal guidelines pertaining to gender relations within the medical context. At the end of this reflection, we offer some practice recommendations that are attuned to the cultural sensitivities of Muslim patient populations. (shrink)

In this article, we tried to reveal the relationship between personality traits and escape behavior in traffic accidents. Different from common computer simulations, this study, for the first time, established a real database recording the escape behavior and personality traits of subjects when watching a first-person-view driving video with explosion. Then, we used a modeling method of general linear to establish a quantitative model of the influence of personality traits, explosion, and their interaction on escape behavior. In (...) the model, we introduced escape response time, escape time, escape direction, escape speed, escape trajectory, and other motion characteristics to study individual escape behavior in accidents. Through the analysis, we concluded several conclusions, including that high neurotic individuals tend to escape with shorter response time and slower speed by choosing doors far from the explosion source. These conclusions may provide some references for the effective escape of the crowd and the successful escape of the individual under traffic accidents. (shrink)

This book reviews how people and animals learn and how their behaviors are later changed as a result of this learning. Nearly all of our behaviors are influenced by prior learning experiences in some way. This book describes some of the most important principles, theories, controversies, and experiments that pertain to learning and behavior that are applicable to many different species and many different learning situations. Many real-world examples and analogies make the concepts and theories more concrete and relevant (...) to the students. In addition, most of the chapters include sections that describe how the theories and principles have been used in the applied field of behavior modification. Each chapter in the seventh edition was updated with new studies and new references that reflect recent developments in the field. The book includes a number of learning aids for students, including a list of learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter, practices quizzes and review questions, and a glossary for all important terms. _Learning & Behavior _covers topics such as classical and operant conditioning, reinforcement schedules, avoidance and punishment, stimulus control, comparative cognition, observational learning, motor skill learning, and choice. Both the classic studies and the most recent developments and trends in the field are explored. Although the behavioral approach is emphasized, many cognitive theories are covered as well along with a chapter on comparative cognition. Upon completing this book readers will be able to:understand the field of learning and discuss real-world applications of learning principles. (shrink)

While there is a widespread acceptance of the link between religiosity and ethics, there is less certainty how this influence occurs exactly, necessitating further research into these issues. A main roadblock to our understanding of this influence from an Islamic perspective is the absence of a validated measurement tool. The purpose of this study therefore is to develop a Scale of Muslims’ Views of Allah. This article discusses how the SMVA was developed through the following five steps: establishment of content (...) and face validity; application of a cognitive interviewing technique to pretest the SMVA with sixteen participants; pilot testing of the SMVA with twelve participants; administration of the SMVA online to marketing and management professionals via a multi-stage cluster sampling process to verify the scale’s reliability and validity; and testing criterion-related validity. The results showed that the newly constructed 13-item scale had adequate psychometric properties. Finally, the implications for organisations, limitations and future research are discussed. (shrink)

Those who deny the usefulness of the concept of “motive” for psychology commonly bring two arguments in support of theirview. The first is that the whole notion of “motive” is “animistic” and “folklorish”, since a motive cannot be directly observed. The second is that “motives” cannot be accurately observed, and therefore are beyond the scope of scientific study, because they are “the secret of the agent”, and the agenthimself has no indubitable knowledge of his “motives”. In a recent article, Professor (...) MacIver defends the view that the imputation of “motives” is necessary to a complete explanation of behaviour. To the first of the above criticisms, he replies that such a view neglects a part of reality and that since “motives” exist they should be studied by psychology. This reply does nothing to demonstrate the necessity of imputing motives in order to obtain a complete explanation of behaviour. To the second criticism he replies “motives” are not the secret of the agent, and we can only assert that the agent has mistaken his “motive” if we can gain indepen-dent knowledge of it. We can do this, Professor MacIver asserts, by observing typical behaviour in typical circum-stances, and making inferences from the coherence of total situations. Professor MacIver's replies to the second of the above criticisms are valid only if “motive” is defined as equivalent to “need”, so that we can say “under such-and-such conditions, such-and-such behaviour occurs”. A statement of this type says nothing about the agent's awareness of his goal. When the term “consciousness” is carefully defined along the lines suggested by Boring, the methods of imputation described by Professor MacIver can be seen to lead us only to the agent's “drives”, or “needs”, defined without reference to the agent's awareness of his goal. Professor MacIver uses “motives” to mean “awareness of the goal”, but gives us no clue as to how they may be imputed, and adduces no proof that their imputation is necessary. A possible criterion of the presence of a “motive” is the degree of direction observable in the organism's varied reac-tions in response to frustration, though the more precise definition of such a criterion must await further experiment. In view of the ambiguity of the term “motive” and its penumbra of false suggestion, it is desirable that the term be dropped from psychology. (shrink)

We consider the relationship between neural and behavioural evidence for animal consciousness. We critically examine two recent studies: one neural and one behavioural. The first, on crows, finds different neural activity depending on whether a stimulus is reported as seen or unseen. However, to implicate this neural activity in consciousness, we must assume that a specific conditioned behaviour is a report of conscious experience. The second study, on macaques, records behaviours strikingly similar to patterns of conscious and unconscious perception (...) in humans. However, confounds are only ruled out in human subjects, presupposing substantial neural similarity between humans and macaques. Taken together, the two studies reveal a sense in which neural and behavioural research rely on each other. Looking ahead, these two types of evidence could prove to be either mutually reinforcing or mutually undermining. The science of animal consciousness needs both neural and behavioural evidence, ideally obtained as part of a single coordinated programme. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology”Francis G. Lu (bio), David Lukoff (bio), and Robert P. Turner (bio)Jackson and Fulford have written an impor-tant paper which addresses an area of increasing interest in the United States—the relationship between religious/spiritual experiences and psychopathology. Using primarily the Present State Examination as the diagnostic framework, the authors describe in rich clinical detail three patients where certain phenomena lead to a possible diagnosis (...) of schizophrenia. However, the patients’ outcomes were uniformly positive—how can this be? The authors argue persuasively for the importance of a contextual assessment “in which psychotic phenomena themselves are embedded in the values and beliefs of the person concerned.” In this commentary, we will first present innovations in the DSM-IV relevant to cultural and religious/spiritual issues, which complement the authors’ conclusions, and then comment upon the paper from this perspective.In the DSM-IV Introduction (1994), a section entitled “Ethnic and Cultural Considerations” provides a rationale for innovations in DSM-IV that better enables its use with culturally diverse individuals: “A clinician who is unfamiliar with the nuances of an individual’s cultural frame of references may incorrectly judge as psychopathology those normal variations in behavior, belief, or experience that are particular to the individual’s culture. For example, certain religious practices or beliefs (e.g., hearing or seeing a deceased relative during bereavement) may be misdiagnosed as manifestations of a Psychotic Disorder” (xxiv). In the introduction, three types of information are cited: 1) sections entitled “Age, Gender and Cultural Considerations” in the text of ninety diagnostic categories discuss clinical variations due to these factors; 2) an Outline for Cultural Formulation designed to assist the clinician in systematically evaluating and reporting the impact of the individual’s cultural context; and 3) a Glossary of Culture-Bound Syndromes. These innovations, based on recommendations of the NIMH Workgroup on Culture, Diagnosis and Care to the Task Force on DSM-IV, are described in extensive detail in an important recent book (Mezzich, Kleinman, Fabrega, and Parron 1996).As an example of the importance of the Age, Gender, and Cultural Consideration section relevant to religious and spiritual experiences, consider the section in the text describing schizophrenia, where the following appears: “Clinicians assessing the symptoms of Schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations that are different from their own must take cultural differences into account. Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft) may be commonly held in another. In some cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a [End Page 75] religious content may be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing God’s voice)” (281). Secondly, in the analogous section of the text describing Brief Psychotic Disorder, the following appears: “It is important to distinguish symptoms of Brief Psychotic Disorder from culturally sanctioned response patterns. For example, in some religious ceremonies, an individual may report hearing voices, but these do not generally persist and are not perceived as abnormal by most members of the person’s community” (303).The Outline for Cultural Formulation provides the clinician a concise tool to specify the following information concerning the cultural context that is relevant to clinical care: cultural identity of the individual, cultural explanations of the individual’s illness, cultural factors related to psychosocial environment and levels of functioning, cultural elements of the relationship between the individual and the clinician, and overall cultural assessment for diagnosis and care. Religion is explicitly mentioned in the third section so as to encourage the assessment of “the role of religion... in providing emotional, instrumental, and information support” (1994, 844). This outline for cultural formulation is more fully explicated in a recent chapter by Lu, Lim, and Mezzich (1995).A major innovation in DSM-IV relevant to this topic is the new diagnostic category entitled Religious or Spiritual Problem defined as follows: “This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is a religious or spiritual problem. Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of spiritual values that may not necessarily be related to an organized... (shrink)

The field service scheduling problem is the key problem in field services. Field service pays particular attention to customer experience, that is, customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction described by customer behavior characteristics based on the prospect theory is considered as the primary optimization goal in this paper. The knowledge of the insertion feasibility on the solution is analysed based on the skill constraint and time window. According to the knowledge, an initialization method based on the nearest heuristic algorithm is (...) constructed. Based on the prior knowledge of the FSSP and the endowment of the Fruit Fly Optimization Algorithm, two operators are defined according to the matrix encoding method. Based on these two operators, three search strategies are then proposed, and the smell-based search strategy and vision-based search strategy for the FOA are redesigned. To verify the performance of the algorithms, the proposed operators and strategies are tested and analysed in the well-known benchmark. Through comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms, the results show that the proposed HFOA is an effective and efficient method to solve the FSSP with customer satisfaction. (shrink)

Religion's historical mistrust of sexuality shapes people's behavior by inhibiting liberal sexuality. Still, it is unclear whether this inhibitive role also includes common, normative sexual behavior, particularly in secularized contexts. Moreover, the possible mediating effects emotions, affects, and thoughts have on the association between religiosity and restricted sexuality have never been integrated into a single model. Finally, cross-religious differences in common sexual behavior have still yet to be documented. We addressed these three issues in two studies, with (...) samples of Catholic and Muslim tradition. Consistently across samples, religiosity predicted, either directly or indirectly, less frequent common heterosexual behaviors and masturbation, partly through sexual guilt and inhibition, and/or decreased sexual fantasy and the search for sexual pleasure. However, married Muslims’ religiosity, unlike Catholics’, did not directly undermine fertility-oriented sexuality and the search for pleasure. Religion's role in restricting sexuality seems to be rooted in deep psychological rationale. (shrink)

Pierre Jacob's book, What Minds Can Do , is mainly concerned with intentionality. Jacob's primary goal is to explain both how it is possible for a physical system to have intentional mental states and how the intentional content of such mental states can play a role in the causal explanation of behaviour. Yet, he also tackles the issue of the nature of conscious experience. I shall focus here on a claim he makes in connection with this latter topic. The (...) claim (made at the very end of Chapter 2, p. 77) is that in order to undergo states of consciousness a creature must have concept-forming abilities. At first sight, this contention seems implausibly strong. Although our intuitions in such matters may not be very reliable, I think many people would be willing to attribute to members of certain animal species a capacity to enjoy conscious experiences, while being reluctant to grant them concept forming abilities. The plausibility or implausibility of Jacob's claim depends in a large part on how one construes the notion of a conscious experience, as well as on what one considers concept-forming abilities to be. Since the topic of consciousness is rather peripheral in Jacob's book, the rejection of this claim would not directly affect his more central theses. Yet, examining it gives us an opportunity to scrutinize a distinction that plays a central role in Dretske's work and that Jacob endorses, namely, the distinction between analogical and digital coding of information. Since this distinction underlies in turn the distinction between sensory content and conceptual content and since the latter distinction is at the core of informational semantics, this discussion may have at least indirect implications for some other problems discussed by Jacob in his book. (shrink)

Moral hypocrisy (MH) occurs when people fail to practice what they preach. Despite the prevalence of the effect of social identity on an individual’s MH, few empirical studies have explored contextual factors that may help reduce MH. By conducting two experiments based on the research paradigm of real stranger presence, we examined how in-group and out-group strangers’ presence and moral behavior may contribute to reducing MH. The results of experiment 1 demonstrated that compared with the presence of out-group strangers, (...) the presence of in-group stranger could effectively inhibit MH (no significant difference between participants reported and actual donation proportions was obtained). The results of experiment 2 replicated and extended the results of experiment 1, first by showing that the presence of in-group strangers could effectively inhibit MH and then by revealing the influence of present strangers’ behavior (moral or hypocritical) on MH. The results indicated that strangers’ moral behavior could effectively eliminate participants’ MH, especially in the presence of in-group strangers. However, when present strangers exhibited hypocritical behavior, they exhibited no effect on participants’ MH, irrespective of the condition of in-group and out-group strangers. The current study provides empirical support for theories related to MH and moral decision making and contributes to the literature on in-group and out-group effects on MH and decision making. (shrink)

We introduce a simple model for so-called spin-echo experiments. We show that the model is a mincing system. On the basis of this model we study fine-grained entropy and coarse-grained entropy descriptions of these experiments. The coarse-grained description is shown to be unable to provide an explanation of the echo signals, as a result of the way in which it ignores dynamically generated correlations. This conclusion is extended to the general debate on the foundations of statistical mechanics. We emphasize the (...) need for an appropriate mechanism to explain the gradual suppression over time of the correlations in a thermodynamic system. We argue that such a mechanism can only be provided by the interventionist approach, in which the interaction of the system with its environment is taken into account. Irreversible behavior is then seen to arise not as a result of limited measurement accuracy , but as a result of the fact that thermodynamic systems are limited systems which interact with their environment. A detailed discussion is given of recent objections to the interventionist approach in the literature. (shrink)

The contents of perceptual experience, it has been argued, often include a characteristic “non-conceptual” component (Evans, 1982). Rejecting such views, McDowell (1994) claims that such contents are conceptual in every respect. It will be shown that this debate is compromised by the failure of both sides to mark a further, and crucial, distinction in cognitive space. This is the distinction between what is doubted here as mindful and mindless modes of perceiving: a distinction which cross-classifies the conceptual / non-conceptual (...) divide. The goal of the paper is to show that there can be both mindful personal level perceptual experiences whose content cannot be considered conceptual — pace McDowell (1994)— and that there are mindless personal level perceptual experiences whose content cannot be considered —pace Evans (1982)— nonconceptual. The resulting picture yields a richer four dimensional carving of the space of perceptual experience, and provides a better framework in which to accommodate the many subtleties involved in our sensory confrontations with the world. (shrink)

Cybernetics promoted machine-supported investigations of adaptive sensorimotor behaviours observed in biological systems. This methodological approach receives renewed attention in contemporary robotics, cognitive ethology, and the cognitive neurosciences. Its distinctive features concern machine experiments, and their role in testing behavioural models and explanations flowing from them. Cybernetic explanations of behavioural events, regularities, and capacities rely on multiply realizable mechanism schemata, and strike a sensible balance between causal and unifying constraints. The multiple realizability of cybernetic mechanism schemata paves the way to principled (...) comparisons between biological systems and machines. Various methodological issues involved in the transition from mechanism schemata to their machine instantiations are addressed here, by reference to a simple sensorimotor coordination task. These concern the proper treatment of ceteris paribus clauses in experimental settings, the significance of running experiments with correct but incomplete machine instantiations of mechanism schemata, and the advantage of operating with real machines ??? as opposed to simulated ones ??? immersed in real environments. (shrink)

The brain is an ever‐changing organ that encodes memories and directs behavior. Neuroanatomical studies have revealed structural plasticity of neural architecture, and advances in gene expression technology and epigenetics have demonstrated new mechanisms underlying the brain's dynamic nature. Stressful experiences challenge the plasticity of the brain, and prolonged exposure to environmental stress redefines the normative transcriptional profile of both neurons and glia, and can lead to the onset of mental illness. A more thorough understanding of normal and abnormal gene (...) expression is needed to define the diseased brain and improve current treatments for psychiatric disorders. The efforts to describe gene expression networks have been bolstered by microarray and RNA‐sequencing technologies. The heterogeneity of neural cell populations and their unique microenvironments, coupled with broad ranging interconnectivity, makes resolving this complexity exceedingly challenging and requires the combined efforts of single cell and systems level expression profiling to identify targets for therapeutic intervention. (shrink)

Experiments on intertemporal consumption typically show that people have difficulties in optimally solving such problems. Previous studies have focused on contexts in which agents are faced with risky future incomes and have to plan over long horizons. We present an experiment comparing decision making under certainty, risk, and ambiguity, over a shorter lifecycle. Results show that behavior in the ambiguity treatment is markedly different than in the risk condition and it is characterized by a significant pattern of under-consumption.

According to a very common view, the main tenet of empiricism is the conviction that all human knowledge derives from sensory experience. But classic philosophers representing empiricism hold that mathematical knowledge is a priori. Mill intended to demonstrate that the laws of arithmetic and geometry have inductive origins. But Frege and others authors showed that Mill’s arguments were wrong. Benacerraf held that, since mathematical objects are abstract entities, they could not have any causal relationship with human beings, so they (...) cannot be known by us. On the other hand, biology and psychology show that in animals and human creatures we can find innate behaviours, in accordance with the theory on natural selection. Experiments performed by Wynn and by other psychologists strongly support that very young babies can determine the results of simple arithmetical operations without any previous learning. We conclude that there are convincing reasons to accept the rationalist thesis about the a priori character of mathematical knowledge. (shrink)