Mind your meat: Religious differences in the social perception of animals

While previous work demonstrated that animals are categorised based on their edibility, little research has systematically evaluated the role of religion in the perception of animal edibility, particularly when specific animals are deemed sacred in a religion. In two studies, we explored a key psychological mechanism through which sacred animals are deemed inedible by members of a faith: mind attribution. In Study 1, non-vegetarian Hindus in Singapore (N = 70) evaluated 19 animals that differed in terms of their sacredness and edibility. Results showed that participants categorised animals into three groups: holy animals (high sacredness but low edibility), food animals (low sacredness but high edibility) and neutral animals (low sacredness and low edibility). Holy animals were deemed to possess greater mental life compared to other animal categories. In Study 2, we replicated this key finding with Hindus in India (N = 100), and further demonstrated that the observed pattern of results was specific to Hindus but not Muslims (N = 90). In both studies, mind attribution mediated the negative association between sacredness and edibility. Our findings illustrate how religious groups diverge in animal perception, thereby highlighting the role of mind attribution as a crucial link between sacredness and edibility.     

The Mitigating Role of Trait Core Confidence on Psychological Distress in Entrepreneurship

We conceptualize the mitigating role of trait core confidence on psychological distress in entrepreneurship manifested by occupational stress, anxiety, and depression. To facilitate field research, we first developed a short trait core confidence scale and validated it in six independent samples (N = 2,434). To test our hypothesis that trait core confidence negatively relates to base-line levels of psychological distress as well as reduces fluctuations of distress in entrepreneurship, we collected data from a 3-day entrepreneurial event called Startup Weekend across seven occasions in the United States. High trait core confidence was related to lower psychological distress both at the start of the event on Friday and at the end of it on Sunday. Core confidence remained stable from Friday to Sunday, as well as 1 month following the event, affirming its trait properties. Additionally, we measured team confidence during the event and found that high team confidence reduced psychological distress of team members. This research contributes to the research on the role of dispositions in occupational health psychology and to a better understanding of how distress of aspiring entrepreneurs is mitigated by trait core confidence.     

Refining the psychometric properties of the circadian type inventory

The psychometric properties of the 18-item circadian type inventory (CTI) were examined in a non-shiftwork sample. Inter-item correlations for each scale were low to moderate. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) via structural equation modelling did not support the posited structure of the CTI. Principal components analysis and reliability analyses suggested the CTI is better represented by 11-items. The revised five item FR scale accounted for 27% of the variance, had stronger factor loadings and increased Cronbach alpha. The psychometric properties of the six item LV scale were marginally improved and explained 21% of the variance. The two-factor 11-item model was supported by CFA. Compared to the 18-item model, the 11-item model showed a marked improvement on several incremental fit indices and achieved a more parsimonious model fit. There was some indication of gender differences but a multi-group CFA indicated model parsimony was best for the invariant model. Gender difference needs to be further examined in large samples using a similar gender balance. It is concluded that the 11-item CTI is psychometrically superior to the original. However, its predictive efficacy needs to be examined in longitudinal studies.     

Practical Intentionality and Transcendental Phenomenology as a Practical Philosophy

This paper will deal with the problem of practical intentionality in the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. First, through an analysis of a passage found in Logical Investigations, I will show Husserl's earlier position with respect to the problem of practical intentionality. I will then go on to critically assess this position and, with reference to some of Husserl's works written after the 1920's, prove that every intentionality should be regarded as a practical intentionality. Correspondingly, transcendental phenomenology should also be characterized as a practical philosophy. I make this statement with the following two senses in mind; transcendental phenomenology is a practical philosophy, first, in the sense that it investigates the various forms of practical intentionality and, second, in the sense that transcendental intentionality as the grounding source of transcendental phenomenology is also a kind of practical intentionality.     

The epistemology of absence-based inference

Our main aim in this paper is to contribute towards a better understanding of the epistemology of absence-based inferences. Many absence-based inferences are classified as fallacies. There are exceptions, however. We investigate what features make absence-based inferences epistemically good or reliable. In Section 2 we present Sanford Goldberg’s account of the reliability of absence-based inference, introducing the central notion of epistemic coverage. In Section 3 we approach the idea of epistemic coverage through a comparison of alethic and evidential principles. The Equivalence Schema–a well-known alethic principle–says that it is true that $p$ if and only if $p$ . We take epistemic coverage to underwrite a suitably qualified evidential analogue of the Equivalence Schema: for a high proportion of values of $p$ , subject $S$ has evidence that $p$ due to her reliance on source $S^{*}$ if and only if $p$ . We show how this evidential version of the Equivalence Schema suffices for the reliability of certain absence-based inferences. Section 4 is dedicated to exploring consequences of the Evidential Equivalence Schema. The slogan ‘absence of evidence is evidence of absence’ has received a lot of bad press. More elaborately, what has received a lot of bad press is something like the following idea: absence of evidence sufficiently good to justify belief in $p$ is evidence sufficiently good to justify belief in $\sim p$ . A striking consequence of the Evidential Equivalence Schema is that absence of evidence sufficiently good to justify belief in p is evidence sufficiently good to justify belief in $\sim p$ . We establish this claim in Section 4 and show how this supports the reliability of an additional type of absence-based inference. Section 4 immediately raises the following question: how can we make philosophically good sense of the idea that absence of evidence is evidence of absence? We address this question in Section 5. Section 6 contains some summary remarks.     

Dimensions of Religion and Spirituality: A Longitudinal Topic Modeling Approach

In lieu of the traditional text data analysis methods, structural topic modeling was utilized to analyze the text contents of 255 self-report inventories of religion and spirituality (R/S) published from 1929 to 2017. The study had two objectives: (a) to clarify and identify the latent dimensions of R/S inherent in the items of the measures; and (b) to examine and demonstrate the usefulness of a longitudinal topic modeling in the study of R/S. We identified 5,617 unique text terms from the measures and fitted topic models on those terms to extract latent dimensions called topics. We also simultaneously analyzed the longitudinal effect of publication decade (i.e., 1950s–2010s) on the topics. A topic model with three topics was chosen to best support the data: Experience of Transcendence (Topic 1), Engagement in Transcendence (Topic 2), and Essence of Transcendence (Topic 3). In addition, the longitudinal analysis revealed that Topic 1 showed a continual increase over the decades, while Topics 2 and 3 both demonstrated a gradual decrease, in effect matching the general trend of Topic 1's increasing popularity in society and the academia.