Radical behaviorism and buddhism: complementarities and conflicts

Comparisons have been made between Buddhism and the philosophy of science in general, but there have been only a few attempts to draw comparisons directly with the philosophy of radical behaviorism. The present review therefore considers heretofore unconsidered points of comparison between Buddhism and radical behaviorism in terms of their respective goals, conceptualization of human beings, and the outcomes of following either philosophy. From these comparisons it is concluded that the commonalities discerned between these two philosophies may enhance both philosophical systems.     

Lexical studies of Filipino person descriptors: adding personality‐relevant social and physical attributes

Lexical studies have focused on traits. In the Filipino language, we investigated whether additional dimensions can be identified when personality‐relevant terms for social roles, statuses and effects, plus physical attributes, are included. Filipino students (N = 496) rated themselves on 268 such terms, plus 253 markers of trait and evaluative dimensions. We identified 10 dimensions of social and physical attributes—Prominence, Uselessness, Attractiveness, Respectability, Uniqueness, Destructiveness, Presentableness, Strength, Dangerousness and Charisma. Most of these dimensions did not correspond in a one‐to‐one manner to Filipino or alternative trait models (Big Five, HEXACO, ML7). However, considerable redundancy was observed between the social and physical attribute dimensions and trait and evaluative dimensions. Thus, social and physical attributes communicate information about personality traits, and vice versa. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Said Nursi and Maulana Ilyas: Examples of Pietistic Spirituality among Twentieth-Century Islamic Movements1

The premise of this article is that we can learn something about the spirituality as well as other orientations of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi and the movement he inspired by taking a comparative perspective. Among other twentieth-century movements in the Muslim world, it has been suggested that the ‘faith’ movement of Maulana Muhammad Ilyas, also known as the Tablighi Jamaat, would be the most apt for comparison. This study therefore highlights comparable and contrasting aspects of these two movements in order to shed light on Nursian spirituality. It will consider, for example, the lives of the founders, the contexts in which their activities arose, their teachings and practices, and the subsequent development of the respective movements.     

An Adaptation for Altruism? The Social Causes, Social Effects, and Social Evolution of Gratitude

ABSTRACT— People feel grateful when they have benefited from someone's costly, intentional, voluntary effort on their behalf. Experiencing gratitude motivates beneficiaries to repay their benefactors and to extend generosity to third parties. Expressions of gratitude also reinforce benefactors for their generosity. These social features distinguish gratitude from related emotions such as happiness and feelings of indebtedness. Evolutionary theories propose that gratitude is an adaptation for reciprocal altruism (the sequential exchange of costly benefits between nonrelatives) and, perhaps, upstream reciprocity (a pay-it-forward style distribution of an unearned benefit to a third party after one has received a benefit from another benefactor). Gratitude therefore may have played a unique role in human social evolution.     

Evolution and Personality: What Should a Comprehensive Theory Address and How?

Personality is arguably the most integrative area of psychology; yet, it is an area about which evolutionary psychologists have had comparatively little to say. This is unfortunate because evolutionary theory holds great potential as a framework that can link together the disparate aspects that make up a person. We suggest that progress in evolutionary personality psychology will be helped by clarification of precisely what an evolutionary theory of personality would need to address. To this end, we first describe and assess some extant contributions by theorists attempting to understand personality from an evolutionary perspective. Next, we endorse a working definition of what personality entails and outline three types of personality differences – character traits, goals/motives, and selves/identities – that any comprehensive evolutionary theory of personality should address. Finally, we suggest an approach forward, one where evolved species‐typical motives orient people toward adaptive ends and result in the differentiation of individuals’ unique selves.     

Comparing effects of perceptual and reflective repetition on subjective experience during later recognition memory

Using the Remember/Know procedure, we compared the impact of a reflective repetition by refreshing (i.e., briefly thinking of a just-seen item) and a perceptual repetition (i.e., seeing an item again) on subjective experience during recognition memory. Participants read aloud words as they appeared on a screen. Critical words were presented once (read condition), immediately repeated (repeat condition), or followed by a dot signalling the participants to think of and say the just-previous word (refresh condition). In Experiments 1 and 2, Remember responses benefited from refreshing a word (in comparison with reading it). In Experiment 2, this benefit disappeared when participants had to refresh one of three active items. Perceptual repetition increased Remember responses in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2 regardless of whether participants had just previously seen 1- or 3-items. These findings indicate that under some circumstances, reflective and perceptual repetition may have different consequences for later subjective experience during remembering, suggesting differences in their underlying functional mechanisms.     

Merely presenting one’s own name along with target items is insufficient to produce a memory advantage for the items: A critical role of relational processing

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Using the self as a reference point at encoding produces a memory advantage over other types of encoding activities. Even simply co-presenting a target item with...     

A memory-based, Simon-like, spatial congruence effect: Evidence for persisting spatial codes

The Simon effect refers to the finding that in a task where stimulus location is irrelevant, reaction time is faster when stimulus and response locations are congruent than when they are not. Dominant theories of the Simon effect have generally attributed this spatial congruence effect to a spatial code automatically generated upon stimulus presentation. A common assumption of these theories is that this spatial code decays in less than a few hundred milliseconds following stimulus onset. We report two working-memory experiments suggesting a reexamination of this assumption—a Simon-like spatial congruence effect persisted over a delay of as long as 2400 ms. We propose that, in addition to generating short-lived perceptual codes, spatial information may be coded in working memory as part of the context associated with stimulus events. When reactivated by cues from the original event, such information may influence response selection and produce spatial congruence effects (in this case, positive when participants made a “yes” response and negative when they made a “no” response).     

Further exploration of Filipino personality structure using the lexical approach: do the big-five or big-seven dimensions emerge?

Filipino college students (N=740) rated their personalities using 502 reasonably familiar terms from a comprehensive taxonomy of Filipino trait adjectives. Using factor analysis, we replicated the seven Filipino personality dimensions identified in a previous study (Church, Reyes, Katigbak and Grimm, 1997). At least seven factors are needed to identify dimensions resembling all of the Big Five. When positive- and negative-evaluation terms are included a Negative-Valence dimension is found, but positive-evaluation terms blend with Intellect terms rather than identifying a distinct dimension. Thus, the cross-cultural generalizability of the Big-Seven model (Tellegen and Waller, 1997) is not completely supported. Correlational analyses consistently show good one-to-one correspondence between the Filipino Gregariousness, Concern for Others versus Egotism, Conscientiousness, and Intellect dimensions and Big-Five Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Intellect, respectively. The Filipino Temperamentalness and Self-assurance dimensions, although moderately correlated with Neuroticism, are multidimensional in terms of the Big Five. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.