Mass indiscriminate shootings like that which happened in the Virginia Tech campus in 2007 are lurking nightmares in society. 32 people were killed and scores others were injured as a disgruntled and mentally disturbed student Seung-Hui Cho let loose his two guns in the sociology department building. When the police had rounded up the site…
Category: Psychology
Do characters in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird construct their own identities?
To Kill a Mockingbird is a masterpiece of American fiction. One of the reasons for this success is its handling of a pressing social issue, namely, racial prejudice. Secondly, the work is structurally layered, allowing readers numerous interpretations. For example, the book can be studied for its socio-economic indications under the Marxist critical framework. It…
A comparison of the subjective factors between Di Hua and Juanjuan which cause the tragedy of their lives in Wu Jianren’s Sea of Regret
Wu Jianren’s 1906 novella ‘Sea of Regret (originally titled Hen Bai) is a masterpiece of modern Chinese literature. The book is rich in themes of morality and the challenges of modernity and patriotism. Adopting a tone of sentimentality that is essential to the Chinese literary aesthetic the novella deals also with concepts such as chivalry…
The psychosocial changes incurred during adolescence
Adolescence is a key developmental stage in an individual’s life. It encompasses substantial changes physiologically, cognitively and socio-emotionally. Adolescence begins with the onset of puberty between 11-13 years and continues till the end of teenage years. Recent scientific evidence suggests that while physical growth stops in late teens, the cognitive development goes up to and…
Social Intelligence Research: Q & A
For the last several weeks, we have been studying the impact of professional presence. What are you learning about your own professional presence? What aspects of your own professional presence do you consider strengths? What aspects of your professional presence are developing through your course of study? What are your desired outcomes for further development…
Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning: A Perspective
Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning will continue to be a key text on human psychology due to its concerns with universal themes. The most focused of those themes in the book is that of suffering and human choice. Frankl suggests that even in the most hopeless and helpless of situations, where one is under…
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl: A critical analysis
Victor Frankl’s classic work Man’s Search For Meaning is a rich source of psychological insight. Written based on first-hand observations of the lives of fellow inmates in Nazi concentration camps, the work succeeds in capturing key universal truths. The foremost of the book’s concerns is that of ‘meaning’ pertaining to human life. It talks about…
Phaedra as an example of Enlightenment values
Are love, passion and other emotions as dangerous as the play seems to make them and is reason alone enough to achieve happiness? Are human emotions a sign of weakness, disease, lack of control, or absence of Reason in the play? What is the cause of this tragedy? Phaedra, originally part of the large body of Greek…
Can Individual Virtue Survive Corporate Pressure?
There are two opposing points of view presented by Robert C. Solomon and Gilbert Harman on the question of ‘Can Individual Virtue Survive Corporate Pressure?’ The two views can be loosely classified as pitting ‘determinism’ against ‘freewill’. Robert Solomon argues that “whatever the structures, the individual’s choice is free, and therefore his character or virtue…
How does Plato’s theory of the psyche relate to modern management practice?
Executive Summary: Plato’s speculations and assertions on the nature of human psyche have withstood the test of time and are a useful aid to modern managers. Plato defined the abstract and the rational as equivalent to the moral good. He equated self-knowledge with self-restraint, and proclaimed that knowledge is virtue. According to Plato, the psyche…