The Individual Psychological Characteristics of a Conspiracy Theorist
Individuálno-psychologické charakteristiky konšpiračného teoretika
Keywords: conspiracy theories; personality; mindware; rationality
More...Keywords: conspiracy theories; personality; mindware; rationality
More...Keywords: Philokalia; Orthodox; Nepsis, Mind; Vigilance; Heart; Self
The mysticism of the Orthodox Church provides spiritual fulfillment of man inthree stages: purification, enlightenment or knowledge, and perfection orunion with God. Purification is the removal of passions and their replacementwith virtues. For example, the philokalic texts, which are a collection of textswritten by 25 Holy Fathers, form a true handbook containing various themes,but all of them educate on “the love of divine beauty” or “the love of virtue”,as the etymology of the chosen title for the compilation. Of these, the study ofthe mind and its dynamics is a predilection for most authors, some of whomhave offered real treatises on this subject. This study limits the presentation ofsome Church Fathers who have spoken of this argument. The mind is a placewhere good and evil thought stake on a continuous struggle that positively ornegatively influences human behaviour and closeness to God. For thisreason, man’s special attention is needed on the mind, that is, a permanentnepsis.
More...Keywords: Gaming Disorder; Internet Gaming Disorder; problematic gaming; gaming addiction; video games;
The recent paper by Aarseth et al. (2016) questioned whether problematic gaming should be considered a new disorder particularly because “Gaming Disorder” (GD) has been identified as a disorder to be included in the next (11th) revision of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Methods: This study uses contemporary literature to argue why GD should be included in the ICD-11. Results: Aarseth and colleagues acknowledge that there is much literature (including papers by some of the authors themselves) that some individuals experience serious problems with video gaming. How can such an activity be seriously problematic yet not disordered? Similar to other addictions, gaming addiction is relatively rare and is in essence a syndrome (i.e., a condition or disorder characterized by a set of associated symptoms that tend to occur under specific circumstances). Consequently, not everyone will exhibit exactly the same set of symptoms and consequences, and this partly explains why those working in the problematic gaming field often disagree on symptomatology. Conclusions: Research into gaming is not about pathologizing healthy entertainment, but about pathologizing excessive and problematic behaviors that cause significant psychological distress and impairment in an individual’s life. These are two related, but (ultimately) very distinct phenomena. While being aware that gaming is a pastime activity which is enjoyed non-problematically by many millions of individuals worldwide, it is concluded that problematic gaming exists and that it is an example of disordered gaming.
More...Keywords: addiction; tango; behavior; dependence;
Behavioral addiction is an emerging concept based on the resemblance between symptoms or feelings provided by drugs and those obtained with various behaviors such as gambling, etc. Following an observational study of a tango dancer exhibiting criteria of dependence on this dance, we performed a survey to assess whether this case was unique or frequently encountered in the tango dancing community. Methods: We designed an online survey based on both the DSM-IV and Goodman’s criteria of dependence; we added questions relative to the positive and negative effects of tango dancing and a self-evaluation of the degree of addiction to tango. The questionnaire was sent via Internet to all the tango dancers subscribing to “ToutTango”, an electronic monthly journal. The prevalence of dependence was analyzed using DSM-IV, Goodman’s criteria and self-rating scores separately. Results: 1,129 tango dancers answered the questionnaire. Dependence rates were 45.1, 6.9 and 35.9%, respectively, according to the DSM-IV, Goodman’s criteria and self-rating scores. Physical symptoms of withdrawal were reported by 20% of the entire sample and one-third described a strong craving for dancing. Positive effects were high both in dependent and non-dependent groups and were markedly greater than negative effects. Long practice of tango dancing did not modify the dependence rate or reduce the level of positive effects. Conclusions: Tango dancing could lead to dependence as currently defined. However, this dependence is associated with marked and sustained positive effects whilst the negative are few. Identifying the precise substratum of this dependence needs further investigation.
More...Keywords: decision-making; intuitive; task
Through the research into intuition and its role in managerial decision-making we are going to try and lay emphasis on the situations when people gain understanding of what intuition is and how to use is successfully. In order to do so, we are going to summarize a variety of researches into the realm of intuition and emphasize several theoretical recommendations. While this revision helps us take into consideration several disputes regarding intuition, it also arises some problems and focuses on new opportunities of study. Another relevant aspect of our carryout presents the most acute controversies - from our own perspective – in the study of intuition.
More...Keywords: nature connectedness; smartphones; addiction; anxiety;
Smartphone use has increased greatly at a time when concerns about society’s disconnection from nature have also markedly increased. Recent research has also indicated that smartphone use can be problematic for a small minority of individuals. Methods: In this study, associations between problematic smartphone use (PSU), nature connectedness, and anxiety were investigated using a cross-sectional design (n = 244). Results: Associations between PSU and both nature connectedness and anxiety were confirmed. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to identify threshold values on the Problematic Smartphone Use Scale (PSUS) at which strong associations with anxiety and nature connectedness occur. The area under the curve was calculated and positive likelihood ratios used as a diagnostic parameter to identify optimal cut-off for PSU. These provided good diagnostic ability for nature connectedness, but poor and non-significant results for anxiety. ROC analysis showed the optimal PSUS threshold for high nature connectedness to be 15.5 (sensitivity: 58.3%; specificity: 78.6%) in response to an LR+ of 2.88. Conclusions: The results demonstrate the potential utility for the PSUS as a diagnostic tool, with a level of smartphone use that users may perceive as non-problematic being a significant cut-off in terms of achieving beneficial levels of nature connectedness. Implications of these findings are discussed.
More...Keywords: calling; work meaningfulness; work passion; mediation; teachers
Researchers and practitioners have shown an increasing interest in the construct of work passion. However, in the existing literature little is known about work passion among educators. Given the recent attention in the educational literature regarding the concept of calling, we attempt to examine its relationship with teachers’ work passion. In doing so, we also highlight the mediating role of work meaningfulness in the aforementioned association. Using a diverse sample of teachers employed in primary education, results indicated that teachers’ calling is positively related to their levels of work passion. Moreover, there is an indirect relationship among these two constructs through work meaningfulness.
More...Keywords: Emotional labor; job stress; intention to leave; call center
Call centers are contact centers that act as communication facilities between customers and businesses with the help of customer representatives. The call center sector where transactions are carried out largely without face to face communication is known as a sector with the most stressful and is also known with having the highest employee turnover rate. Customer representatives are not able to use any initiative and they have too many workloads; for this reason, they are frazzled. In addition, customer representatives need to play role despite of their natural emotions. This affects the emotional labor behavior of sector employees. In this study, the job stress’ mediating role at emotional labor’s effect on intention to leave is investigated. Data was collected from two call centers operating in Bitlis province in Turkey by using survey method. Analyzes were made with the SPSS 23 and AMOS 22 programs through 207 valid questionnaires. In the analyzes made, job stress has full mediating effect at emotional labor variable’s surface acting dimension’s effect on intention to leave. Due to the correlation analyzes performed, there was a significant relationship between surface acting and natural emotions (expression of naturally felt emotions) dimension of emotional labor variable with job stress and intention to leave.
More...Keywords: Long-durational performance; temporal turn; presence/absence; trace; repetition; critical theory; defetishization
The present paper proposes a questioning of the ways in which, in the long-durational performance, there occurs an overestimation of the temporal regime of the present, to which a “stage” presence of the performer corresponds, understood as a “live”, in corpore, unmediated presence.Starting from the practice of artists such as Marina Abramović, Marlyn Arsem or Tehching Hsieh, but especially from the curatorial/institutional discourse, which legitimizes their performances, this study initiates a critical evaluation of the “mystification” of presence in the long-durational performance, but also of the hyperbolization of the regime of the present. In the conditions in which these performances are using remembering/archiving/ recording instruments, a “fetishization” of the present/presence is a paradox. In this paper, I bring up the topic of the manifestations of the performer’s presence, either as an auratic presence, a literal presence or a co-presence − aspects which sometimes end up being mutually contaminated.Thus, I analyze the long-durational performance using Jacques Derrida’s theory of traceability, but also the under- standing of the duration as a “constitutive piece” for this typology of performance, as analyzed by Gilles Deleuze, starting with Henri Bergson. I therefore argue, in their wake, that the present works as an “impure” regime of time, in juxtaposition with the past and the future, thereby cancelling a present-oriented ontology of performance art. At this time of post-criticism and post-theory, I assert the vitality of the two theorists’ thinking, but especially the discrepancy, the antithesis between the theoretical discourse on performance (especially that developed by Philip Auslander) and the purist practice of the long-durational perfor- mance, anchored, in fact, in a “nostalgia” for the present.
More...Keywords: professional communication; oral culture; rhetorical genre studies; activity theory; situated learning; multimodal discourse analysis;
Professional communication has become an area of scholarly investigation, a domain in which many professionals show their proficiency or compete for a job, and a discipline offered by many reputable academic programmes. Professional communication itself has evolved into a complex, interdisciplinary construct over the last 35 years. It has been investigated, described, conceptualized and taught by many scholars who have employed older, revised, combined or new methods. It is the purpose of the present paper to discuss some perspectives on professional communication (modern, interpretive, critical, postmodern, rhetorical) and the research undertaken to find adequate methods to teach it. The paper sheds light on the methods proposed by North American and Canadian researchers, who investigated professional communication and suggested teaching solutions for the transition from academia-to-workplace in an attempt to help novices develop into performant professionals. Amongst the discussed research and teaching methods the study surveys rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, situated learning, and multimodal discourse analysis.
More...Keywords: Self-Awareness Scale; reliability and validity;
The purpose of this study is to adapt Self-Awareness Scale (SAS) developed by Concon (2011) into Turkish with a view to investigating self-awareness levels of sports managers. Validity and reliability analysis of the scale has been conducted on a group of sports managers. The study group is formed of 133 sports managers. There are 104 male and 29 female participants who work as provincial directors, district directors, departmental directors and in other managerial positions (chief, youth center manager, etc.) in the Provincial and Districts Directorates of Youth Services and Sports which arethe provincial organizations of the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses have been conducted to confirm the structural validity of the scale. The Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficients have been calculated in order to establish the reliability of the scale. Following the analyses, a scale composed of a total of 48 items and four factors have been obtained. Cronbach Alpha coefficients of the sub-scales have been found to range between .77 and .93. It has been concluded that the Turkish version of the scale is a valid and reliable tool that can be used in determining the self-awareness levels of sports managers.
More...Keywords: social entrepreneurship; social responsibility; education
Social entrepreneurship education awakes social awareness about the possibility of action for another person, mindfulness for others and changes the way we think about creating social values. It shows that man is a creator responsible not only for himself but also for others - he contributes to society. His actions outline contemporary history. Social entrepreneurship opens up a space for building a sense of belonging in the spirit of the common good. This article attempts to present the overview of social entrepreneurship education and some of its determinants.
More...Keywords: family emotional expressiveness; family cohesion; family flexibility; adolescents;
The present paper scrutinizes the relationship between family emotional expressiveness (i.e., the tendency to express dominant and/or submissive positive and negative emotions) and components of family structure as proposed in Olson’s Circumplex model (i.e., cohesion and flexibility, family communication, and satisfaction) in families with adolescents. The study was conducted on a sample of 514 Slovenian adolescents, who filled out two questionnaires: the Slovenian version of Family Emotional Expressiveness – FEQ and FACES IV. The results revealed that all four basic dimensions of family functioning were significantly associated with higher/more frequent expressions of positive submissive emotions, as well as with lower/less frequent expressions of negative dominant emotions. Moreover, expressions of negative submissive emotions explained a small, but significant amount of variance in three out of four family functioning variables (satisfaction, flexibility, and communication). The importance of particular aspects of emotional expressiveness for family cohesion, flexibility, communication, and satisfaction is discussed, and the relevance of present findings for family counselling is outlined.
More...Keywords: Forced Answering; Online Survey Research; Dropout; Nonresponse; Response Quality; Faking; Random Answering;
Online surveys have become a popular method for data gathering for many reasons, including low costs and the ability to collect data rapidly. However, online data collection is often conducted without adequate attention to implementation details. One example is the frequent use of the forced answering option, which forces the respondent to answer each question in order to proceed through the questionnaire. The avoidance of missing data is often the idea behind the use of the forced answering option. However, we suggest that the costs of a reactance effect in terms of quality reduction and unit nonresponse may be high because respondents typically have plausible reasons for not answering questions. The objective of the study reported in this paper was to test the influence of forced answering on dropout rates and data quality. The results show that requiring participants answer every question increases dropout rates and decreases quality of answers. Our findings suggest that the desire for a complete data set has to be balanced against the consequences of reduced data quality.
More...Keywords: trait emotional self-efficacy; mood; incremental validity; PANAS; TEIQue;
This study examined the relationship between trait emotional intelligence (trait EI) and somatic complaints after controlling for positive and negative affect (PA and NA). 362 volunteers (222 males) completed the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Short Form (TEIQue-SF), the Somatic Complaint List (SCL), and the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scales (PANAS). Results showed that high trait EI is positively correlated to PA and negatively correlated to NA and somatic complaints, but that it can predict somatic complaints over and above PA and NA. These findings highlight the protective role of trait EI in mental and physical health.
More...Keywords: intercultural communication; personal skills; reciprocal learning
Most initiatives in many UK universities designed to integrate their home and international student cohorts are likely to take place either within academic courses or through extra-curricular activities. Unusually, for 8 years between the academic years 2007/8 and 2014/15, the University of Birmingham in the UK ran an elective module within its Personal Skills Award (PSA) that combined academic assessed learning in a social setting. This module sought to facilitate intercultural communication using the potential of its culturally diverse student population as a resource for intercultural learning in order to realise De Vita's (2005) 'ideal'. The participants, home and international undergraduates, developed their intercultural awareness over a period of several weeks by being each other's cultural informants in social meetings outside the classroom, acting in effect as case studies. To pass the module and achieve 10 credits (which were included on their degree transcript) the participants had to submit a reflective learning journal and attend a short interview about what they had learnt. Data obtained from responses to a questionnaire sent to course participants concludes that they benefitted from, and valued, not only the autonomous dual learner-teacher approach but also the informal nature of the learning situation.
More...Keywords: Islamic Jurisprudents; Marāji; Mujtahid; edicts; fatwahs; taqlīd; Iraqi Youth; concerns
Muslims believe that Qur'anic revelations and the sayings (or hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad provide a code of life for this world, and the hereafter. Through the Holy Qur'an, His Prophet, and the Prophet's Progeny, Allah informed Muslims that it is incumbent upon them to both pursue knowledge, and to act upon it with wisdom. In an attempt to obey this command of the Almighty, followers of Islam who seek to understand Divine Scriptures with due diligence also eventually realise the limits to their understanding, even when endeavouring to decode the apparently simplest of Qur'anic verses, as they often have an underlying complexity to their exegesis. Thus, unlike Sunni Muslims, the Shi'a followers of the Ahlulbayt appreciate both the importance and necessity of taqlīd - that is, deferring to appointed jurisprudents for learned and scholarly interpretations of the Holy Texts, the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and what are considered to be his infallible descendants from his daughter, Fatima Zahra. However, to what extent are the edicts, or fatwahs, issued by contemporary Islamic jurisprudents in alignment with the beliefs and concerns of the youth of today, specifically Iraqis.
More...Keywords: aesthetic cognitivism; aesthetic experience; aesthetic theories; essentialist definitions; pluralism
Originating in the theoretical and aesthetical controversies whipped up by the overall iconoclastic rejections of traditional aesthetic canons in avant-garde art, the very question concerning the refinement of cognitive adventures and the plural meanings of aesthetic experiences has continuously fuelled the American ruminations on visual arts. Broadly inspired by an opuscule of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the first conceptual investigations of the arts in the United States have been incited by the interrogation of the cognitive status of aesthetics (i.e., the autonomy of artistic idioms and/or the essentialism/ anti-essentialism debate regarding the languages of the arts). The present paper attempts to unveil the most recent dimensions of cognitivism about the visual arts, especially focusing on its instantiations in contemporary American aesthetics.
More...Keywords: urban resilience;rural resilience;local and regional development;revitalization;Cittaslow city network
The aim of this article is to use a new research concept, referred to as resilience, in rural development (rural resilience) in the context of the often discussed concept of urban resilience. The concept of urban resilience is recognized as a tool for strategic diagnosis and monitoring of cities. In studies of urban resilience for cities of various sizes, quantitative research is most often used. The author, on the basis of literature discussions and own research, presents the use of qualitative research in the assessment of urban resilience for the national network of Cittaslow cities. The concept of urban resilience refers to “a resilient city”, especially in the case of a collective criterion (i.e., urban quality policy). Seven groups of criteria in the matrix of urban development self-assessment are the basis for the evolutionary changes in the resilience of individual cities and the entire network. In the case of Cape Clear Island in Ireland, qualitative research of rural resilience was based on global indicators of economic, social and environmental capital proposed by Wilson. Despite the subjectivism of respondents, results of qualitative research allow for making strategic decisions for the purposes of obtaining specific development balance points and selecting specific paths for the Island’s development. Both quantitative and qualitative research — their practical dimension — should be used to build community resilience.
More...Keywords: Ulysses; the use of bodies; zone of non-consciousness; corporeal narratology; Agamben; Damasio; Punday.
James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: Reading the Self in the Body. Throughout this paper, my primary contention is that, as a book, Ulysses is a body of potentialities meant to help readers consubstantiate with their selves, with a special dedication for the Irish audience of the 1900s in particular. I suggest, in other words, that from a post-humanist perspective, the novel’s most metempsychotic feature remains its ability to guide readers out of their self-legitimising narratives and into the seat of their consciousness, the individual body. As the reader suspends their personal existence to engage with the body of the book, the latter helps deliver them into life-actual, all the while internalising a story unravelling its own textual cessation. This perspective on Ulysses involves re-tracing the human body within each narrative level, and the changes it undergoes through the novel’s embeddedness.
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