FOOD: ITS MANY ASPECTS IN SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND CULTURE

Food is a sine qua non for life on Earth. It has more significance than nutrition and sustenance, more variety than many aspects of human culture. Food has religious as well as historical dimensions. The complexity of the food chain and of the related ecological balance is one of the wonders of the biological world. In the human context, food has found countless expressions and regional richness. Food has provoked feasts, as its lack and maldistribution have caused famines. While being a source of physical satisfaction food has also had environmental impacts. Some of these matters are explored in these reflections.     

How do Children Associate Food Type to Illustrated Height and Obesity?

The following three studies examined young children’s and adults’ recognition of the impact of healthy and unhealthy foods on height and weight. Study 1 examined the impact of foods on height and weight. Study 2 examined the role of foods on characters of different ethnicities. Study 3 controlled for participants’ prior knowledge about the impact of food by presenting fictitious alien characters. The results indicated that preschoolers recognized that healthy foods promoted an increase in height but only for African-American images. Adults recognized the impact of nutrition on both height and weight with a greater emphasis of nutrition for weight than height. These results demonstrate that preschoolers’ biological model is more sophisticated and differentiated than previously reported.     

Development of norms for executive functions in typically-developing Indian urban preschool children and its association with nutritional status

Executive functions (EFs) are essential and important for achieving success in children’s everyday lives and play a fundamental role in children’s cognitive, academic, social, emotional and behavioral functioning. A cross-sectional study was carried out to develop age- and sex-specific norms for EFs using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function – Preschool Version (BRIEF-P) among 2- to 5-year-olds from urban Bangalore, India. In addition, the association between EFs and anthropometric measures, a marker of nutritional status, is also examined. Primary caregivers of 412 children, equally distributed by age and sex, participated. Raw scores for each domain and indices were converted to standard t-scores and percentiles were computed. A t-score at or above 63 corresponding to the 90th percentile was considered as the cutoff for executive dysfunction in this sample. The prevalence of executive dysfunction is 10% based on the Global Executive Composite score of the BRIEF-P. The cutoff score for identifying executive dysfunction using existing United States (US) norms is higher compared to the cutoff score obtained in the current study. Therefore, using US norms for Indian children could result in the prevalence of executive dysfunction been underestimated. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that stunted and underweight children have significantly elevated EF scores after adjusting for age, sex and socioeconomic status (SES; p < .01). A greater understanding of EFs in preschool children is important for the early identification of executive dysfunction and implementing interventions to improve their future prospects. This study also shows that undernourished children are more likely to have executive dysfunction.     

Relational and Contextual Reasoning: Philosophical and Logical Aspects

This essay is a commentary on Helmut Reich's recently published book on relational and contextual reasoning (RCR). Reich's ideas are relevant in contexts of conflict, and they enable us to consider the notion of objectivity differently. He makes us see the constraints in individual perspectives. His book also can enable people to formulate problems of human concern in a wider and richer framework, which may lead to solutions not obtainable on the basis of binary logic.     

TECHNO‐SECULARISM: COMMENTS AND REFLECTIONS

Abstract. I comment on some of the points made in John Caiazza's thesis on techno‐secularism and offer some of my own further reflections on the subject. Tertullian's rhetorical question about Athens and Jerusalem has universal relevance, not just for Western culture, and, notwithstanding the many positive contributions of science and technology to human culture and civilization, they may not take the place of religion of one kind or another in the foreseeable future. What is needed is to transform religions in ways that meet the challenges of a world drastically transformed by science and technology.     

Can we get sick if we want to? Children's and adults' recognition of intentionality in the origins of illness and injuries

The present set of studies examined the impact of intentionality (wanting/not wanting to get sick) on the transmission of contagious illness and injuries. Study 1 examined whether preschoolers and adults thought that a recipient of an illness is more likely to get sick if he/she wanted to. Studies 2, 2a, and 3 examined if the intentions of the transmitter would influence the transmission of illness to the recipient. Study 4 examined the influence of germs on intentionality. Both preschoolers and adults reasoned that the intentions of the recipient would play a significant role in the probability of contracting an illness but only adults reasoned that the recipient having knowledge of the transmitter's intentions would have an impact on illness. Moreover, preschoolers (but not adults) judged that biological contaminants such as germs would interact with the intentionality of the recipient to increase the chances of contracting an illness whereas adults reasoned that psychological states can have a direct influence on the manifestation of illness. These results suggest that preschoolers and adults entertain a highly sophisticated and selective process when assessing, the impact of psychological factors such as intentionality on biological processes such as the origins of illness.     

Management of day-to-day organisational human relations: a Henri Rey perspective

Nearly all contributions to applying psychoanalytic understanding to organisational life rely either on a group relations model or observing and commenting on how people impact on each other. In this paper, I use a particular theory of human relations from post-Kleinian psychoanalysis to understand the complexity of the manager/staff relationship which is not unlike the analyst/therapist relationship with a patient.