Suffering and healing: An interpretation of the Buddhist doctrine of the four noble truths

The Buddha's method of spiritual release is crystallized in the Four Noble Truths. The Four Truths profile the condition of an individual's life. It explains the cause of suffering, the means through which an individual residing in a transient world can extract oneself from samsara and propel oneself into an abiding spiritual reality or nirvana. This four stage method parallels the principles of diagnosis, etiology, recovery or health, and therapeutics, which are employed by physicians in their clinical practice. This article is a reflection on this method and its practical application.     

Psychological Predictors of Condom Use to Prevent HIV Transmission Among Zimbabwean Students

Psychologists have much to contribute to HIV prevention. It is important to identify predictors of HIV preventive behaviour and to incorporate this information in AIDS education. The Health Belief Model is an established model of health behaviour that has recently been applied to AIDS prevention. It originally posited that perceptions of susceptibility to, severity of, and solutions to, illness predicted health behaviour. It thus emphasized “disease” dimensions of illness. It was expanded to include barriers to, cues to, and social support for, health behaviour. The enlarged model thus incorporated “social” dimensions of health behaviour. Because preventing AIDS involves a partner and considerable social risks and skills, inclusion of social components may improve the capacity of the Health Belief Model to predict HIV preventive behaviour. An inventory measuring condom use and the enlarged Health Belief Model was completed by 181 male and 171 female teacher-trainees. Data were analysed using multiple regression with hierarchical entry, first of disease dimensions (susceptibility, severity, solution), then social dimensions (barriers, cues, social support). Addition of social dimensions to the disease dimension equation yielded a significant F-change among both sexes and increased the variance explained from 16% to 30% among males, and from 4% to 14% among females. The full regression was significant only among males. The implications of these results for intervention goals, messages and strategies among both sexes are elucidated.     

Intoxication and exposure to stress: effects of temporal patterning

In this study we explored the temporal patterning of intoxication and exposure to a stress-producing situation on alcohol's effects on stress. Forty male social drinkers received either a 0.7 g/kg dose of alcohol or a placebo. When exposure to a social stressor preceded intoxication, a significant alcohol-induced increase in heart-rate reactivity was found. When intoxication preceded exposure to the stressor, conventional analysis of the data indicated a stress-dampening effect on alcohol on heart rate. No differences were obtained from self-reports of anxiety in either pattern. The findings are explained in terms of attentional and cognitive-encoding processes.     

Measuring Daily Events and Experiences: Decisions for the Researcher

There has been a burgeoning interest in studying daily events and experiences. This article discusses a variety of methodologic challenges that face daily event and experience researchers. The issues discussed include techniques for measuring events, the development of event checklists, sampling event content, specifying event appraisals, event validation procedures, and the creation of summary measures derived from event checklists. Procedural issues discussed include determining the number of observations and persons needed for daily event studies, the evaluation of response, attrition, and missing item bias, and problems linking event reports over time.     

The Relationship of Upward-Influencing Behavior with Subordinate-Impression Management Characteristics1

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of subordinate-impression management disposition, as measured by self-monitoring and other-deception, with the use of hard, soft, and rational upward-influencing behavior in an organizational setting. One hundred and two bank employees confidentially completed the Self-Monitoring Scale (SMS), Other-Deception Questionnaire (ODQ), and Form M of the Profiles of Organizational Influence Strategies. The results provided mixed support for the hypothesis that increasing levels of self-monitoring and other-deception would be linked with rising levels of upward influencing. A significant self-monitoring and other-deception interaction was observed. As hypothesized, increasing levels of both self-monitoring and other-deception were associated with effectiveness in influencing the supervisor. The findings are discussed in terms of the psychological processes involved in influence strategy selection. It is also suggested that the ODQ and SMS may assess impression management motivation and skill, respectively. The implications of the findings are addressed.     

Cross-cultural cross-validation of the Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire among Zimbabwean school children

For 568 boys and 698 girls (ages 8 to 17 years), Neuroticism scores were reliable and factorially valid for both sexes but reliability and validity for Extraversion were modest and, while reliable, 45% of Lie scale items did not load on their factor of origin. Also, Psychoticism scores were unreliable and factorially invalid. Careful item analyses must be undertaken and the construct of psychoticism verified.     

AN APT PUNISHMENT FOR TOM JOAD: (RE)IDENTIFYING TOM JOAD FOR A MORAL JUDGMENT BASED ON THE PRA

Our basic intuition seems to suggest that the moral biography of an individual matters in our treatment of the individual. We do keep criminal records on file, and we do care about the moral progress of individuals. At times our desire to fix responsibility seems too strong, and in our zeal we invent a definite, metaphysical character on which to pin crimes. However, some moral philosophers have tried to redirect our attention to affix responsibility in a way that attends to actions, deeds done. Two ways to affix responsibility have been reviewed—the SR and the PRA. In the case of Tom Joad we could arrive at the conviction that Tom was responsible through use of either the SR or the PRA. In the end the difference was not that one method held Tom culpable and one exculpated him. The difference was seen in the way the PRA included the earlier commission of the same crime in its evaluation of responsibility. To include in the evaluation of Tom's murder of George the earlier murder of Herb is to entertain a definite theory about the relation of Herb's murderer to George's murderer. I have suggested one possible candidate for that theory, Derek Parfit's theory of person stages.     

The role of duration in memory and metamemory of enacted instructions (SPTs)

Summary Subjects enacted two series of tasks as instructed (subject-performed tasks, or SPTs). The enactions were of either short (5-s) or long (30-s) duration. The long en actions were either repetitive (e.g.,bounce a ball several times) or else nonrepetitive (e. g.,stand up, walk round the room, open the door, look out, close the door, sit down). During presentation, subjects were to rate the probability of recall of each SPT in a subsequent free-recall test. The long SPTs were given higher recall ratings than the short SPTs, but the subjects did not differentiate between the repetitive and the nonrepetitive items. Recall mirrored the ratings; the long SPTs were recalled more frequently than the short ones, with no difference between the repetitive and the nonrepetitive items. The metamemory results are discussed in relation to the notion that the memory-monitoring system is sensitive to quantitative, but not to qualitative, differences in encoding.