What’s in a Name? The Dilemma of Title and Geography for Contemporary Hasidism

This paper examines the importance of “branding” in hasidic life. It considers the impact of place names associated with the title of a particular rebbe or tsadik and his followers. When there is more than one claimant to succeed to the role of rebbe for a particular group of hasidim, the competition is often intensified because even though each claimant may have his own followers, there is only one name available for the group and its leader. This situation, different from the one that existed earlier in the history of Hasidism, makes the circumstances of succession today more fraught than they once were.     

The Relationship Between Workplace Spirituality and Work-to-Family Enrichment in Selected Public Sector Organizations in Malaysia

Journal of Religion and Health - Workplace spirituality (WPS) has been associated with various benefits, including its potential to reduce work–family conflict. Previous studies have...     

The Sacred Sites of Houston: A Novel Experiential Course for Undergraduate Medical Education on Religion and Spirituality

Journal of Religion and Health - Medical schools are charged to deliver a curriculum on religion and spirituality (R/S), so a novel experiential course, the Sacred Sites of Houston, was developed....     

Missing,Presumed Not Dead

Philosophia - In this paper, I argue that if we have reason to believe that an immaterial soul exists, then (absent evidence to the contrary) it should be presumed to be immortal. The conclusion is...     

What Is the Model in Model-Based Planning?

Flexibility is one of the hallmarks of human problem-solving. In everyday life, people adapt to changes in common tasks with little to no additional training. Much of the existing work on flexibility in human problem-solving has focused on how people adapt to tasks in new domains by drawing on solutions from previously learned domains. In real-world tasks, however, humans must generalize across a wide range of within-domain variation. In this work we argue that representational abstraction plays an important role in such within-domain generalization. We then explore the nature of this representational abstraction in realistically complex tasks like video games by demonstrating how the same model-based planning framework produces distinct generalization behaviors under different classes of task representation. Finally, we compare the behavior of agents with these task representations to humans in a series of novel grid-based video game tasks. Our results provide evidence for the claim that within-domain flexibility in humans derives from task representations composed of propositional rules written in terms of objects and relational categories.     

Baselining affects the production of deceptive narratives

Recent research shows that the quality of a baseline (i.e., the analysis of one's behavior in normal conditions) decreases when the second narrative is expected and deceitful. However, a first step would be to investigate whether the writing of a first narrative might influence the second, independently of its expectancy. In this study, we hypothesized that second narratives would be less detailed, especially if these narratives are deceptive. Participants (N = 71) were asked to narrate two consecutive truthful and deceptive narratives. The second narrative was unexpected, and the order of the narratives was counterbalanced. Results suggest a detrimental effect of deceptiveness and order on the frequency of details. Moreover, an interaction was observed, suggesting when narratives are written after a first one, the frequency of details decreases, all the more if they were deceptive. The results of this experiment are discussed from both a theoretical and an applied perspective.