To assess the relative strength of children’s claims to remember previous lives, a strength-of-case scale has been developed. It assigns weights to features of each case that are more suggestive of a paranormal explanation. The scale was found to have a high degree of internal consistency. Analysis of 799 cases with the scale indicated that the strength of a case correlated with the economic st...

This study uses conjuring to investigate the effects of suggestion, social influence, and paranormal belief upon the accuracy of eyewitness testimony for an ostensibly paranormal event. Participants watched a video of an alleged psychic seemingly bending a metal key by the power of psychokinesis. Half the participants heard the fake psychic suggest that the key continued to bend after it had be...

Cognitive theories of religion have postulated several cognitive biases that predispose human minds towards religious belief. However, to date, these hypotheses have not been tested simultaneously and in relation to each other, using an individual difference approach. We used a path model to assess the extent to which several interacting cognitive tendencies, namely mentalizing, mind body duali...

Paranormal claims enjoy relatively widespread popular support despite by definition being rejected by the scientific community. We propose that belief in paranormal claims is influenced by how popular those claims are as well as by dominant scientific views on the claims. We additionally propose that individuals will be most likely to be positively influenced by the views of science when claims...

– This paper examines the implications of parapsychological counseling in psychiatric practice. The author reviews the major clinical and historical issues of the relationship between the occurrence of paranormal phenomena and psychiatric practice, and he emphasizes the existence of an important link between these two fields of inquiry and the relevance in an individual’s life of the occurrence...

An operator T ∈ B(H) is called quasi ∗-paranormal if ||T ∗Tx||2 ≤ ||T x|||Tx|| for all x ∈ H. If μ is an isolated point of the spectrum of T , then the Riesz idempotent E of T with respect to μ is defined by

The flood of multi-context measurement data from many scientific domains has created an urgent need to reconstruct context-specific variable networks, that could significantly simplify network-driven studies. Computationally, this problem can be formulated as jointly estimating multiple different, but related, sparse Undirected Graphical Models (UGM) from samples aggregated across several conte...

American theories of reincarnation have a long and complex history, dating from 1680s to the present. It is the purpose of this paper to highlight the main currents of reincarnation theory in the American context, giving a brief historical survey. Sources surveyed begin with Native American traditions, and then move to immigrant traditions based in Western Esotericism, Christianity, Judaism, mi...

The phrase “case of the reincarnation type” refers to any child who has information and/or other characteristics that suggest a paranormal connection between himself and a particular person who has died before he was born. By a “paranormal connection,” we mean the communication of information without the recognized sensory channels. Initially unintentionally, several cases previously studied by...