Some Psychological Aspects of the Belief in Immortality

1919 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-314
Author(s):  
James Bissett Pratt

The individual's attitude toward the Determiner of Destiny, which is religion, has always an essentially practical coloring. It involves a belief, to be sure, but this belief is never a matter of pure theory; it bears a reference, more or less explicit, to the fate of the individual's values. Hence in nearly every religion which history has studied or anthropology discovered, the question of the future in store for the individual believer has been one of prime importance. The content of this belief is a question for the theologian and the historian of religion; the psychologist, however, may be able to throw some light on the related question why people believe, or fail to believe, in immortality at all. What, in short, are the psychological sources from which this belief springs, and what are the leading types of this belief?

Author(s):  
A. S. Koval

This article is devoted to the studying hermeneutic circle in the development of methodological culture of future music teacher. Under the conditions of globalization processes, tendencies of convergence of world cultures improvement of culturological training of student youth requires new approaches, in particular, culturological training of students of pedagogical specialties. The task of pedagogical education is to develop a teacher as a specialist and as a person of high culture, who has a special positive effect on the personality of school student. This article analyses the works of scientists dedicated to the issues of establishment and development of the hermeneutic approach in philosophical, psychological, and logical and gnosiological contexts. It is defined the essence of the concept of “hermeneutic circle” as one of the basic principles of the hermeneutic approach. There have been provided the examples of interpretation of the principle of hermeneutic circle by various scientists. Hermeneutic approach is applied in sciences such as pedagogy, psychology, economics, sociology etc. In pedagogical science the hermeneutic approach at the level of conceptual use was elaborated by A. Zakirova. She introduced the term “pedagogical hermeneutics”. Hermeneutic circle as a principle of text understanding is based on the interrelation of the part and the whole. Understanding of the whole consists of the understanding of the individual parts, and understanding of the parts requires understanding of the whole. The concepts of the part and the whole are correlated: the text is a part concerning the whole creative activity of the author, which in its turn is a part of the particular genre or literature in general, as well as the part of spiritual life and biography of the author. The idea of hermeneutic circle means also that there is no understanding of the text without certain prerequisites: understanding is preceded by some idea of what is yet to understand. There have been determined the peculiarities of the use of the principle of hermeneutic circle in the development of methodological culture of the future teacher of musical art. In light of hermeneutical trends, the penetration of which in the realm of musical art can be traced quite clearly, the use of the hermeneutic circle principle in the development of methodological culture of the future teacher of musical art appears not only in the narrow interpretation of the particular phenomenon or group of phenomena, but much wider — as a means of learning and understanding of the worldview by a person.


Author(s):  
Ayta Sakun ◽  
Tatiana Kadlubovich ◽  
Darina Chernyak

The problem of success became relevant at the beginning of the XXI century. Everyone strives to succeed, to be confident in themselves and in the future. Success is recognized as one of the needs of the individual. Reforming modern education is designed to make it human-centered, effective, close to the practical needs of the learner. The humanization of education is impossible without creating situations of success in learning. Such situations activate a person's cognitive motivation, reveal his creative potential, make a person strong and confident. To create situations of success, teachers use a variety of methods and tools that enhance the cognitive activity of students.


Author(s):  
Daphna Oyserman

Everyone can imagine their future self, even very young children, and this future self is usually positive and education-linked. To make progress toward an aspired future or away from a feared future requires people to plan and take action. Unfortunately, most people often start too late and commit minimal effort to ineffective strategies that lead their attention elsewhere. As a result, their high hopes and earnest resolutions often fall short. In Pathways to Success Through Identity-Based Motivation Daphna Oyserman focuses on situational constraints and affordances that trigger or impede taking action. Focusing on when the future-self matters and how to reduce the shortfall between the self that one aspires to become and the outcomes that one actually attains, Oyserman introduces the reader to the core theoretical framework of identity-based motivation (IBM) theory. IBM theory is the prediction that people prefer to act in identity-congruent ways but that the identity-to-behavior link is opaque for a number of reasons (the future feels far away, difficulty of working on goals is misinterpreted, and strategies for attaining goals do not feel identity-congruent). Oyserman's book goes on to also include the stakes and how the importance of education comes into play as it improves the lives of the individual, their family, and their society. The framework of IBM theory and how to achieve it is broken down into three parts: how to translate identity-based motivation into a practical intervention, an outline of the intervention, and empirical evidence that it works. In addition, the book also includes an implementation manual and fidelity measures for educators utilizing this book to intervene for the improvement of academic outcomes.


Author(s):  
Abbie J. Shipp

Temporal focus is the individual tendency to characteristically think more or less about the past, present, and future. Although originally rooted in early work from psychology, research on temporal focus has been steadily growing in a number of research areas, particularly since Zimbardo and Boyd’s (1999) influential article on the topic. This chapter will review temporal focus research from the past to the present, including how temporal focus has been conceptualized and measured, and which correlates and outcomes have been tested in terms of well-being and behavior. Based on this review, an agenda for research is created to direct temporal focus research in the future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 130 (629) ◽  
pp. 1384-1415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Hertwig ◽  
Michael D Ryall

ABSTRACT Thaler and Sunstein (2008) advance the concept of ‘nudge’ policies—non-regulatory and non-fiscal mechanisms designed to enlist people's cognitive biases or motivational deficits so as to guide their behaviour in a desired direction. A core assumption of this approach is that policymakers make artful use of people's cognitive biases and motivational deficits in ways that serve the ultimate interests of the nudged individual. We analyse a model of dynamic policymaking in which the policymaker's preferences are not always aligned with those of the individual. One novelty of our set-up is that the policymaker has the option to implement a ‘boost’ policy, equipping the individual with the competence to overcome the nudge-enabling bias once and for all. Our main result identifies conditions under which the policymaker chooses not to boost in order to preserve the option of using the nudge (and its associated bias) in the future—even though boosting is in the immediate best interests of both the policymaker and the individual. We extend our analysis to situations in which the policymaker can be removed (e.g., through an election) and in which the policymaker is similarly prone to bias. We conclude with a discussion of some policy implications of these findings.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
pp. 3017
Author(s):  
Elias Dörre ◽  
Sebastian Pfaffel ◽  
Alexander Dreher ◽  
Pedro Girón ◽  
Svenja Heising ◽  
...  

Energy generation and consumption in the power grid must be balanced at every single moment. Within the synchronous area of continental Europe, flexible generators and loads can provide Frequency Containment Reserve and Frequency Restoration Reserve marketed through the balancing markets. The Transmission System Operators use these flexibilities to maintain or restore the grid frequency when there are deviations. This paper shows the future flexibility potential of Germany’s household sector, in particular for single-family and twin homes in 2025 and 2030 with the assumption that households primarily optimize their self-consumption. The primary focus is directed to the flexibility potential of Electric Vehicles, Heat Pumps, Photovoltaics and Battery Storage Systems. A total of 10 different household system configurations were considered and combined in a weighted average based on the scenario framework of the German Grid Development Plan. The household generation, consumption and storage units were simulated in a mixed-integer linear programming model to create the time series for the self-consumption optimized households. This solved the unit commitment problem for each of the decentralized households in their individual configurations. Finally, the individual household flexibilities were evaluated and then aggregated to a Germany-wide flexibility profile for single-family and twin homes. The results indicate that the household sector can contribute significantly to system stabilization with an average potential of 30 negative and 3 positive flexibility in 2025. In 2030, the corresponding flexibilities potentially increase to 90 and 30 , respectively. This underlines that considerable flexibility reserves could be provided by single-family and twin homes in the future.


Author(s):  
James W. Underhill ◽  
Mariarosaria Gianninoto ◽  
Mariarosaria Gianninoto

Exploring the roots of four keywords for our times: Europe, the citizen, the individual, and the people, Mariarosaria Gianninoto’s and James Underhill’s Migrating Meanings (2019) takes a broad view of conceptualization by taking on board various forms of English, (Scottish, American, and English), as well as other European languages (German, French, Spanish & Czech), and incorporating in-depth contemporary and historical accounts of Mandarin Chinese. The corpus-based research leads the authors to conclude that the English keywords are European concepts with roots in French and parallel traditions in German. But what happens to Chinese words when they come into contact with migrating meanings from Europe? How are existing concepts like the people transformed? This book goes beyond the cold analysis of concepts to scrutinize the keywords that move people and get them excited about individual rights and personal destinies. With economic, political and cultural globalisation, our world is inseparable from the fates of other nations and peoples. But how far can we trust English to provide us with a reliable lingua franca to speak about our world? If our keywords reflect our cultures and form parts of specific cultural and historical narratives, they may well trace the paths we take together into the future. This book helps us to understand how other languages are adapting to English words, and how their worldviews resist ‘anglo-concepts’ through their own traditions, stories and worldviews.


1982 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 231-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Engel

In this paper I hope to explain the reasons for developing a method to provide the individual with tools to cope with failure at an early stage of his life; additionally, the general principles of that method will be formulated. Obviously, the basic objective is ultimately aimed at conditioning the child's thinking towards development of different attitudes in relation to failure situations. Success of the method, in the long run, depends upon the repetition of similar techniques, at least during the first years of the child's schooling. Thus we tend to believe that if we ‘instil’ in the child the proposed way of relating, he will then be able to cope not only with failure in the future but also with pressures exerted by unskilled teachers in school, who may use failure as a threat. As an additional alternative there is proposed a general model of treating children who have not been trained at an earlier stage to deal with failure within the school framework.


1983 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 571-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Postel

Summary The purpose of this paper is to investigate Philippe Pinel's psychiatric experience, his practice in “la maison de santé Belhomme” and his first publications which were concerned with the treatment of mental patients and appeared in “La Gazette de Santé” which he edited between 1785 and 1789. During that time, the main preoccupation of the future head doctor of “La Salpétrière” had been to ensure the application and the development of moral treatment, in its practical modalities as well as its theoretic rationalization. Meanwhile, the institutional aspect of this therapy had the upper hand over the individual cure. This evolution brought Pinel and his successors to neglect the latter. In this connection we can regret that Philippe Pinel did not continue to have more private practice for this allowed him to follow first his experience and research (individual cure) in this field of rational psychotherapy, that of moral treatment.


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