Indian Spirituality: How Relevant is Pargament’s Framework?

The psychology of religion and spirituality is a topic of increasing interest in India as well as in the West. An internationally influential framework for defining religion and spirituality has been developed by US psychologist Kenneth Pargament, who conceptualizes spirituality and religion as search processes related to sacred realities. Pargament’s framework has been found to resonate across multiple cultures and has guided and informed empirical research in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim populations. The present paper argues that Pargament’s framework can also coherently resonate with Hinduism and other indigenous Indian religious beliefs and practices. We conclude that future studies of religion and spirituality in Indian contexts may benefit by framing their investigations with reference to Pargament’s approach. Such framing need not be uncritical and would help bring Indian psychology of spirituality/religion in closer contact with psychology of spirituality/religion in other parts of the world, benefiting both India and the worldwide psychology of religion and spirituality.     

Mahatma Gandhi’s Pragmatic Spirituality: Its Relevance to Psychology East and West

M. K. Gandhi is no academic psychologist; but his philosophy and practice of pragmatic spirituality have important implications for psychology in general and Indian psychology in particular. Psychology as taught and practised in India is mostly Western and not Indian psychology. Indian psychology is an emerging system of psychology with its roots in classical Indian thought. According to Gandhi, the person is instinctively brute, but inherently spiritual. Consequently, he/she has on the one hand natural attraction to sensory gratification and indulgence, selfish desires and craving. On the other hand, he or she aspires for self-realization. Human development is a dialectical process where people seek to find a workable synthesis between sensory indulgence and spiritual aspirations, between egotistic selfishness and altruistic urges. Gandhi’s life provides an excellent case study of the ways of spiritual development. The techniques he crafted like satyagraha and the strategies he followed in his public life give us insights into how spirituality can be applied to improve human condition. The applications are not India specific, but universal. Therefore, psychologists from the East as well as from the West can join in exploring Gandhian ideas and techniques of psycho-spiritual development and their relevance to today’s troubled world.     

印度穆斯林种姓摭议

穆斯林种姓是印度乃至南亚地区的特殊历史文化现象,它形成于中世纪时的印度,经历一定的发展变化后,以一种隐性的方式呈现。从构成形式上来讲,印度穆斯林种姓依出身尊卑划分为阿什拉夫、阿吉拉夫和阿贾尔;各种姓集团也具有传统的印度教种姓制度的一些基本特征,即存在等级秩序、流行内婚的习俗、部分种姓与世袭的职业有传统的关联。印度穆斯林种姓与印度教种姓制度并不具有同等意义。种姓作为印度穆斯林社会关系的一部分,呈现出其自身的一些特点。从整体结构来看,印度穆斯林种姓分为两大部分,即源于穆斯林群体特有的等级关系和源于种姓制度的等级关系,因而体现出混合文化的特质。     

心灵如何被感知:从松果体到镜像神经元

文章从笛卡尔的身心交感论开始,探讨了松果体在身心交互中的重要地位,并分心理主义、行为主义、认知主义三个阶段,描述了心理学回答"心灵如何被感知"的两条途径:心灵内省与行为反映。最后,文章特别描述了新近发现的镜像神经元,认为它可能是当代心理学体系内的"笛卡尔式松果体",是沟通身体活动与心理状态、自我与他人心理状态的桥梁。未来,镜像神经元在心理学研究中的地位,可能与松果体在笛卡尔体系内的地位一样重要。     

Searching for South Asian Intelligence: Psychometry in British India, 1919–1940

This paper describes the introduction and development of intelligence testing in British India. Between 1919 and 1940 experimenters such as C. Herbert Rice, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, and Venkatrao Vithal Kamat imported a number of intelligence tests, adapting them to suit a variety of South Asian languages and contexts. Charting South Asian psychometry's gradual move from American missionary efforts toward the state, this paper argues that political reforms in the 1920s and 1930s affected how psychometry was “indigenized” in South Asia. Describing how approaches to race and caste shifted across instruments and over time, this paper charts the gradual recession, within South Asian psychometry, of a “race” theory of caste. Describing some of the ways in which this “late colonial” period affected the postcolonial landscape, the paper concludes by suggesting potential lines for further inquiry into the later career of intelligence testing in India and Pakistan.     

Persecution of Indian Christians

Christians are one among many minority religious groups in India that face "persecution.""Persecution" here relates to the unjust treatment of lower classes in the Hindu caste system; it is not only Christians that are persecuted, but all those who fall in the lower castes. Part of the animosity towards Christians, then, is due to the fact that many Christian schools have been built to educate the masses thereby upsetting the existing caste system; furthermore, Christianity preaches a classless gospel. Persecution of Christians in India takes place under the guise that Christian Missionaries are covertly trying to convert Hindu–Indian society to the western cult of individualism. Government propaganda, laws, and programs designed to thwart Christian efforts, feed off of this mentality. Unfortunately, there are certain Christian groups that feed off of the misery of people in an unjust caste–system, offering salvation through conversion. These groups do not help matters at all; in fact, they add fuel to the fire.     

The changing intercaste attitudes in North India: A follow-up after four years

Since independence, the government of India, through various constitutional and legislative measures, has tried to root out the evils of the caste system. In order to study the effect of these measures and of various socioeconomic changes on intercaste attitudes, a study of intercaste attitudes conducted by the author in 1968 is used as a baseline to study the changes over the four-year period. The responses to the 15 items compared deal with general caste attitudes, attitudes toward special privileges for the scheduled castes and, the caste Hindus' attitudes toward Harijans (former ‘untouchables’). The comparison of the responses to these items in 1968 and 1972 (the follow-up study) indicates that a higher percentage of respondents gave liberal responses in 1972 than in 1968 to the questions dealing with public and peripheral areas of interaction. However, very little change was found in those spheres of interaction which are relatively personal and central or involve intimate interaction, e.g., the theory of Karma, attitude toward the caste system as such and attitudes toward dining with or acceptance of food from Harijans. The results lend further support to the ‘cognitive imbalance’ theory of attitude change.     

Global Aging: Challenges for Community Psychology

Older persons are among the major marginalized, disenfranchised citizens worldwide, yet this group has generally been ignored in the community psychology literature. In this paper, we trace the demographic trends in aging worldwide, and draw the field’s attention to the United Nations Program on Aging, which structures its policy recommendations in terms of concepts that are familiar to community psychologists. A central theme of the paper is that community psychology can have a role in producing the conceptual shifts needed to change societal attitudes now dominated by negative age stereotypes.     

De/geneticizing Caste: Population Genetic Research in South Asia

Recent years have witnessed a number of population genetics studies aiming to explore the ‘genetic profile’ of the South Asian population and of the caste system. This paper examines four genetic studies and their mass media representations, and discusses interviews with leading historians and social scientists whose work has focused on issues of the caste system. Similar to earlier commentators—from colonial scholars and administrators to Hindu reformers and nationalists—who provided different explanations for the origin of the caste system, recent genetic studies have offered conflicting inferences on the nature of castes and tribes of the subcontinent. These studies, the way they were received on the subcontinent, and assayed by historians of caste, tell a story about agendas of geneticization competing with forces of resistance. On the one hand, they signal a new interest in the debate about the relationship between caste and ‘ethnicity’; on the other hand, they are used selectively by different social groups to strengthen their own political agendas, are denied cognitive validity by historians of caste, and never reach a consensus about the history of caste formation.     

行为金融学与心理学

由于理性经济人假设与实际的偏差,经典现代金融学遇到了一些被称为“未解之谜”的现实问题。行为金融学是从人们的实际决策行为出发来研究和解释金融市场的相关问题。因此,心理学的研究成果就成为行为金融学研究必不可少的基础。与投资者信念、偏好以及决策相关的情感心理学、认知心理学和社会心理学的研究成果在行为金融学各领域得到了广泛的应用。金融学与心理学两个领域的密切合作将推动行为金融学的进一步发展。     

Methodological functionalism and the description of natural systems

The primary way that explanations are constructed in cognitive psychology is by methodological functionalism: in short, functionally defined components are proposed in order to explain how inputs (i.e., stimuli from the environment) are turned into behavior. But despite its close association with cognitive psychology, methodological functionalism is a technique that can be used to describe any natural system. I look at how methodological functionalism has fared when used by other special sciences and what lessons can be learned from these cases. Three explanations of chemical and biological systems that were developed using methodological functionalism are examined: Willis’s (1684) explanation of fermentation, Farr’s (mid-1800s) explanation of cholera, and Mendel’s (mid-1800s) explanation of inheritance. The discovery of HIV in the early 1980s, an investigation that rejected methodological functionalism early on, is also discussed. The assessment of methodological functionalism is not positive. This technique has limitations. The implications for cognitive psychology are considered, and one conclusion is that cognitive psychology will eventually cease relying on methodological functionalism.     

进化心理学视角下的两性冲突与缓和

进化心理学观点认为两性冲突是一个性别达到最佳适应的过程被另一个性别所阻碍,其根本原因是两性繁衍成功的根本进化利益存在冲突。从进化心理学的角度,根据两性敌对性选择理论,两性冲突可以分为基因座内的两性冲突与基因座间的两性冲突,前者可由性选择理论解释,后者涉及到两性的适应与反适应以及在军备竞赛中的协同进化。而两性冲突缓和则可以由费舍尔模型与基因复制理论、性别二态性和一夫一妻制度解释。两性冲突及缓和也分别具有进化心理学的相关实证依据支持。未来两性冲突领域的研究需要提升研究方法的客观性及两性冲突特质的多样性,并关注两性冲突缓和的现实有效途径以及婚配制度与评估方式对繁衍成功的交互作用。     

A Stale Challenge to the Philosophy of Science

In his article “Is psychology based on a methodological error?” and based on a quite convincing empirical basis, Michael Schwarz offers a methodological critique of one of mainstream psychology’s key test theoretical axioms, i.e., that of the in principle normal distribution of personality variables. It is characteristic of this paper—and at first seems to be a strength of it—that the author positions his critique within a frame of philosophy of science, particularly positioning himself in the tradition of Karl Popper’s critical rationalism. When scrutinizing Schwarz’s arguments, however, we find Schwarz’s critique profound only as an immanent critique of test theoretical axioms. We raise doubts, however, as to Schwarz’s alleged ‘challenge’ to the philosophy of science because the author not at all seems to be in touch with the state of the art of contemporary philosophy of science. Above all, we question the universalist undercurrent that Schwarz’s ‘bio-psycho-social model’ of human judgment boils down to. In contrast to such position, we close our commentary with a plea for a context- and culture sensitive philosophy of science.     

Religion insulates ingroup evaluations: the development of intergroup attitudes in India

Research on the development of implicit intergroup attitudes has placed heavy emphasis on race, leaving open how social categories that are prominent in other cultures might operate. We investigate two of India's primary means of social distinction, caste and religion, and explore the development of implicit and explicit attitudes towards these groups in minority‐status Muslim children and majority‐status Hindu children, the latter drawn from various positions in the Hindu caste system. Results from two tests of implicit attitudes find that caste attitudes parallel previous findings for race: higher‐caste children as well as lower‐caste children have robust high‐caste preferences. However, results for religion were strikingly different: both lower‐status Muslim children and higher‐status Hindu children show strong implicit ingroup preferences. We suggest that religion may play a protective role in insulating children from the internalization of stigma.     

心理学危机的实质与解决方案

人们曾在不同层面上讨论心理学的危机,而这种对危机认识的偏离本身又进一步加强了学科本身的分裂。在总结前人对危机认识的基础上,通过分析表明,心理学危机是心理学学科发展中自我同一性危机的表现,其实质在于心理学学科同一性的缺乏,而根源来自于心理学建立之初的理论基础。因此,心理学危机的解决有待于其学科同一性的确立,心理学学科的发展则有待于其学科同一性的展开。     

Postmetaphysical Thinking or Refusal of Thought? Max Horkheimer’s Materialism as Philosophical Stance

Abstract

Frankfurt School critical theory has long opposed metaphysical philosophy because it ignores suffering and injustice. In the face of such criticism, proponents of metaphysics (for example Dieter Henrich) have accused critical theory of not fully investigating the questions is raises for itself, and falling into partial metaphysical positions, despite itself. If one focuses on Max Horkheimer’s early essays, such an accusation seems quite fitting. There he vociferously attacks metaphysics, but he also develops a theory that pushes toward metaphysical questions. His work can thus seem laden with unpacked metaphysical baggage, and fraught with contradiction. The aim of this paper is to show that Horkheimer’s critique of metaphysics makes sense and is not contradicted by a surreptitious metaphysics. To show this, Horkheimer’s views will be compared with Bas van Fraassen’s in The Empirical Stance. Ultimately, the paper should show that Horkheimer’s early philosophy can be reconstructed in such a way that it employs a ‘materialist stance’.     

中国神话中的具身心理学思想探索

西方“具身认知”心理学与赋存在中国文化里的以“天人合一”为核心的“体知”心理学思想息息相通, 而中国文化又有其独异于西方文化的“身体”智慧。文化的源头实为神话。追根溯源, 本文主要从具身认知的视阈中将中西方神话中“身体”的角色两相比照, 首先从本体论维度以现象学诠释的方法来描述神话的身体母体是如何生成的, 并以天地开辟神话、万物肇始神话和人类起源神话为例揭示中国“身体”的本体论特色—— 一元论; 其次再从空间维度以概念隐喻的理论来剖析神话的身体现象学场域是如何延展的, 并从物我同一角度、天人交感角度和人神相通角度来彰显中国“身体”的空间维度特色——气论; 最后再从时间维度以社会建构理论来解构神话的身体是如何在时间场域中流变的; 并从社会、文化和历史三个层面来表达中国“身体”的时间维度特色——易论。通过从中国神话故事中挖掘中国传统文化中独有的“具身智慧”, 以期为建立中国人自己的科学心理学起抛砖引玉之用。     

Understanding Extreme Violent Behavior in Ultra Firms: Exploring Identity Fusion from a Dialogical Perspective

This paper explores a dialogical operationalization of identity fusion in the context of football firms. An in-depth life story interview with a longstanding member of a football firm involved in several violent episodes was qualitatively analyzed. The variety of positions of the self (I-positions) as well as the dialogical relations established by such positions were examined under themes associated with identity fusion, in an attempt to understand pro-group radical violent behavior. Results suggest that a core coalition of internal I-positions and external We-positions favoring extreme ultra violence appeared to dominate the participant’s self-system. This coalition seemed to have soft boundaries among the positions compounding it and, at the same time, rigid boundaries with other positions of the self-system, operating as an I-prison, preventing alternative counter-violence voices to be heard and promoter or meta-positions to emerge. Considering that functionally equivalent forms of identity fusion have been identified in radical football violence and terrorism, this knowledge can contribute to tackle the pathways for engaging in extreme violence in favor of a group/organization. Moreover, it can be used to develop more effective programs to promote individuals’ de-fusion from different groups, whenever group adherence proves dysfunctional and risky for themselves and/or others.     

Capturing Psychologists’ Work in Academic Health Settings: The Role of the Educational Value Unit (EVU)

This paper describes how psychology faculty positions in academic health centers (AHCs) have evolved to meet the changing needs in healthcare. In that context, the roles of psychologists have expanded significantly to include a wide array of clinical responsibilities, teaching and supervisory roles, administrative functions, research initiatives, and academic scholarship. Traditionally, faculty compensation plans have been calculated through the use of Relative Value Units which are primarily based on clinical service delivery, hence, incomplete when attempting to account for these growing academic responsibilities. This paper reviews the need to expand the ways in which the work provided by psychologists is appropriately identified and compensated for in AHCs. Drawing upon six models utilized in other areas of medical education, this paper describes the potential utility of incorporating Educational Value Units as a metric for capturing this expanding set of academic responsibilities and systematically incorporating them into a psychologist’s job design. Recommendations for future considerations are provided.     

Time,or the mediation of the now: on Dan Zahavi’s “irrelational” account of self-temporalization

On Dan Zahavi’s Husserlian account of the subject, the self-temporalization of subjectivity presupposes what he calls an “immediate impressional self-manifestation.” It follows from this view that self-awareness is an inherent power of the one who will be subject, rather than a product of sociality introduced into life from without. In this paper, I argue against Zahavi’s position by going over the development of Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, examining the positions Husserl takes and the reasons that he comes to these positions. Once we reach Husserl’s ultimate account, it becomes evident that Zahavi’s position is untenable.