Increasingly, mental health services in resource-limited settings are being delivered by lay health workers with limited professional training. This study compared beliefs and attitudes about mental illness among church-based lay health workers in Enugu, Nigeria with no psychiatric training (n=59) and medical trainees with different levels of exposure to psychiatric care from two teaching hospi...

In the social sciences, talk about belief is ubiquitous . Since social scientists are typically self-conscious about their methods, there is also a lot of talk about talk about belief And since belief is a genuinely curious and perplexing phenomenon , showing many different faces to the world , there is abundant controversy. Sometimes belief attribution appears to be a dark, risky, and imponder...

Pigeons were conditioned to peck a response key under a procedure that alternated periods of food reinforcement with periods of extinction. The pigeons attacked a nearby pigeon at the onset of extinction. Some also attacked a stuffed model of a pigeon. The duration of attack was an inverse function of the time since the last food reinforcement and a direct function of the number of reinforcemen...

There are many opportunities in everyday life to associate consumer products with success or failure. For example, when a basketball fan drinks a particular brand of soda while watching her favorite team win a game, she may perceive that this consumption facilitated the victory. Subsequently, the fan may continue to purchase and consume this same item during future games, in an attempt to help ...

Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing. Like optical illusions, they can occur for an...

Szechwan is one of the largest, richest and most populous provinces in China, extending from 101?-111? east longitude and 27?-24? north latitude. The population is estimated at 45,000,000. It is essentially an agricultural province; the important crops are rice, sweet potatoes and corn. Though the land is very fertile and productive, the living standard in rural Szechwan is very low. The food o...

Many superstitious practices entail the belief that good or bad luck can be "washed away." Consistent with this belief, participants who recalled (Experiment 1) or experienced (Experiment 2) an episode of bad luck were more willing to take risk after having as opposed to not having washed their hands, whereas participants who recalled or experienced an episode of good luck were less willing to ...

Irrational or illogical beliefs are referred to variously as magical thinking, peculiar beliefs, superstitious beliefs, and half-beliefs. We first distinguish the various terms according to their most common and relevant usage for consumer psychologists and define a conceptual structure for the roles of conscious and nonconscious processes associated with peculiar beliefs in decision-making. We...

and relief in time of sickness?of their castes, their tenets, and their practices, and any one so disposed might glean from the Indian medical periodicals of the last half century materials for a very instructive essay on the subject. We hear, on the one hand, of a physician caste, learned in the traditions of a past era, holding as an heir-loom an empirical knowledge of remedies, which we shou...

The topic of the relationship between obsessive and delusional thinking can be developed from a descriptive point of view, focusing the differential aspects, and from a standpoint more sensible towards the continuity linking the two phenomena, looking for those elements contributing to c1arify the dynamic relationship between them. As Binswanger [1957] wrote: «In the “linnean” system of psychop...