Psychological Facts Research Articles

How to decide what to do: Why you're already a realist about value

AbstractMetaethical realists and anti‐realists alike have typically assumed that deliberation about what to do is, at least sometimes, properly settled by the agent's evaluative attitudes—what she wants, likes, or values—rather than by any objective source of value out in the world. I argue that this picture of deliberation is not one that the deliberating agent herself can accept. Seen from within the first‐person perspective, the agent's own evaluative attitudes are not encountered as descriptive psychological facts, but are rather “transparent” to the external world, conceived as a place already suffused with normative significance: they are her finding the relevant parts of the world to be desirable, valuable, and so on. And from the agent's own point of view, these attitudes can do the normative work involved in settling deliberation only because and insofar as they are understood as in this way a warranted response to this desirability or value. Attitudes that the agent does not experience as transparent in this way are attitudes from which she is alienated, and as such she cannot understand them as authoritative over her deliberation. What this means, I argue, is that deliberation about what to do involves a commitment to a particularly substantive form of metaethical realism.

Hume's Constitutivist Response to Scepticism

In the concluding section of the Book One of the Treatise, Hume confronts radical scepticism about the standards of correct reasoning. According to the naturalistic interpretations, Hume resolves this scepticism by appealing to some psychological facts. A common criticism of this interpretation is that the alleged naturalistic epistemic norm seems to be merely Hume’s report of his psychology, and it remains unclear why this seemingly mere psychological description can provide a principled reason to overcome his scepticism. In this paper, I will argue that Hume’s discussions of the “indirect passions” and social identity provide a constitutivist ground for the naturalistic epistemic standards in the “Conclusion”: being the object of the indirect passions constitutes what kind of person one is, and being the kind of person (philosopher in Hume’s case) gives non-optional reason to pursue certain kinds of reasoning.

A contemporary look at the relationship between general cognitive ability and job performance.

The relationship between general cognitive ability (GCA) and overall job performance has been a long-accepted fact in industrial and organizational psychology. However, the most prominent data on this relationship date back more than 50 years. This meta-analysis examines the relationship between GCA and overall job performance using studies from the current century. Results across 153 samples and a total sample size of 40,740 show a mean observed validity of .16, with a residual SD of .09. Correcting for unreliability in the criterion and correcting predictive studies for range restriction produces a mean corrected validity of .22 and a residual SD of .11. While this is a much smaller estimate than the .51 value offered by Schmidt and Hunter (1998), that value has been critiqued by Sackett et al. (2022), who offered a mean corrected validity of .31 based on integrating findings from prior meta-analyses of 20th century data. We obtain a lower value (.22) for 21st century data. We conclude that GCA is related to job performance, but our estimate of the magnitude of the relationship is lower than prior estimates. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Kant’s Fantasy

Abstract Throughout his lectures and published writings on anthropology, Kant describes a form of unintentional, unstructured, obscure, and pleasurable imaginative mental activity, which he calls fantasy (Phantasie), where we ‘take pleasure in letting our mind wander about in obscurity’ (LA 25:480). In the context of his pragmatic anthropology, Kant is concerned not only to describe this form of mental activity as a fact of human psychology, but more importantly, to criticize and discourage it. But must we share Kant’s negative evaluation? Could fantasy play a positive role in some kinds of experience? In this paper I first reconstruct Kant’s conception of fantasy, and then consider what role fantasy might play in aesthetic experience. Precisely because of his anxieties about fantasy, Kant is careful to distinguish between the lawless freedom of the imagination in fantasy and the ‘free lawfulness’ of the imagination in aesthetic judgment. Departing from Kant, and with help from Susan Sontag, I argue that certain aesthetic objects, especially certain works of modernist art, positively invite fantasy, making fantasy part of proper aesthetic appreciation. I conclude by suggesting that while fantasy can indeed play a positive role in aesthetic appreciation, there is still reason to regard fantasy as ‘normatively ambiguous’.

УПРАВЛЕНИЕ ПОТЕНЦИАЛОМ ЗДОРОВЬЯ ЧЕРЕЗ ПРАКТИКУ ФОРМИРОВАНИЯ ЭМОЦИОНАЛЬНОГО ИНТЕЛЛЕКТА

The article examines the problem of managing health potential through psychological technologies, in particular the formation of an individual’s emotional intelligence. In the modern world, a person can hardly achieve absolute health (for reasons of environmental violations, high-speed socio-psychological standards of self-realization). At the same time, the individual’s area of responsibility is the process of migration of health indicators on the “Health – Disease” continuum and its approach/removal to/from the “label/ label Health”. We are talking not only about systematic monitoring of biochemical health indicators, but also psychological facts indicating the direction of the health vector. Psychological health factors include automated negative verbalizations of attitudes, needs, motives, and values; irrational character traits and subsequent psycho-emotional states. Awareness and control of negative psycho-emotional states constitute the essence of the process of developing emotional intelligence.

Healing attitudes in contagious times: the experience of practising psychotherapy in China during the pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic is a challenge for any human being. Realising this simple psychological fact, the China Society for Analytical Psychology launched a "Garden of Heart & Soul 2020" volunteer campaign, providing psychological care to those in need whether or not they had had previous experience with counselling or psychotherapy. This article describes principles and practice of Jungian analysts, analysts in training, sandplay therapists, and other practitioners in China seeking to apply Jungian analytic techniques with regard to exposing and working through psychological complexes to the problems that have emerged for people facing the epidemic. Emphasis has been placed on developing a conscious, compassionate attitude towards the cultural complexity the epidemic has activated in China, which has therapeutic aspects based on the traditional wisdom of Chinese culture. Contemporary Ci-bei (compassion) therapy has added to these the contemporary Jungian emphasis upon playing, active imagination in the form of art making and authentic movement, and attention to the feelings of the inner child. With people facing a pandemic and its many problems, the use of Chinese myths and legends that involve facing collective challenges with resilient ingenuity is also helpful. They can be retold to contemporary people caught between fear of isolation and fear of contagion in such a way as to awaken the archetypal energy of the individual self that is needed to reconcile these opposites. In applying these Jungian techniques and concepts, we have been able to witness their power even in relatively shortterm crisis intervention, to foster transformation of attitudes and healing in populations facing cultural stress who would not have imagined that consulting a Jungian practitioner could be so helpful.

A reassessment of source citation issues in The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China by Mark Elvin

Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China is one of the best comprehensive works on the environmental history of China both at home and abroad, and has deservedly garnered much praise. However, the rationality of the sources it cites and the suitability of their application is quite controversial, chiefly centering on how sources in the category of poetry and literature, which are newly drawing attention, can more effectively play a role in the field of environmental history. One of Elvin’s objectives was to outline the true history of environmental development, drawing upon traditional sources from the classical Chinese canons as well as previous Chinese findings, and with respect to the interpretation of specific environmental issues, he essentially realized this vision. However, that he relied solely on interpretations of poetic and literary sources in elevating microcosmic events to macroscopic constructs seems like a stretch, and errors and misinterpretations arising from substituting psychological facts for historical facts are present as well; the addition of “overreaching” value judgments causes him to unwittingly succumb to the pitfall of the theory of linear aggravation of environmental decline. He is not the sole example of such tendencies, which are also clearly reflected in environmental histories of China written by Western scholars, as represented by Robert B. Marks, Elizabeth C. Economy, and so on, and which are in urgent need of correction. Appropriate sources are the basis for an accurate understanding of environmental issues, and objective interpretation is the premise for obtaining rational solutions. Avoiding existing malpractices, transforming the historical sources in various disciplines, and clarifying the place of the “environment” in the past, present and future are still focal points in current research on the environmental history of China.

Dumbfounded by the Facts? Understanding the Moral Psychology of Sexual Relationships

AbstractOne of the standard examples in contemporary moral psychology originates in the works of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He treats people's responses to the story of Julie and Mark, two siblings who decide to have casual, consensual, protected sex, as facts of human morality, providing evidence for his social intuitionist approach to moral judgements. We argue that Haidt's description of the facts of the story and the reactions of the respondents as ‘morally dumbfounded’ presupposes a view about moral reasoning that is more substantial than he acknowledges. Drawing on the philosophical work by Iris Murdoch and Cora Diamond, we explore how different descriptions of human morality, sexuality, and family relations engage us in evaluations about distinctive features of human life and language that go deeper than Haidt envisages. Thus, we show the need to attend to the concepts used to describe the facts of human moral psychology and the pictures of morality these concepts reveal about the researcher's own understanding of moral experience. This points to the particular responsibility any researcher into human moral psychology has for ensuring that the descriptions they offer are attuned to the complexities of the lives of those they form theories about and that these do not appear conceptually confounding.

Hermann von Helmholtz and the Quantification Problem of Psychophysics

Hermann von Helmholtz has been widely acknowledged as one of the forerunners of contemporary theories of measurement. However, his conception of measurement differs from later, representational conceptions in two main respects. Firstly, Helmholtz advocated an empiricist philosophy of arithmetic as grounded in some psychological facts concerning quantification. Secondly, his theory implies that mathematical structures are common to both subjective experiences and objective ones. My suggestion is that both of these differences depend on a classical approach to measurement, according to which the arithmetic laws of addition define what is measurable as a particular domain for their application, and, at the same time, the extensibility of these laws to all known physical processes works as a heuristic principle for empirical research. Such an approach is worth reconsidering, not only because it lends plausibility to some of the controversial aspects of Helmholtz’s theory, but also because it offers a philosophical perspective on quantification problems that originated in the nineteenth-century.This paper draws insights on Helmholtz’s philosophical views from his engagement with the measurability of sensations via Fechner’s psychophysical law. This seems to be in contrast with the fact that the reception of Helmholtz’s theory culminated with the formulation of the theory of extensive measurement. I will contend that Helmholtz reached a no less important standpoint in the nineteenth-century debate on whether sensations are different (i.e., intensive) kinds of magnitudes and on how, if at all, they can be measured.

Philosophical handling of "Idiographic Approach”

In general a philosophical approach is classified into Western and Eastern. But then, when it comes to the handling of subjects like Ethics, Morality and to a large extent human-temperament, there is no visible schism in the viewpoints. A philosophical outlook usually deals with queries related to people's varied levels of comprehension and reactions towards a set of situations. In this regard the classic philosophical approach is quite obvious and common with the sensitive minds which permit very little scope to flexibility, in handling perceptions. Philosophical approaches do help us to remove the ambiguities or rather vagueness clearly present in our expressions. At the same time a verbose write-up or prolix lecture, for some time might impress us but would lead nowhere. It is in this context that a philosophical approach, which takes into consideration "behavioural psychological facts", is of utmost importance to gain clarity. The idealistic proposals that impress us in general in all fields, somehow do not provide a thorough satisfaction in case of "human behaviour". It is an open fact that there are a huge number of complicated factors which relentlessly influence human mind /nature. One of the major ones is "circumstances" having a thorough hold, owing to which the bookish principles in practice miserably fail. In order to overcome psychological disorders, there have been various methods employed. However, Freud's exhaustive case study approach stands valid even today. Therefore, in the modern times we understand the need of getting into details of each case to reach the roots and then apply remedial methods. Despite so many solutions that are proposed, yet tackling the problems with a philosophical outlook, somehow is not encouraged. Human nature had been burdened by many ideologies, mostly in a theoretical manner. Since the results are not arriving as surmised, it is almost declared that functioning of human nature is enigmatic. This paper explores the possibility of philosophical handling of this tricky problem by proposing certain reflective ideas.

Women and Planters during American Revolution War as Narrated in Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782)

The paper attempts to discover a historical fact of American women’s educational achievement and self-image as well as to unravel a psychological fact of American planters’ existential crisis in the historical period of Revolution War by means of information reported by Jean Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (1735-1813) in his famous Letters from an American Farmer (1782). To make the attempt successful, two literary criticisms are done by the writers of this paper, namely feminist criticism and existentialist criticism. The feminist criticism is carried out to dig up data out of the Letters and analyze it through feminist lens, while the existentialist criticism is performed to unearth signs of existential crisis experienced by the Southern planters during the Independence War of America. After scrutinizing the Letters, it is found that Southern women during the war of independence are well-educated but have a low self-image and that Southern planters suffer anguish and despair of woeful political revolution which shutter their existential equilibrium.

Rodzina w systemie społecznym: Klasyczne teorie i badania psychologii międzykulturowej

An undeniable fact in psychology is the statement that the individual fate of an individual is influenced by family influences, but these depend to a large extent on the location of the family in the social structure and, more broadly, in a specific civilization context. Cross-cultural psychology provides a lot of information in this regard, although it seems to be far from the final conclusions. The presented text provides an overview of important theoretical approaches and research relating to contemporary cross-cultural differences in the sphere of family life. In the first subsection, they deal with general approaches and system structure. The second presents data on research related to the concept of parental ethonotheroia of child rearing. The third section is devoted to tracking the specificity of Polish families against the background of the modern world – international research, taking into account the Polish sample, and the comparison of the results of Polish and American research carried out with the use of the same measurement tool (resulting from a specific and, as it turned out, culturally-dependent theory).

How can consciousness be false? Alienation, simulation, and mental ownership

Alienation has been recently revived as a central concept in critical theory. Current debates, however, tend to focus on normative rather than on explanatory issues. In this paper, I confront the latter and advance an account of alienation that bears on the mechanisms that bring it about in order to locate alienation as a distinctive social and psychological fact and to dissolve a paradox it seems to involve. In particular, I argue that alienation can be explained as a disruption induced by social factors in the sense of mental ownership that comes with the first personal awareness of being a subject of attitudes, emotions, and actions, and outline how social factors can play a structuring causal role in the process that brings it about. In the first section, I introduce the theme and explain why it is important to focus on the mechanisms that underlie alienation. In the second section, I maintain that understanding how alienation works is crucial to make sense of false consciousness. In the third section, I consider the relevance of mental ownership to explaining alienation and discuss existing evidence about whether and how it can fail. In the final section, I argue that disturbances in the simulation routines that support social cognition might underpin alienation, and outline how social factors might play a structuring causal role in this connection.

Role of artistic activities in developing the academic achievement of middle school students

Artistic activities are considered one of the most prominent types of visual arts through which artistic expression is practiced, whether it is intellectual expression or the expression of feelings and feelings. From an emotional and psychological point of view, psychological researchers have also been interested in the field of adolescent arts, for what it contains of psychological facts and indications that reflect their motives, struggles and hidden desires in an unconscious and transcendent manner. Which artistic activities carry for their direct impact on adolescent students and know the impact of these activities on academic achievement through a scale built by the researcher for this purpose. This study found the following: 1) There are differences in the motivation for academic achievement and in favor of the post-test. 2) Technical activities can develop the motivation for academic achievement and make positive change in this field, and this is confirmed by the current study through its findings.

الأسرار البيانية والمقاصد البلاغية من ورود الأمر في القرآن العظيم والرد على مطاعن المخالفين

A meticulous rhetorical article in a detailed scientific response to the non-scientific doctrine that denies the Sunnah of the prophet (PBUH) and attempts to nullify the cornerstone and the hypothesis of Fasting, from a rhetorical and intentional perspective of the occurrence of the matter in the holy Qur'an. My method in response was influenced by the approach of the Egyptian critic Dr. Mustafa Nassef in his book "A Second Reading of Our Old Poetry", where he made the structure of Arabic poetry a complex subject that requires a thorough analytical reading, in a medical sense, in order to dive into the body of the studied material and extracts its deep secrets and psychological facts instead of the superficial anatomical reading influenced by the Impressionism, which in his view and ours is an outdated reading. As for the goal of the research, it is to fathom out the secrets of the subject's rhetoric in the Great Quran, by defending its miraculous language from the insults of the ignorants and the appeals of haters who are unaware of its purposes. He concluded that it is necessary to confront the misconceptions of the invalidators with a sober scientific approach and a sound critical lesson. Keywords: eloquence, pragmatics, imperative in the Quran, criticism

Is it not over yet? – pandemic-induced ongoing burn out continues for students in Azerbaijan.

Abstract In a nagging pandemic, while there will be some regression when the dust from pandemic settles, online, remote and hybrid education seems to stay for good and is expected to maintain a substantial portion of education. Students chronic burnout continues with more questions raised every day than the answers and promises made. It is a known psychological fact that when a younger generation of students encounters life-threatening events, they tend to reflect on death and uncertainty and take stock of their lives with defining what to make of their lives and how to achieve that. We surveyed mental health, social life and its impact on academics of medical and engineering students in Azerbaijan and reported the following data. Out of 274 respondents were 51% female and 48.2% male. 86.5% were from the age group (18–25) and 12.5% from (25–35) years. Majority of the students found themselves juggling with too many balls at the same time, not everyone could keep the focus, skill set and training to succeed. Female students delayed their cultural-ordained marriageable age in pursuit of a well-settled career partner, while male students found themselves looking for an alternative career path. Majority of professional students burn-out by a loss of at least two years of their professional education. This seemed to play out more for medical students as they were not able to find experiential training and hospital residencies. This included medical and engineering students who were ambitious to seek western education but lockdowns and visa regulations held them hostage at their home countries. Azerbaijan students however, were resilient enough to withstand the dual trauma of war with their neighboring country while fighting a global war against COVID-19 pandemic.

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Human–Robot Interactive Communication and Cognitive Psychology Intelligent Decision System Based on Artificial Intelligence — Case Study

Cognitive psychology is a science of human knowledge, which means that people perceive, acquire, memorize, think, and comprehend intellectual capabilities. The psychological strategy involves controlling every action and status of the human body. The problematic states of psychological facts include mental disorders like depression, stress, anxiety, and inferiority complex, leading to memory loss. The emerged technique of cognitive psychological managing framework using artificial intelligence (CPMF-AI) is introduced. The proposed framework is extended to forecast the psychological standards of the human brain for practical well-being. There are four methods to monitor memory power, stress, and other human mental disorders. They are distant neural systems (DNS), convolutional psychology tracking systems (CPTS), intelligent neural systems (INS), and memory-building strategies (MBS). Besides language aspects, physical aspects play a vital part in human–robot interaction (HRI) and make the difference compared to the more limited HRI communication. These methodologies are integrated into four case studies to detect neural passage systems for monitoring mental issues. The simulation analysis helps enhance the framework’s accuracy and minimize the error rate. Thus, the proposed system of cognitive technology is comparatively better than the existing methods.

Scandinavian Psychological Theory of Law

The article examines the nature and main characteristics of the legal views of Scandinavian lawyers, who are traditionally identified in the history of modern legal thought as representatives of legal realism. The focus is, first of all, on the nature and methods of substantiating law as a psychological fact, which largely determines the profile of the legal views of Scandinavian realists (on the example of the writings of A. Hagerstrem and A. Ross). In this regard, the psychological orientation of the theoretical and legal views of the Scandinavian realists makes it possible to more accurately highlight the question of the place, meaning and orientation of the psychological by its nature Scandinavian theory of law in the history of modern legal thought. In addition, the study focuses on the features of epistemological approaches underlying the legal views of the realistic movement in legal thought in the Scandinavian countries. В The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it gives a problem-critical assessment of the content of the legal views of the Scandinavian realists, determines the specifics of the semantic load of realism as an epistemological attitude underlying their philosophical, ethical and legal views, reveals the peculiarities of the interpretation of law as a psychological fact, and also demonstrates the possibilities of typologizing the corresponding ideas about law as a psychological theory law and its regional interpretation. In addition, clarifications are made to the definition of the place and significance of the psychological theory of law of Scandinavian authors in the history of pan-European legal thought, and some essential features of psychologism in the legal understanding of the considered regional group are identified.

Avangardna umetnost u sociološkoj perspektivi - Renato Pođoli i Boris Grojs

The paper deals with the possibilities of perceiving avant-garde arts on the example of prominent authors: Renato Poggioli in the book The Theory of the Avant-garde, and Boris Groys in the book In the Flow. Both of these works, through which the sociological perspective of avant-garde arts is presented, are separated by a historical gap of over fifty years. Poggioli focuses on defining the basic socio-cultural features of avant-garde arts, mostly studying it as a relatively isolated social phenomenon. He demands that avant-garde arts should be studied as a sociological and psychological fact. Groys views avant-garde, and all contemporary art, as a product of global socio-economic and cultural-historical assemblies. He starts from the idea of material flow as an all-pervading force that affects all actors of social and cultural life. Sociological insight is necessary for the complete study of avant-garde. He states that it was the avant-garde artists who expressed an awareness of the inevitability of the flow. The aim of research is to provide the possibility of sociological consideration of avant-garde art, as a way of understanding characteristics of the culture of modern society.