Reconsidering the Soteriological Significance of Śūnyavāda

The doctrine of emptiness (?ūnyavāda) is of significant soteriological importance for the Madhyamaka Buddhism. Therefore it is a reasonable prima facie demand that interpretations of emptiness must accord with this fact. This hermeneutic consideration has been taken to present particular problems for Mark Siderits' semantic interpretation of ?ūnyavāda. This paper examines Siderits' attempted reconciliation of his semantic interpretation of ?ūnyavāda with its purported soteriological aspects. I question whether Siderits can successfully respond to these problems in order to adequately incorporate the hermeneutic requirement. I argue that the semantic view is not immune to the problems that it was formulated to avoid. It too can be asserted. What is more, the semantic view can generate its own particular forms of attachment which can obscure soteriological goals. These conclusions lead me to question the general project of trying to develop a soteriologically efficacious interpretation of ?ūnyavāda in the first place.     

Evidence That Episodic Memory Impairment During Tobacco Abstinence Is Independent of Attentional Mechanisms

Previous studies have demonstrated reductions in episodic memory during nicotine withdrawal. However, these studies have been unable to dissociate memory reductions from losses in attention associated with tobacco abstinence. In the present study, the authors sought to determine whether episodic memory reduction is a primary effect of nicotine withdrawal during tobacco abstinence. Heavy smokers were tested when smoking normally and following 24 hrs of abstinence. Participants were tested with a recognition memory task in which items were studied under full and divided attention conditions. Forward digit span and backward digit span were also included as control measures. Withdrawal was associated with a reduction in memory performance that was independent of attention at encoding. The authors conclude that impairment of episodic memory is a primary effect of nicotine withdrawal during tobacco abstinence. Further research is required to determine if this is associated with continued use of tobacco and cessation failures.     

Setting things straight: A comparison of measures of saccade trajectory deviation

In eye movements, saccade trajectory deviation has often been used as a physiological operationalization of visual attention, distraction, or the visual system’s prioritization of different sources of information. However, there are many ways to measure saccade trajectories and to quantify their deviation. This may lead to noncomparable results and poses the problem of choosing a method that will maximize statistical power. Using data from existing studies and from our own experiments, we used principal components analysis to carry out a systematic quantification of the relationships among eight different measures of saccade trajectory deviation and their power to detect the effects of experimental manipulations, as measured by standardized effect size. We concluded that (1) the saccade deviation measure is a good default measure of saccade trajectory deviation, because it is somewhat correlated with all other measures and shows relatively high effect sizes for two well-known experimental effects; (2) more generally, measures made relative to the position of the saccade target are more powerful; and (3) measures of deviation based on the early part of the saccade are made more stable when they are based on data from an eyetracker with a high sampling rate. Our recommendations may be of use to future eye movement researchers seeking to optimize the designs of their studies.     

No pairing problem

Many have thought that there is a problem with causal commerce between immaterial souls and material bodies. In Physicalism or Something Near Enough, Jaegwon Kim attempts to spell out that problem. Rather than merely posing a question or raising a mystery for defenders of substance dualism to answer or address, he offers a compelling argument for the conclusion that immaterial souls cannot causally interact with material bodies. We offer a reconstruction of that argument that hinges on two premises: Kim’s Dictum and the Nowhere Man principle. Kim’s Dictum says that causation requires a spatial relation. Nowhere Man says that souls can’t be in space. By our lights, both premises can be called into question. We’ll begin our evaluation of the argument by pointing out some consequences of Kim’s Dictum. For some, these will be costs. We will then present two defeaters for Kim’s Dictum and a critical analysis of Kim’s case for Nowhere Man. The upshot is that Kim’s argument against substance dualism fails.     

Community responses to a suicidal crisis: implications for suicide prevention

We conducted a cross‐sectional, random‐digit‐dial survey to evaluate public responses to a hypothetical question: “If someone you knew was suicidal, what would you do first?” Younger people were more likely to call a suicide hotline, and less likely to go to an emergency room (ER) or call 911; immigrants (in the U.S. <15 years) were more likely to call 911, and less likely to call a suicide hotline; African Americans were more likely to go to the ER and call 911; Hispanics were more likely to call 911 but less likely to call a suicide hotline. These results suggest that public messages about hotlines and emergency options for suicidal patients need to be tailored to relevant population characteristics including age, education, ethnicity, and language preferences.     

Recruitment Consultant Revenue: Relationships with IQ,personality, and emotional intelligence

The objective of this paper is to address the predictive validity of the workplace Swinburne University Emotional Intelligence Test. The first aim of this research project was to identify whether financial revenue earned by consultants in an Australian professional recruitment company were related to their levels of emotional intelligence (EI). The second aim was to assess whether EI competencies were more strongly related to revenue performance than measures of IQ and personality. The study consisted of 100 recruitment consultants from a large Australian‐based company who had their IQ assessed and completed a questionnaire battery consisting of measures of personality and EI. Revenue accrued by the recruitment consultants was also collected and related to the psychometric measures. Results showed that emotional competencies and personality traits are valuable predictors of job performance as measured by the revenue accrued by recruitment consultants. Further to this, the EI competencies were observed to be more strongly related to this measure of performance, and were able to predict a significant proportion of variance in performance in comparison to IQ and personality.