The Value of a Psychological Approach

Author(s):  
Patrik N. Juslin

Psychology is commonly defined as the study of mental processes and behaviour. The main focus is on describing and explaining how people sense the world (perception), how they think (cognition), feel (emotion), and behave (action). Music psychology focuses on mental processes and behaviours that occur in connection with music: it aims to observe, and develop theories about, the processes involved in composing, performing, and listening to music. This chapter argues that at its core, the study of music and emotion is concerned with relationships between ‘musical events’ and ‘emotional responses’.The interface between them consists of psychological processes in the human mind. Thus, psychology is key to understanding how and why a listener goes from ‘sound’ to ‘significance’.

2020 ◽  
pp. 106591292095214
Author(s):  
Daniel Schillinger

Contemporary authorities invoke luck to explain the arbitrariness of economic success, to emphasize our shared vulnerability to disaster, and to urge more generous policy, legislation, and governance. According to Robert Frank, Martha Nussbaum, and Ronald Dworkin, for example, extreme bad luck can befall individuals no matter what they know or do. By redefining luck as a psychological phenomenon (rather than as a constitutive principle of the world), this article challenges the contemporary consensus. My approach to luck arises out of my engagement with the political thought of Thucydides. Whereas influential interpreters present Thucydides as a witness to the crushing power of bad luck, and whereas they criticize Thucydides’ Pericles for being insufficiently deferential to luck, I revisit and defend Pericles’ skeptical and psychological approach to luck, and I argue that Thucydides shares this approach, at least in the main. The pathological intellectual and emotional responses to apparent good or bad luck diagnosed by Pericles in his final speech recur throughout the History and influence the evolution of the whole war. Going beyond Pericles, Thucydides shows that the appeal of luck arises out of a human need to explain, beautify, or lament what is merely natural necessity, haphazard coincidence, or awful suffering.


2021 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Robert H. Woody

Psychology and music can be complementary fields of study. Psychology is the study of the amazing human mind, and music comprises some of people’s most fascinating behaviors. Psychology promotes understanding of people: how they perceive and process the world around them, how they feel emotion, how they learn, and how they can skillfully perform certain behaviors, just to name several areas of interest. Music is made by human beings for human beings. Because people are the most important elements of music, aspiring musicians really cannot optimally advance their craft without considering the insights offered by psychology. This chapter introduces the psychology of music as a field of study. It covers a number of topics, including the cultural nature of music, the contributors to emotionally powerful music experiences, and the acquired skill explanation of musical ability.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-71
Author(s):  
Asep Saepullah

One of the functions of the human mind is think rationally and scientifically. This creates an idea of ​​a theory of knowledge (epistemology) which is part of the philosophy of science with various schools and figures, namely rationalism, empiricism, positivism, and criticism. However, the existing schools received special attention because there were still many shortcomings in it, one of which was August Comte's positivism which was criticized by Karl R. Popper. Not stopping at criticism, Popper also offers new principles as solutions to the problems that criticizing. Through the three stages of the world, namely the physical world, the human world and its psychological processes and the world of science. According to Popper, the truth of a science is not determined through justification (verification), but through refuting the propositions established by science itself (falsification). Therefore, the author tries to explain how the relevance of Karl R. Popper's epistemology with theology and Islamic thought through a historical-philosophical approach. Through this approach, the authors conclude that all science has the possibility to be falsified, including theology and Islamic thought


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Gantman ◽  
Robin Gomila ◽  
Joel E. Martinez ◽  
J. Nathan Matias ◽  
Elizabeth Levy Paluck ◽  
...  

AbstractA pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Alexander Lukankin ◽  

The post-socialist transformation of general and vocational education system has led to the loss of many positive gains that were already achieved earlier. The polytechnic character of our school and its practice-oriented foundations, based on a reasonable combination of basic education and professional and applied training, were seriously undermined. Modern Russian secondary schools have become something like pre-revolutionary classical high schools, without taking into account the significant fact that in pre-Soviet Russia, along with high schools, there was a wide network of real schools. They focused students on further mastering technical professions and active participation in the production sector of the country. Today we are witnessing a global revolution in the spiritual sphere, aimed at changing the very essence of a man. Note that natural science education is valuable not only for its formal method, but also for providing the basis for a correct understanding of the world. It fosters independence of thought and distrust of other people’s words and authorities. This is the best protection of the human mind from all sorts of superstitions delusions and mysticism.


Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Zbikowski

This chapter explores the relationship between music and emotion, beginning with a review of research on emotion, followed by a review of research on music and emotion. It is proposed that the connection between music and the emotions reflects music’s capacity to provide sonic analogs for some of the most salient aspects of emotion processes. This proposal is illustrated through analyses of two movements from J. S. Bach’s cantata “Ich habe genug,” which make explicit two important features of musical grammar: syntactic processes and syntactic layers. The chapter concludes with observations about the ways music is used to shape emotional responses within liturgical settings of the kind that motivated and framed Bach’s cantata.


Author(s):  
Barry Stroud

This chapter presents a straightforward structural description of Immanuel Kant’s conception of what the transcendental deduction is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it. The ‘deduction’ Kant thinks is needed for understanding the human mind would establish and explain our ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to something we seem to possess and employ in ‘the highly complicated web of human knowledge’. This is: experience, concepts, and principles. The chapter explains the point and strategy of the ‘deduction’ as Kant understands it, as well as the demanding conditions of its success, without entering into complexities of interpretation or critical assessment of the degree of success actually achieved. It also analyses Kant’s arguments regarding a priori concepts as well as a posteriori knowledge of the world around us, along with his claim that our position in the world must be understood as ‘empirical realism’.


2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 640-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Slovic ◽  
Daniel Västfjäll ◽  
Arvid Erlandsson ◽  
Robin Gregory

The power of visual imagery is well known, enshrined in such familiar sayings as “seeing is believing” and “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Iconic photos stir our emotions and transform our perspectives about life and the world in which we live. On September 2, 2015, photographs of a young Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, lying face-down on a Turkish beach, filled the front pages of newspapers worldwide. These images brought much-needed attention to the Syrian war that had resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and created millions of refugees. Here we present behavioral data demonstrating that, in this case, an iconic photo of a single child had more impact than statistical reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths. People who had been unmoved by the relentlessly rising death toll in Syria suddenly appeared to care much more after having seen Aylan’s photograph; however, this newly created empathy waned rather quickly. We briefly examine the psychological processes underlying these findings, discuss some of their policy implications, and reflect on the lessons they provide about the challenges to effective intervention in the face of mass threats to human well-being.


Author(s):  
Ekaterina Savitskaya ◽  

In the field of cognitive linguistics it is accepted that, before developing its capacity for abstract and theoretical thought, the human mind went through the stage of reflecting reality through concrete images and thus has inherited old cognitive patterns. Even abstract notions of the modern civilization are based on traditional concrete images, and it is all fixed in natural language units. By way of illustration, the author analyzes the cognitive pattern “сleanness / dirtiness” as a constituent part of the English linguoculture, looking at the whole range of its verbal realization and demonstrating its influence on language-based thinking and modeling of reality. Comparing meanings of language units with their inner forms enabled the author to establish the connection between abstract notions and concrete images within cognitive patterns. Using the method of internal comparison and applying the results of etymological reconstruction of language units’ inner form made it possible to see how the world is viewed by representatives of the English linguoculture. Apparently, in the English linguoculture images of cleanness / dirtiness symbolize mainly two thematic areas: that of morality and that of renewal. Since every ethnic group has its own axiological dominants (key values) that determine the expressiveness of verbal invectives, one can draw the conclusion that people perceive and comprehend world fragments through the prism of mental stereo-types fixed in the inner form of language units. Sometimes, in relation to specific language units, a conflict arises between the inner form which retains traditional thinking and a meaning that reflects modern reality. Still, linguoculture is a constantly evolving entity, and its de-velopment entails breaking established stereotypes and creating new ones. Linguistically, the victory of the new over the old is manifested in the “dying out” of the verbal support for pre-vious cognitive patterns, which leads to “reprogramming” (“recoding”) of linguoculture rep-resentatives’ mentality.


1906 ◽  
Vol 52 (219) ◽  
pp. 745-755
Author(s):  
William W. Ireland

Although the world will never again see anything like the great crusades of the middle ages, these events may be traced to causes which, though now of less force, still influence the human mind, appealing to the simplest and deepest cravings of our common nature.


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