Month: December 2013
Lecture 12: An Overview of Contributors to Phenom. of Religion
5 Cognitive Science of Religion
The valuable contribution of cognitive science of religion is the insight on the propensity of the human mind for dealing with supernatural agents, and their ability for access to the human mind. Science has the expertise on nature. These insights on nature serve as a platform for further understanding religious phenomena and truth-claims.
Cognitive Science of Religion has been often, according to Barrett (2007, p.12) falsely, associated with an anti-religious agenda. Dawkins (2006), for instance, uses the same findings in his effort to free the world of religious thought. There are others who scorn the possibility of applying the findings of evolutionary science to religion (Pinker, 2006).
Bering and Johnson (2005) justify the existence of the cognitive hardware described above, by pointing out to the logic of the adaptive process, in the language of evolution:
We have inherited the general template for religiosity because those early humans who abandoned the prospect of supernatural […]
Lecture 1: What is Positive Psychology?
Positive psychology: Its sources and contents
In 1998, when Martin Seligman was elected as the president of the American Psychology Association (APA) he extended a clarion call to psychology to focus on wellbeing and happiness as it does on pathology and psychological disorder (Seligman, 1999). The stream of psychological accent that followed is referred to as ‘positive psychology’. This is not a new school of psychology but only a new movement. It draws its sources from the history of psychology; and its interests are similar to that of humanistic psychology, but it differs sharply from it in that positive psychology embraces an empirical approach. It is the focus on existential questions with an empirical grounding that makes positive psychology unique (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 13; see also Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2001).
For a long time, psychology was focused on understanding, treating and preventing psychological disorder. The positive psychology movement challenges this […]
Lecture 2: Understanding Affective States
WHAT IS AN EMOTION?
‘…a kind of shorthand, an abbreviated way to refer to a package of events and processes…antecedent events, the physiological and motor responses, the memories, thoughts, images, and information processing, and the mobilisation of efforts to cope with the source of emotions. All of these may be implied when someone says, “He looks angry” (Ekaman, 1989).
EMOTIONS AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
The way we process emotion is influenced by gender, genetic makeup and some personality traits.
The environmental influence on emotional processing is also strong. That is, we learn to process. That is why, the way children deal with emotions is different from that of adults.
This learning process could be largely determined by early exposure to strong emotional stimuli without accompanying support. Certain way of expressing emotions in a particular context (family) learnt as a child may be difficult in dealing with in another context (school/community) as an adult.
POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY & AFFECTIVE […]