Knowledge in Society as an Empirical Base for Indian Psychology

Indian society has enormous complexity and diversity of religion and culture. The Indian Psychology will be truly enriched if it explores and integrates these experiences at the individual and group levels. In addition there is perhaps something to learn from the Positive Psychology as to how to best utilize the knowledge in Indian society for the sake of humanity.     

Activation of shape and semantic information during ambiguous homophone processing: eye tracking evidence from Hindi

In two visual world eye tracking studies, we examined the activation of subordinate meanings of ambiguous homophones in Hindi and particularly when the sentence context is biased towards the dominant meaning. Participants listened to sentences that were either neutral or biased towards the dominant meaning of the homophone and saw a display containing four pictures. In experiment 1, the display had a shape competitor of the subordinate meaning of the homophone in both neutral and biased conditions along with three unrelated distractors. Experiment 2 had semantic competitors of the subordinate meaning of the homophones along with three distractors. Proportion of fixations to different objects overtime suggested that participants activated the subordinate meanings and oriented their attention to the shape and semantic competitors even when the prior context was biased towards the dominant meaning. Overall, these data from Hindi provide further support to those models of lexical access that assume exhaustive access of both the meanings of an ambiguous homophone. These data suggest even a dominant bias does not eliminate the activation of perceptual and conceptual features of the subordinate meaning.     

Assessment of the Fiji-Based Condom Social Marketing (CSM) Program

This paper discusses the results of a systematic review of the Condom Social Marketing (CSM) program which was implemented in Fiji by a non-profit organization for a period of 5?years. The CSM program was introduced during a decade when Fiji was recording an escalating number of new Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infections. The aim of the program was to increase the awareness and utilization of safe sexual practices among the most vulnerable group??the youths??which had reported the highest incidences of sexually transmitted infections. Program assessment revealed that the CSM program had reportedly increased the acceptability, accessibility, and usage of their TRY TiME condoms in Fiji. We conducted a survey on a sample of sexually active people during January?CFebruary 2009 to examine their prevailing level of knowledge about HIV/AIDS, sexual behavior/practices, and risk perception. The results showed that, despite the high level of awareness about HIV/AIDS among survey participants, people did not consistently practice safe sexual behavior and commonly identified themselves as at low risk of acquiring HIV. This paper concludes that more extensive behavior change programs are needed in order to influence people to change their risky sexual practices and reassess their risk perceptions.     

The millennial generation of Sikhs in North America

ABSTRACT

Millennial Sikhs are second- or in some cases third-generation children born in North America in the last two decades of twentieth century. They have been actively involved in the process of ‘renewal and re-definition’ of the Sikh tradition. Cross-cultural encounters heighten their sense of identity. They constantly draw from their Sikh inheritance the universal values of social justice and equality to reach out to their non-Sikh neighbors and to fight against discrimination and injustice. Their principal strategy has been to downplay the Punjabi cultural traditions of their parents and to highlight the universal aspects of their faith in their dealings. Although they have consciously stayed away from the ‘factional politics’ of gurdwaras, they have made incredible strides in Sikh activism and political arena.     

Friends and Family: The Role of Relationships in Community and Workplace Attachment

Purpose

Most work–life research focuses on the spillover of the nuclear family to the workplace, offering little insight into how other family relationships and friendships can spill over to affect employees’ organizational attachment. Past research has also overlooked the role of relationship quality and the mechanisms underlying these life-to-work spillover effects. Addressing these shortcomings, we integrate the systemic model of community attachment with job embeddedness theory to develop a model of community relational embeddedness and then use this model to examine how nonwork relationships connect people to their workplaces.

Design/Methodology/Approach

We used survey data from a national sample of 2025 accounting professionals and tested mediation hypotheses using structural equation modeling.

Findings

Employees’ relationships with friends and family predicted their attachment to their communities, which in turn predicted their workplace turnover intentions. Supporting our theoretical model, bonds with friends and family predicted moving intentions, and community fit and sacrifice mediated these effects. Community fit and sacrifice also predicted work turnover intentions indirectly through moving intentions. Tests also revealed that, surprisingly, friendships had a stronger impact on community attachment than family.

Implications

Employees are connected to their organizations through an array of close community relationships that extend beyond the nuclear family (i.e., spouse, children). Organizations can enhance employees’ workplace attachment by recognizing the role of friends and offering work–life programs that use a broad conceptualization of family (e.g., adult siblings, parents).

Originality/Value

Our study illustrates the importance of community relationships to workplace attachment, and the need to incorporate relational quality, nonnuclear family, and friendships in future research.

     

Combining Indian and Western Spiritual Psychology: Applications to Health and Social Renewal

We introduce the topic of Indian/US collaboration in studying religion and spirituality (R/S), providing both historical and philosophical context. A fully in-depth and comprehensive study of R/S will require taking into account three potential types and sources of knowledge: (1) theoretically and intellectually oriented knowledge as exemplified by William James; (2) empirically oriented knowledge as exemplified by Gordon Allport; and (3) experience- and realization-derived knowledge based on reports from eminent spiritual figures. We sketch the distinct but mutually informative challenges of clinical and epistemic integration. We suggest several topics for future collaboration, arguing that the most comprehensive study of R/S will require combining the western attention to empirical knowledge with the Indian psychology movement’s attention to realization-derived knowledge. Suggested topics include processes of learning from spiritual exemplars and teachers; health effects from engagement in Hindu or other Indian religious practice; psychological and health effects of specific spiritual practices; the importance and influence of the focus used in meditation; the effects of japam, Ramnam, or similar repeated short prayers; how diverse spiritual practices affect mindfulness; and the nature and means of fostering skills for living in a religiously plural society.     

Representations of the 1984 Tragedy in Punjabi Cinema: Ideology and Cultural Politics

Using medium of modern Punjabi language, this paper provides critical overview of the way in which Indian cinema has tried to grapple with the aftermath of the 1984 tragedy. The films analysed in this paper include two Hindi films Maachis, Hawayein, and three Punjabi films Des Hoyaa Pardes, Sadda Haq and Punjab 1984. The paper examines each film's underlying ideology, screen techniques and ultimately what it portrays through its narrative construction of the past. The Hindi films almost echo an ‘Indianist’ ideology – a nationalist perspective of Sikh youth rebelling against the state ultimately shown as misguided and purposeless, while Punjabi films with their more realistic linguistic and aesthetic presentation fall short of any sensitive portrayal of the tragedy. The paper concludes with some comments upon their comparative worth and weaknesses and the disjunction between the Bollywood productions and the Punjabi initiatives: the former as part of the Indian industry with its highly developed formulistic commercial orientation and the latter with little technical sophistication and resource-starved productions.