Aphenomenological Study of Spontaneous Spiritual and Paranormal Experiences in a 21st-Century Sample of Normal People

2012 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-132
Author(s):  
Fredrick James Woodard

This paper presents a phenomenological study using the methodology of Woodard's phenomenological and perceptual research. This method examines individuals' internal meanings during spontaneous spiritual and paranormal experiences, as described from their point of view. A group of 40 adults was phenomenologically interviewed after they responded to a newspaper announcement in New Hampshire asking for volunteers who had had spiritual and paranormal experiences. Using the method, Six Individual Situated Structures and a General Structure were identified and examined. Nine major themes were explicated during the participants' spontaneous experiencing: unexpectedness, contrariness to belief, certainty, contradictory experiencing, language as a barrier to expression, external influences, internal dialogue, evil as separateness, and some social psychological influences. Several themes observed in hypnotic experiencing, such as the characteristics of the Adequate Personality in Perceptual Psychology, are interpreted and discussed. This research illustrates how subjective experience can be adequately researched in a qualitative manner outside the confines of the laboratory setting. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further research are given.

Author(s):  
Felicitas Pielsticker ◽  
Ingo Witzke ◽  
Amelie Vogler

AbstractDigital media have become increasingly important in recent years and can offer new possibilities for mathematics education in elementary schools. From our point of view, geometry and geometric objects seem to be suitable for the use of computer-aided design software in mathematics classes. Based on the example of Tinkercad, the use of CAD software — a new and challenging context in elementary schools — is discussed within the approach of domains of subjective experience and the Toulmin model. An empirical study examined the influence of Tinkercad on fourth-graders’ development of a model of a geometric solid and related reasoning processes in mathematics classes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Maffoni ◽  
Anna Giardini ◽  
Antonia Pierobon ◽  
Davide Ferrazzoli ◽  
Giuseppe Frazzitta

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by motor and nonmotor symptoms. Both of them imply a negative impact on Health-Related Quality of Life. A significant one is the stigma experienced by the parkinsonian patients and their caregivers. Moreover, stigma may affect everyday life and patient’s subjective and relational perception and it may lead to frustration and isolation. Aim of the present work is to qualitatively describe the stigma of PD patients stemming from literature review, in order to catch the subjective experience and the meaning of the stigma construct. Literature review was performed on PubMed database and Google Scholar (keywords: Parkinson Disease, qualitative, stigma, social problem, isolation, discrimination) and was restricted to qualitative data: 14 articles were identified to be suitable to the aim of the present overview. Results are divided into four core constructs: stigma arising from symptoms, stigma linked to relational and communication problems, social stigma arising from sharing perceptions, and caregiver’s stigma. The principal relations to these constructs are deeply analyzed and described subjectively through patients’ and caregiver’s point of view. The qualitative research may allow a better understanding of a subjective symptom such as stigma in parkinsonian patients from an intercultural and a social point of view.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-56
Author(s):  
Maria Elena Vera Villagran ◽  
L. Myriam Sagarnaga Villegas ◽  
Jose Salas Gonzalez ◽  
Juan Leos Rodriguez

This project looks for the relationship among variables influencing Mexican key lime supply and demand in the domestic and US market under the scenario of using a higher quantity of fertilizers as a strategy for responding against the threat of citrus greening (HLB). With the help of domestic and international databases from 2000 to 2012, a simultaneous equations model was built capturing behavioral and technical variables influencing supply and demand. The most important relationships among variables were price of the product and disposable income for the demand and use of fertilizers and exchange rate for the supply. This work gives the insight, from the economic point of view, that building a model including the right key variables will give a sense of the general structure of a market and the changes in stability due to a sanitary threat


2011 ◽  
pp. 792-800
Author(s):  
Mario Tesconi ◽  
Enzo Pasquale Scilingo ◽  
Pierluigi Barba ◽  
Danilo De Rossi

Posture and motion of body segments are the result of a mutual interaction of several physiological systems such as nervous, muscle-skeletal, and sensorial. Patients who suffer from neuromuscular diseases have great difficulties in moving and walking, therefore motion or gait analysis are widely considered matter of investigation by the clinicians for diagnostic purposes. By means of specific performance tests, it could be possible to identify the severity of a neuromuscular pathology and outline possible rehabilitation planes. The main challenge is to quantify a motion anomaly, rather than to identify it during the test. At first, visual inspection of a video showing motion or walking activity is the simplest mode of examining movement ability in the clinical environment. It allows us to collect qualitative and bidimensional data, but it does not provide neither quantitative information about motion performance modalities (for instance about dynamics and muscle activity), nor about its changes. Moreover, the interpretation of recorded motion pattern is demanded to medical personnel who make a diagnosis on the basis of subjective experience and expertise. A considerable improvement in this analysis is given by a technical contribution to quantitatively analyse body posture and gesture. Advanced technologies allow us to investigate on anatomic segments from biomechanics and kinematics point of view, providing a wide set of quantitative variables to be used in multi-factorial motion analysis. A personal computer enables a realtime 3D reconstruction of motion and digitalizes data for storage and off-line elaboration. For this reason, the clinicians have a detailed description of the patient status and they can choose a specific rehabilitation path and verify the subject progress.


Author(s):  
Mario Tesconi ◽  
Enzo Pasquale Scilingo ◽  
Pierluigi Barba ◽  
Danilo De Rossi

Posture and motion of body segments are the result of a mutual interaction of several physiological systems such as nervous, muscle-skeletal, and sensorial. Patients who suffer from neuromuscular diseases have great difficulties in moving and walking, therefore motion or gait analysis are widely considered matter of investigation by the clinicians for diagnostic purposes. By means of specific performance tests, it could be possible to identify the severity of a neuromuscular pathology and outline possible rehabilitation planes. The main challenge is to quantify a motion anomaly, rather than to identify it during the test. At first, visual inspection of a video showing motion or walking activity is the simplest mode of examining movement ability in the clinical environment. It allows us to collect qualitative and bidimensional data, but it does not provide neither quantitative information about motion performance modalities (for instance about dynamics and muscle activity), nor about its changes. Moreover, the interpretation of recorded motion pattern is demanded to medical personnel who make a diagnosis on the basis of subjective experience and expertise. A considerable improvement in this analysis is given by a technical contribution to quantitatively analyse body posture and gesture. Advanced technologies allow us to investigate on anatomic segments from biomechanics and kinematics point of view, providing a wide set of quantitative variables to be used in multi-factorial motion analysis. A personal computer enables a realtime 3D reconstruction of motion and digitalizes data for storage and off-line elaboration. For this reason, the clinicians have a detailed description of the patient status and they can choose a specific rehabilitation path and verify the subject progress.


Author(s):  
Michael Heim

Something....-What? —A phenomenon. Something intrusive, something vague but insistent, pushing itself upon us. — Something outside? From afar? Something alien? — Something descending in the night, standing in the shadows at the foot of the bed. —An illusion? Hallucination maybe? A quirky twist of imagination? — No, definitely a presence, something that might be a someone, a someone with wires and electric sensors, probing, penetrating, exploring private parts. Something lifting us off the familiar face of the planet we thought we knew so well, beaming us outside the orbit of our comfortable homes. Definitely something indefinite . . . or someone. —We hear about them only from others who speak about sightings of unidentified objects in the sky, because we do not allow ourselves to be counted among the unstable few who acknowledge the possibility of something outside the circle of our sciences. Those unstable few accept belief in something standing in the shadows at the door. We listen closely to those speaking about incidents of the phenomenon. We do not look. — Something IS out there. We’ve seen and heard it in the night. It’s contacting us. The phenomenon certainly exists in late-night chat like the above. It exists as metaphysical hearsay, as an internal dialogue between what we believe and what we think we are willing to believe. Popular descriptions of “the incident” waver between child-like awe and tongue-in-cheek tabloid humor. Here is where our knowledge, as a culturally defined certainty, becomes most vulnerable. Here we discover the soft edges of knowledge as an established and culturally underwritten form of belief. What a thrill to feel the tug of war on the thin thread of shared belief! A blend of religious archetypes and science-fiction imagery supplies the words for those who tell about the incident. The stories often float up through hypnosis or “recovered memory” hypnotherapy, as in the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill who experienced abduction one September night in New Hampshire in 1961. Researchers have recently plotted consistently recurring patterns in thousands of stories, and the mythic dimension of the story line has not been lost on Hollywood.


2019 ◽  
pp. 84-89
Author(s):  
Iryna Ivanenko

Charles Bally’s works laid the basis for the linguistic interpretation of the conceptions of association and associativity and understanding of associative mechanisms with regard to the fundamentals of psychology and systemacy of semantic links in thinking and language. The foundation of the modern theory of associativity is the classification of associations (mnemonic and necessary, close and distant, internal and external) developed by Charles Bally in his works. In linguo-stylistics the conception of association and associativity are associated with understanding of the psycholinguistic mechanisms of figurative use of language units and the realization of the aesthetic function of a literary language (S.Ya. Yermolenko, A.A. Moisiienko, L.V. Tailor, O. Malenkov, H.M. Siuta). Among the mechanisms for the formation of linguistic associations are the following factors: objective, social and intellectual experience, dependence on cultural and historical traditions, the gender identity of the speaker, etc. One of them dominates in each specific communicative situation. Currently known classifications of types of associative links take into account the basic positions of psycholinguistics, and the needs of lexicology and stylistics, etc. General differentiation is carried out: 1) for contiguity, similarity and contrast, 2) according to the scheme “word-stimulus, word-reaction”, 3) according to the type of relationship between the stimulus and the associate). Deep differentiation of associations according to the type of relationship between stimulus and associate) determines the allocation of several associative types: paradigmatic (food – bread) / syntagmatic (food – consume); thematic (friend – childhood > childhood friend); empirical (associated with the subjective experience of the speaker); social (associated with the social experience of the speaker), etc. The use of other criteria motivates the allocation of these types of associations: a) audio, visual, adorational, tangential; b) the usual and unexpected; c) direct and indirect, mediated; d) positive and negative; e) cultural, ethnic and author’’s individual. Understanding the connection between associativity and imagery is a primary issue in the modern literary language theory. Being a basis of concrete and sensual perception of the literary text, associations serve as a basis of creation of character in literature (S.Ya. Yermolenko, L.O. Pustovit, L.O. Stavitska, V.A. Chabanenko). It is necessary to consider the ideas of Franko’s treatise according to the history of the formation of the associativity theory. In particular, the proposed division of poetic associations by content (“ordinary”, that is, simple, and “linked by force”, that is, complex), remains undeniable. During the twentieth century the understanding of the mechanisms of implementation of associativity significantly deepened. One of the main subjects of intensive processing was the paradigmatic ordering of words in language and in human memory, the presence of clear mental connections between certain objects, realities on the basis of commonality or adjacency of their individual traits, features, etc. (compare.: spring – green, light, sun, warmth, flowers, feelings). This motivates the associative grouping of words into semantic fields. From linguo-stylistics point of view the associative-semantic field is a text structure, the model of the functional and stylistic implication of lexical-semantic units. The core of such a field, as a rule, are the keywords – the semantic and estimated coordinates of the entire work. Another type of lexicon combination, taking into account the associative links between the components, is an associative and imaginative field. It arises on the basis of associative and semantic or lexical and semantic association due to the identity of the denotative properties of linguistic signs, the general tradition of common language and poetic usage. Its center is the most active unit (dominant) – the core component of the series, which organizes the relationship of all other components. Associative-figurative series (lexical-thematic lines) go from this dominant, which work together semantically with the center for associative and creative field. Associativity is one of the key concepts of modern linguistic style. Terminological functionality of the conception of association and associativity is associated with the activity of cognition of the problems of “language association”, “artistic association”, “associativity and creative work”.


2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Jonck ◽  
P. Verster

A social-psychological perspective on the attitude of members in the Mangaung area towards church unification within the Dutch Reformed family of churches: a cross-cultural investigation Until recently, only one investigation had been conducted into church members’ attitudes towards church unification. This was done from a theological instead of a social-psychological point of view. The term “attitude” may be defined as the expression of inner feelings that reflect whether the person concerned has a favourable or unfavourable predisposition towards a certain object. Church unification entails the process of uniting separate church denominations within the Dutch Reformed Church family. The aims of this study were achieved by gathering data from respondents of six Dutch Reformed congregations (N=104; 46, 6%), as well as six Uniting Reformed congregations (N=47; 21, 1%). The remainder of the respondents came from five Dutch Reformed Church in Africa congregations (N=72; 32, 3%). A biographical questionnaire was used, as well as the Attitude towards Church Unification Scale. The influence of different variables such as language, gender, age, marital status and church activities on the attitudes of church members was investigated. It was concluded on the basis of statistical analysis that members of all the different denominations of the Dutch Reformed Churches had a positive attitude towards church unification. It was found that language was the variable that had the greatest influence on the attitude of church members.


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