Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Implicit Religion And The Curvilinear Relationship Between Religion And Death Anxiety, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Debate over the relationship of religion to death anxiety has included the opposing views of Malinowski, who held that religion lessened death anxiety, and Radcliffe-Brown, who argued that religion increased death anxiety. Homans' theoretical synthesis of these viewpoints was tested by Leming, who concluded that the empirical relationship was curvilinear, meaning that both high and low religious involvements resulted in low death anxiety while middle-range attachments did not.

Reconsideration of this result argues that the presence of death anxiety is not dependent upon social learning, and that either high or low levels of theism leads to the resolution of anxiety …

Relating Psychological Measures To Anthropological Observations: Procrastination As A Field Proxy For Death Anxiety?, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Anthropologists frequently incorporate psychological concepts such as death anxiety into their sociocultural theorizing, but are reluctant to use the psychological instrumentation quantifying these concepts. Due to the needs of ethnographic fieldwork, behavioral proxies should be identified for psychological concepts wherever possible. Two exploratory studies investigate whether procrastination might serve as just such a proxy for death anxiety. While significant results were found, they are too weak for the intended field application.

Sociobiological And Psychosocial Models Of Physical Attractiveness Phenomena: A Confrontation Of Theories, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

A majority of cultural anthropologists underestimate the value of sociobiological theory for a better understanding of human behavior. This essay attempts to demonstrate the shortcomings of this position by presenting an illustrative problem. Sexually asymmetrical physical attractiveness phenomena are examined first from a traditional psychosocial model. In its pure form this model is unable to account for the known data; when supplemented by sociobiological premises, however, these difficulties are resolved.

A Charisma Model Of Telepathic Communication, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

This paper opened by making some general criticisms of the state of parapsychological research: that it suffered from a lack of external validity and from uncritical acceptance of a flawed paradigm. The charisma model was offered as an attempt to rectify these problems. It allows for laboratory experiments to be designed which closely approximate genuine human interactions by shifting the paradigm for telepathy from that of energy transfers to one of communication events.