Food satisfies hunger and hunger obeys desire. Accordingly, desire and longing result in societal problems. Food and love may be extreme needs of humans, but the fulfillment of a human’s wants through food and love may help ease such societal problems. This paper aims to unravel the culture of the Bicolanos as the theme highlighted in Merlinda Bobis’ Banana Heart Summer. As a contemporary novel, Banana Heart Summer depicts the material and nonmaterial culture of Region V known as the Bicol (...) Region. The paper presents an analysis of the novel’s creative representation of food towards characters and their relationships with one another. The researcher employed Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalyzes particularly on the pleasure and reality principles. Likewise, the cultural and gender studies and semiotics are applied in the treatment of material. This descriptive-qualitative type of analysis employed on the novel highlights how cultural-domestic issues and socio-political problems brought along by poverty for food and love can be triumphed over through strong family bonds, religion-induced faith, culture-bound tradition, and palatable dishes on the table. The entire novel suggests hope and positivity amidst the evident “hunger”. It offers awareness of the different types of hunger brought along by the socio-historical and political issues. The understanding of one’s culture provides a better view of the world; this worldview may help identify the locale’s distinctiveness. Keywords - Literature, Bicolanos material and nonmaterial culture, socio-historical andpolitical issues, descriptive- qualitative analysis, semiotics, cultural and genderstudies, Philippines. (shrink)

An analysis of the level of emotional and dependency according to sociodemographic characteristic factors in university students in a period of confinement due to COVID-19. 689 female students of the city of Arequipa were included; we used a measurement instrument with 23 items that allowed us to understand the influence of the current situation on the psychological state of the university. The results indicate that there is a low level of emotional dependence, in relation to the variable of the emotional (...) situation being one of the main reasons why single students are less likely to have this dependence as they do not have any type of romantic relationship, since they focus more on their personal goals through their university studies, which shows that they are more independent when taking on challenges and objectives consistent with their academic training, compared to those who maintain a relationship. (shrink)

Engagement happens when academics and non-academics form partnerships to create mutual understanding, and then take action together. An example is the “value web” work associated with W. K. Kellogg Foundation’s Food Systems Higher Education–Community Partnership. Partners nationally work on local food systems development by building value webs. “Value chains,” a concept with considerable currency in the private sector, involves creating non-hierarchical relationships among otherwise disparate actors and entities to achieve collective common goals. The value web concept is extended herein by (...) separating the values of the web itself, such as the value of collaboration, from values “in” the web, such as credence values associated with a product or service. By sharing and discussing case examples of work underway around the United States, the authors make a case for employing the value webs concept to represent a strategy for local food systems development, specifically, and for higher education–community partnerships, generally. (shrink)

Schematic, propositional, analogical and associative representational Systems (SPAARS) is the integrated cognitive model of emotion proposed by Power and Dalgleish (Cognition and Emotion: from order to disorder. The Psychology Press, England, 1997). It is multi-level in nature and includes four different levels of representation. In SPAARS, emotions are described as appraisal-based according to an individual’s goals, thus making the theory functional in nature. Basic emotions possess an innate component and hence can be elicited automatically, since these emotions might already have (...) been appraised in an individual’s evolutionary past. Thus, the theory proposes two routes for the generation of emotions. It provides an useful approach within which both basic and complex emotions can readily be understood. The theory can also be applied in order to explain emotional disorders as well as to generate novel therapeutic interventions for them. In the current review the SPAARS approach has been used to understand psychopathy, also called the disorder of empathy (a complex emotion). The theory provides a new perspective for looking at psychopaths. It suggests that psychopathy may arise either due to a problem generating the basic emotion of sadness, the complex emotion of empathy or a combination of the two. The interventions suggested would also vary depending upon the underlying nature of the problem. (shrink)