Ethical behaviors are taught in business classrooms using multiple methods, among which case studies are a standard method. However, when introduced at the undergraduate level, until students have developed a strong foundation in moral philosophy, a prescriptive case analysis template may help them build constructive mental models towards that foundation. The paper thus proposes a case analysis method template based on critical components identified in the Ethics literature that lead to ethical decision-making that can be used as a tool by (...) teachers in Ethics in Business classrooms. The critical components entail the development of moral awareness by training the students to develop ethical values through practice. Students learn how to identify an ethical dilemma, analyze various stakeholder characteristics, explore ethical principles, and make moral judgments before recommending moral actions in each context. A sample case analysis is also provided for classroom use. The implications and value to educators, students, and managers are discussed. (shrink)

An empirically based version of the good life as proposed by positive psychology is a donut with something missing at the core--the moral map. This paper addresses ramifications of this lacuna, and suggests ways to narrow the gap between science and life. By applying an extended version of the self-regulation theory of Higgins to a cross cultural analysis of the good life as envisioned by Seligman and Confucius, respectively, this paper sheds light on the culturally encapsulated value judgments behind positive (...) psychology, examines issues at stake in an empirically based version of the good life, and suggests, for future research, alternative approaches that may better fulfill the promises of positive psychology. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

A hallmark of Christian mysticism is negative theology, which refers to the school of thought that gives prominence to negation in reference to God. By denying the possibility to name God, negative theology cuts at the very root of our cognitive makeup--the human impulse to name and put things into categories--and thereby situates us "halfway between a 'no longer' and a 'not yet'" , a temporality in which "the past is negated, but...the present is not yet formulated" . The affective (...) corollary of this "no longer" and "not yet" state is the "dark night of the soul" that mystics are known to have bouts of. One particular variant of the "dark night of the soul" is awe, which will be the focus of this paper. My investigation starts with an introduction to the two primary themes of negative theology--negativity and self-reflexivity, followed by a critique of D. Keltner and J. Haidt's model of awe, which is compared with R. Otto's phenomenology of mysticism in general and religious awe in particular. In the concluding section, I examine the relevance of religious awe to contemporary life on the one hand, and to emotion research on the other. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This paper traces the recent debate over the legitimacy of maturity mismatching and fractional reserve banking. It shows that there is common ground between Bagus and Howden :399–406, 2009, 106:295–300, 2012) on the one hand and Evans on the other regarding contractual arrangements that lead to fractional reserve banking, while both agree that fractional reserve banking that arises out of a bailment or storage contract constitutes fraud. Block and Barnett :711–716, 2009, 100:229–238, 2011) stress the illegitimacy of fractional reserve banking (...) for creating more money substitutes than there is actual money. While it is true that fractional reserve banks are capable of creating money, this activity still cannot be regarded as fraudulent using a common law definition of fraud for it can only take place with requisite client collaboration that makes it impossible to identify a victim. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century Bengal was a period of change, conflict and accommodation both among the bhadralok – literally translated to mean the gentle folk, the middle classes – as well as between them and the British rulers. The world view of the bhadralok and its search for a new paradigm had its material basis in changes in existing land relations, the emergence of the market and of urban spaces as well as the spread of education and literacy. Often changes in familial patterns, (...) new roles for girls and women, their education and introduction to wider society, reflected developments in Britain. As the colonial encounter brought about a range of changes in a rapidly evolving social, economic and geographic scenario, it is important to try and understand inter-personal dynamics and at the level of individual consciousnesses. Women started reflecting and writing about their lives by the middle of the last century; the preferred form was the journal or diary. Several wrote many years later, often in widowhood. Monica Chanda was one such woman: the only daughter of Sarala and J.N. Gupta, a member of the Indian Civil Service, she was persuaded, at the age of 70, to write about her childhood, a period of her life she loved reminiscing about to her children and grandchildren. Life in the districts, her mother's role as civil service wife par excellence, early schooling and its later denial are evocatively sketched in this brief memoir. The present article will deal with constructions of a post-Victorian Indo-Anglian girlhood as perceived by Monica, using extensive quotations from the unpublished text. It will also try to trace the symbiotic relationship with the British Raj – viewed often with mixed feelings by the colonized. (shrink)

My agenda is to ground psychological science in culture by using complex rather than overly simple models of culture and using indigenous categories as criteria of a translation test to determine the adequacy of scientific models of culture. I first explore the compatibility between Chinese indigenous categories and complex models of culture, by casting in the theoretical framework of symmetry and symmetry breaking a series of translations performed on Fiske's relational models theory. Next, I show how the dimensional approach to (...) culture, prevalent in mainstream psychology, fails the translation test. Ethical implications of this analysis for cross cultural psychology are discussed. (shrink)

Background mood differs from focal emotions in that it is an inchoate “bodily felt sense” rather than full fledged emotional syndromes such as anger, sadness, etc. Microanalysis of a Focusing therapy session is made to illustrate how the cultivation and maintenance of background mood with its characteristic double vision is essential to emotional creativity.

The universe changes, as the energy-matter complex that constitutes it, continuously flows from higher order to lower order resulting in the incessant increase of entropy and the ever forward direction of time. But the one thing that does not change is the perpetual struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. When probed in to theproperties of the above two contending forces through a deep study of various branches of physical, natural and human sciences, it was revealed, that which resists the eternal nature-flux (...) can be considered as ‘good’, while that which catalysts it as ‘evil’. The ‘Four Fundamental Forces’ along with life-force in nature, and justice; culture and the like, in human society, serve as gleaned samples drawn from the respective sciences to prove the above radical assertion about ‘good’. Disappointingly, we human beings, a part of nature, with the aid of our advanced cerebral cortex, catalyst disorder or increase entropy by dropping bombs, by exhausting natural resources, and by being a threat to the entire eco-system and to the fellow human beings for our material and sensual ends. However, the human soul is quintessentially ‘good’ and always craves for ‘order’. The objective of this paper is to show that literature is one of the forms in arts, which presents a sample of ‘order’ that is capable of permeating and setting the same kind of resonation in a receptive soul, besides articulating life transmuted in to truth. To prove the above statement the Paradiso Canto III from Dante’s The Divine Comedy is taken for the study. (shrink)

Comment on an article by . A semiotic perspective based on the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce is offered to open up new directions to the current debate over basic emotions. While explaining in a systematic way contested questions such as causal chain, association, and dissociation among the components of emotion, this semiotic analysis suggests that preoccupation with these building blocks type of questions masks and distracts attention from the more global problems that plague affective science—the essentialism that drives the (...) debate, and the tendency to explain behavior in terms of isolated organisms. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This commentary offers an alternative interpretation of Iago's resentment based on clinical psychology and a cross-cultural perspective, thereby revisiting the fundamental question of what is emotion.

I propose for emotion research a dynamic approach to truth in which folk theories, no matter how much they may be infested with magical thinking and peculiar beliefs, can function as potential competitors and valued interlocutors on the platform of theory construction. For demonstration, I present the ancient Chinese notion of ganlei as a counterpoint to Western metaphysics. Potential contributions of this indigenous belief system to theory and research on emotions include bringing greater clarity to existing concepts of empathy and (...) mind reading and participating meaningfully in the current debates on emotions. More important, ganlei suggests a shift of focus in emotion research from epistemological to ontological categories and from mental representations to intermental transactions. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Consent plays a vital role in every aspect of medicine and surgery, facilitating the patient in making informed decisions about their treatment. The recently published Reference Guide to Consent, by the Department of Health (DH), notes that, although not a legal requirement, the completion of consent forms is good practice, particularly in interventions such as surgery. In addition, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman noted that a significant number of complaints about consent involved the complainant feeling that they did not (...) fully understand what was going to happen. It was often found that there was no documentation to clarify what the patient was told, when and by whom. We have performed an audit of 71 randomly selected consent forms, elective and trauma cases within our district general hospital orthopaedics department. Our data demonstrate that a significant number of consent forms were incorrectly or insufficiently completed. This could not only leave the patient confused about their procedure but also leaves the doctor open to litigation, with little in the way of documentation support. Minor changes in consenting methods and more precise documentation could significantly improve patient experience and satisfaction. (shrink)

Response to commentaries by Neu, Sundararajan, and Reisenzein.

Louise Sundararajan’s aim in Understanding Emotion in Chinese Culture is to provide an explanatory framework for cross-cultural differences between Chinese and what she refers to as “Western” cultures from the methodological perspective of indigenous psychology, which aims to give voice to the knowledge that exists beyond the limits of mainstream “Western” psychology. Her book is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, physics, biology, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics. She also identifies some of the shared roots of Daoism, Confucianism, (...) and Buddhism, and other similarities between Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Indian cultures, in order to further explicate the various concepts of Chinese emotions. As a result, Sundararajan also draws some more general conclusions regarding what she refers to as “Eastern” cultures. (shrink)

For this study, we have considered Facebook Marketplace (FBM) to understand how knowledge from the social networking world affects consumer choice and behavior, ie, users' economic decisions.[...] the FBM could be considered as a digital socioeconomic system where availability of digital trace data from user interactions would enable studies of population-level human interactions (Sundararajan et al., 2013).

Rajan Gurukkal is a leading social scientist and is currently the Sundararajan Visiting Professor at Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science. He has been the former Vice Chancellor, M. G. University, Kottayam, Kerala. An avid reader, critical theorist and a prolific writer, he has authored several monographs, research articles and has been actively engaged with several projects in association with UGC, the Ford Foundation to name a few. His research interests explore the historiographic dimensions and dialectical processes (...) involving the state and society. He can be reached at [email protected]. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est l'hommage qu'une des deux filles de Jean Klein (1912-1998), Nita, comédienne et artiste, a décidé de rendre à son père, un des plus célèbres maîtres spirituels du XXe siècle, pour le centième anniversaire de sa naissance. Nita Klein a rassemblé ici de nombreux souvenirs de conversations avec Jean Klein, des inédits, des photographies autour de la question de l'art et de la spiritualité. Jean Klein a été philosophe et un maître spirituel remarquable auteur d'une oeuvre essentielle qui (...) a infuencé de nombreux enseignants contemporains comme Eric Baret, Jean-Bouchart D'Orval, Francis Lucille, Jean-Marc Mantel etc. Même si Jean Klein n'appartenait à aucune école, sa quête de la vérité a rencontré l'Advaïta Vedânta (Non-Dualité) dont il a dit lui-même que " ce n'est pas un système, une religion, une technique. Ce n'est même pas une philosophie, c'est simplement la vérité. " Mais Jean Klein était aussi violoniste (il pratiqua toute sa vie le violon) et s'intéressait à toutes les formes d'art : au théâtre, à la peinture (il était ami de Hans Hartung), à la danse (son autre fille, Malavika, est professeur de danse indienne). Il s'agit donc dans ce livre d'une rencontre entre l'intuition d'un artiste et la recherche indienne de la vérité, recherche plus orientée vers la perception globale de la Réalité que vers les certitudes offertes par le savoir. Nita Klein nous invite à découvrir comment la spiritualité authentique conduit à la création artistique ; comment, dans l'art du théâtre, l'interprétation d'un personnage, peut atteindre à la vérité, quand la personnalité du comédien consent à s'effacer. " En l'absence du "Moi", il y a seulement la vie. ", dit Jean Klein. Et pas seulement dans le théâtre, mais dans la peinture, le dessin, la danse. La Non-Dualité, avec Jean Klein, est une ouverture à la Beauté. (shrink)

In this post-modern darkness, the Phenomenology of Life and of the Human Condition excavates and brings to light the Logos of Life in its entire harmonizing interplay. In the present collection, which continues the long and winding itinerary of our previous probings, we first uncover the new field of the ontopoiesis of life by means of the self-individualisation of life, the key to its labyrinth (Tymieniecka). A network of the ontopoietic itineraries manifest life in its innumerable perspectives: the constructive scanning (...) (chronos and Kairos) are treated specifically by Eva Syristova, M. Bielawka, F. Bosio, and M.A. Cecilia. Individualising dynamisms of passions and the tying of the communal order by G. Bucher, R. Sweeney, A. Polis, A. Zvie Bar-On and others. The life-struggle for the light of the spirit by L. Sundararajan, I.R. Owen etc. The deep springs of mundaneity in human existence (moral sense, empathy, communication) by A. Luse, A. Ales Bello, J. Cibulka, J. Sivak, etc. (shrink)

Reply by the current authors to the comments made by Jaak Panksepps , James.A. Russell and Louise Sundararajan on the original article by Peter Zachar . I consider the utility of the concept of natural kind, and explore difficulties in applying it reliably. I examine categorical and dimensional approaches to affect with respect to both scientific realism and nominalist approaches to classification. I agree that eliminativist analogies are beneficial but argue that they cannot fully account for the relationship between (...) folk and scientific psychology. I also claim that neither Panksepp's nor Russell's models are incommensurable with Sundararajn's deeper approach to affective science. I suggest that Panksepp's conclusions about the structure of primary affect may be incompatible with the dimensional model, which illustrates the limits of translational work. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)