Eastern Concepts of Love: A philosophical reading of Narada Bhakti Sutra

Bhakti has been an all-pervasive concept in the philosophical and religious traditions of India. The origin of bhakti can be traced in the Vedas wherein the root-word bhaj and various synonyms appear and in that point in time no distinction was made between secular (prema) and religious love (bhakti). Narada Bhakti Sutra (NBS) is a premier treatise on the nature of bhakti that emphasizes the connection between bhakti and prema and treats the age-old enigma about the nature of love in an original fashion. NBS has usually been interpreted in a theistic manner, often with theistic interpolations into the text. This paper interprets NBS with a philosophical approach to discover its unique insights on the perennial philosophical issue, namely, ‘what is love?’ and shows that NBS harks back to the age of the Vedas in which secular love and religious love were inter-twined.     

Synchrony in the onset of mental-state reasoning: evidence from five cultures

Over the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have shown considerable interest in the onset of a theory of mind, typically marked by children's ability to pass false-belief tasks. In Western cultures, children pass such tasks around the age of 5 years, with variations of the tasks producing small changes in the age at which they are passed. Knowing whether this age of transition is common across diverse cultures is important to understanding what causes this development. Cross-cultural studies have produced mixed findings, possibly because of varying methods used in different cultures. The present study used a single procedure to measure false-belief understanding in five cultures: Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand. With a standardized procedure, we found synchrony in the onset of mentalistic reasoning, with children crossing the false-belief milestone at approximately 5 years of age in every culture studied. The meaning of this synchrony for the origins of mental-state understanding is discussed.     

Assessing Cultural Adaptation: Psychometric Properties of the Cultural Adaptation Pain Scale

This article explores the psychometric properties of a newly developed Cultural Adaptation Pain Scale. This scale is designed to assess the degree of subjective pain, social distance, and discouragement that may be related to cultural adaptation. Factor analyses revealed 4 factors in the scale that had an overall Cronbach's alpha of .85. Implications for multicultural counseling are discussed.     

Community-based instruction for independent meal preparation by adults with profound mental retardation

Three adults with profound mental retardation and very limited reading skills were transitioned to community living after spending more than 20 years in a residential facility. Community-based instruction was used to teach them to independently prepare meals. Directed rehearsal and prompting procedures were used to teach them those meal preparation skills that they were unable to perform independently. We present assessment, training and followup data on the preparation of a dessert by the three participants. Following an assessment on the steps needed to prepare the dessert, training was introduced in a multiple baseline across subjects design. Results showed that the participants were able to independently prepare the dessert in up to 21 pre-training and training sessions. Monthly followup for six months showed that they were able to independently prepare the dessert in various community settings of their choice.     

THE REPRESENTATIVENESS OF OBSERVATIONAL SAMPLES OF DIFFERENT DURATIONS

The representativeness of behavioral observation samples with durations of less than the whole time of interest was investigated. A real-time recording system was developed to quantify the behavior of 5 profoundly mentally retarded physically handicapped adult students in an institutional training setting. Behavior was observed using six mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories during 2.5-hr observation sessions. Sample observation sessions with durations ranging from 15 to 135 min were computer simulated from the whole-session (150-min) records. It was found that the representativeness of these samples, when compared to whole-session records, was a function of the relative duration of the behavioral categories and of sample duration. The occurrence of relatively high-duration behaviors (lasting for more than 50% of the session) was estimated to within 20% error by samples of less than 60 min, but low-duration behaviors (1 to 3% of the session) were inadequately quantified even from 135-min samples. Increasing irregularity of bouts of behavior in the low-duration behaviors is suggested as the cause of the functions obtained. Implications of the findings for applied behavior analysis are discussed, with the recommendation that the adequacy of observational session durations be empirically assessed routinely.