Postgraduate research students: People in context?

This article seeks to explore learning, development and academic success, using postgraduate research students' experiences and relating them to submission and completion rates. The perceptions and circumstances of a sample of postgraduate research students from one cohort in a large civic university were examined via questionnaire and interviews. Significant associations between data gained via questionnaire and outcome of research study are presented, together with qualitative illustrations from comments and interviews with participating individuals. A developmental, sociocultural understanding of the learner is discussed. This supports a brief review of a package of practical measures designed to assist universities to support research students, especially those who may have difficulty negotiating the experience of research study, and their supervisors, and ultimately improve retention and submission rates.     

Causing People to Exist and Saving People’s Lives

Most people are skeptical of the claim that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be well worth living provides a reason to cause that person to exist. In this essay I argue that to cause such a person to exist would be to confer a benefit of a noncomparative kind and that there is a moral reason to bestow benefits of this kind. But this conclusion raises many problems, among which is that it must be determined how the benefits conferred on people by causing them to exist weigh against comparable benefits conferred on existing people. In particular, might the reason to cause people to exist ever outweigh the reason to save the lives of existing people?     

Told in Memory of God’s People: Beloved

The purpose of this article is to show how Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, can be used in pastoral care and counseling courses to encourage the development of empathy and to illustrate themes in the communal contextual and intercultural paradigms emerging in the field of pastoral theology.     

Consciousness-Body-Time: How Do People Think Lacking Their Body?

War captivity is an extreme traumatic experience typically involving exposure to repeated stressors, including torture, isolation, and humiliation. Captives are flung from their previous known world into an unfamiliar reality in which their state of consciousness may undergo significant change. In the present study extensive interviews were conducted with fifteen Israeli former prisoners of war who fell captive during the 1973 Yom Kippur war with the goal of examining the architecture of human thought in subjects lacking a sense of body (disembodiment) as a result of confinement and isolation. Analysis of the interviews revealed that threats to a normal sense of body often lead to a loss of the sense of time as an objective dimension. Evidence suggests that the loss of the sense of body and the loss of the sense of time are in fact connected; that is, they collapse together. This breakdown in turn results in a collapse of the sense of self.     

The Illusion-of-Transparency and Episodic Memory: Are People Egocentric or Do People Think that Lies are Easy to Detect?

The illusion-of-transparency seems like an egocentric bias, in which people believe that their inner feelings, thoughts and perspectives are more apparent to others than they actually are. In Experiment 1, participants read out true and false episodic memories to an audience. Participants over-estimated the number of people who would think that they were the liar, and they overestimated how many would correctly identify the liar. Experiment 2 found that with lessened task demands, and by using a scale of doubt, participants distinguished lies from truthful statements (albeit with a degree of error). Over the two experiments, results indicated that people have some ability to distinguish lies from truth (in illusion-of-transparency tasks), although people often overestimate this ability, and participants sometimes think their own lies are easier to detect than is really the case.     

On Being Mindful: What Do People Think They're Doing?

Thoughts are typically dismissed as sources of distraction that hinder a mindful awareness of ongoing experience. Although this may be said of some thoughts, we focus on the undervalued role that regulatory thoughts play in the development and maintenance of mindful action. To do so, we explore the function of thoughts from the perspective of action identification theory. The application of action identification principles to mindfulness yields a new understanding of how the mind coordinates mindful action, with implications for mindfulness instruction, practice, and future research.     

Pet Peeves and Happiness: How Do Happy People Complain?

The present study was designed to investigate the relationships among mindfulness, happiness, and the expression of pet peeves. Previous research has established a positive correlation between happiness and mindfulness, but, to date, no research has examined how each of these variables is related to complaining in the form of pet peeves. Four hundred ten male and female college students listed the pet peeves they had with a current or former relationship partner. They also completed measures of happiness, positive and negative affect, depression, mindfulness, relationship satisfaction, and satisfaction with life. Pet peeves were negatively correlated with relationship satisfaction, well-being, and mindfulness. Consistent with hypotheses, support was found for the mediating role of mindfulness in the relationship between happiness and pet peeves.     

Other People’s Errors

The question of when other people’s bad acts belong on our moral ledger arises in a number of different scenarios. Each scenario has received some philosophical attention, but no one has noted the structural similarities of these various scenarios or the implications of a proposed approach to one for how the others should be approached. That is the ambition of this article. In it, seemingly disparate moral phenomena—blunt rules, preemptive restrictions, moral blackmail, complicity, retreat and proportional response, and the duty to rescue from a peril one has caused—are shown to have similar structures and thus to require similar moral approaches.     

The Optimum Level of Well-Being: Can People Be Too Happy?

ABSTRACT— Psychologists, self-help gurus, and parents all work to make their clients, friends, and children happier. Recent research indicates that happiness is functional and generally leads to success. However, most people are already above neutral in happiness, which raises the question of whether higher levels of happiness facilitate more effective functioning than do lower levels. Our analyses of large survey data and longitudinal data show that people who experience the highest levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of close relationships and volunteer work, but that those who experience slightly lower levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of income, education, and political participation. Once people are moderately happy, the most effective level of happiness appears to depend on the specific outcomes used to define success, as well as the resources that are available.     

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy: How is it Different with Older People?

This paper discusses the treatment of depression in older adults (over age 65) using cognitive therapy techniques first developed by Beck and colleagues. The focus of this paper concerns whether modifications of CBT are required in order to ensure maximal efficacy and discusses what modifications may be suitable by advocating conceptual and theoretical reasons for their adoption. Some important contextual factors may need to be taken account of when working with older people such as dealing with expectancies about lifespan, the likelihood of chronic physical illness and longevity and chronicity of the personal history of problems. It is our contention that much more has been written about outcome in CBT with older people than has been written about psychotherapy process issues. This paper aims to address this perceived gap in the literature.     

Community Attitudes Toward People Receiving Unemployment Benefits: Does Volunteering Change Perceptions?

People receiving government income support due to unemployment are sometimes required to participate in activities such as volunteering. These “mutual obligation” requirements have community support, but the effect of volunteering on benefit recipients is unclear. In three person-perception experiments (N = 222, 533, 934), we considered whether volunteering overcomes negative evaluations of unemployed benefit recipients. Volunteering increased the extent to which benefit recipients were considered suitable workers and likeable, but these effects also generalized to non-recipients. Results suggest that volunteering may compensate for attitudinal barriers arising from welfare stigma that represents a barrier for employment.     

Taking People as They Are?

相似文献   

Keeping People In or Out?

Abstract : In this article I argue that the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms provides a good basis for the legitimate participation of all citizens in political discourse and decisions, no matter what faith they hold. The argument is backed by selected insights from philosopher Jürgen Habermas and sociologists Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas. Against this backdrop, I suggest some challenges for a theology that addresses issues related to religion and society.     

Why Do People Use Facebook?

The social networking site, Facebook, has gained an enormous amount of popularity. In this article, we review the literature on the factors contributing to Facebook use. We propose a model suggesting that Facebook use is motivated by two primary needs: (1) the need to belong and (2) the need for self-presentation. Demographic and cultural factors contribute to the need to belong, whereas neuroticism, narcissism, shyness, self-esteem and self-worth contribute to the need for self-presentation. Areas for future research are discussed.     

Leading God’s People: Perceptions of Influence Among African–American Pastors

Journal of Religion and Health - Religious leaders, particularly African–American pastors, are believed to play a key role in addressing health disparities. Despite the role...     

Can People Creative in Imagery Interpret Ambiguous Figures Faster than People Less Creative in Imagery?

The purpose of the research study was to investigate whether people creative in imagery are better than people non‐creative in imagery at interpreting ambiguous figures. Creativity, in the imagery paradigm, is said to involve two processes: combinational play and discovery. Discovery plays a major role in creativity as it is the process of discerning, judging or interpreting the value of a mental construction. Furthermore, creative people have been said to be insightful thus supporting the proposition advanced here that people creative in imagery are faster at interpreting and finding alternative interpretations for ambiguous figures than people less creative in imagery. This study reports both latencies and discoveries in perception and mental imagery as measured on a figure combination task. The data support the conclusion that people creative in imagery are more capable in reinterpreting ambiguous figures and that they are quicker in their discoveries than people less creative in imagery. The analysis to the questions of how the subjects arrived at their discoveries may also illustrate the Gestalt literature on insight as a rapid pattern recognition.     

Perceptions of Rational Discrimination: When Do People Attempt to Justify Race-Based Prejudice?

This research investigated the role of situational context and personality factors in moderating perceptions of race-based decisions made by others. White participants were presented with a short story that described a taxi driver who refuses to pick up a Black man. The primary dependent variable concerned the perceived rationality of the taxi driver's decision. Analyses of these perceptions revealed 2 main findings, both of which involved need for cognition (Cacioppo, Petty, & Morris, 1983). First, need for cognition moderated the effects of participants' attitudes toward Blacks, such that anti-Black participants judged the taxi driver's decision as more rational than did pro-Black participants, but this was only true when participants also scored high in need for cognition. Second, participants who were experimentally induced to think about the task in an "analytical" fashion also judged the taxi driver as relatively rational, but this again was only true for participants who scored high in need for cognition. The implications of these results for a controversial set of arguments regarding rational discrimination by the social critic Dinesh D'Souza (1995) are discussed.