Louise Sundararajan
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 612832 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Louise Sundararajan |
| PRENOMES | Louise |
| SOBRENOME | Sundararajan |
| ASSINATURA | SUNDARARAJAN L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Rochester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3442-6897 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 21 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1993 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Strong‐Ties and Weak‐Ties Rationalities
In this study, we test the theory of strong‐ties and weak‐ties rationalities (STWTR) (Sundararajan 2020) and the criterion validity of its measures using strong‐ties rationality and weak‐ties rationality scales to predict COVID‐19 related perceptions and behaviours. These include public stigma, help‐seeking networks, and health behaviours across four societies (Han‐Chinese, Chinese‐Malaysians, Malay‐Malaysians, and White‐Australians, n = 918). Th…
Culture as an ontological universe
This article proposes a model of culture that adds an ontological dimension to conventional wisdom that approaches culture as social-ecological environments and associated practices. This new model entails a paradigm shift from epistemology to ontology and from a downstream to an upstream analysis of culture. The heuristic value of this novel model of culture consists in (1) rendering visible and intelligible the ontological universe of cultural …
Decolonial research practices from an indigenous psychology perspective
The indigenous psychology (IP) movement has challenged mainstream psychology, which is considered rooted in colonial legacies, and has advocated for locally informed and developed theories and practices. The article explores the nexus of IP and decolonial psychology, emphasizes the need to challenge Western-centric hegemony, and promotes a contextually rich, relational paradigm based on reflexivity. IP critiques the Euro-American methodologism an…
In the wake of religious conversions
Mapping culture and rationality across four countries
A cross-cultural study of strong ties and weak ties rationalities
An Ontological Turn for Psychology in the Age of the Machine and Global Warming
This essay pays homage to indigenous psychology by reiterating its central theme – decolonization – through a variant of the theme in the call for an ontological turn. Ontology refers to human’s basic commitments and assumptions about reality, namely what things are, and what they could be. It is argued that ontologies have consequences. The ontology of objects privileged in science facilitates the acquisition of objective knowledge in the physic…
Resilience revisited
This study attempts to widen the conceptual space of resilience in (Western) psychology in order to better capture the resilience landscape of an ethnic minority group ravaged by the HIV/AIDS pandemic—the Nuosu-Yi in Southwest China. Without decolonizing the construct of resilience, non-Western versions of coping with adversities cannot be properly understood. Our process of decolonization of resilience involved two steps: First, we conducted sem…
Religion, cognition, and emotion
As cultural conflicts are intensifying locally and internationally in the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic, fine-tuned investigation of culture/religion, especially that of the marginalized populations, holds the potential to reduce disparity and suffering in the global village This study used 3 textual analysis programs-Topic Modeling, C-LIWC, and SSWC-Chinese-to shed light on the differences in cognition and emotion between two communities with r…
Expanding our kind
Conducted in four societies—Taiwan, India, Mainland China, and the United States—this pan-cultural study extended and replicated a previous finding, with Iranian samples, of the possibility and benefits of expanding our “kind” via priming. The mechanism behind this phenomenon is explained through the principle of ontological parity. Derived from animism as articulated in Chinese folk beliefs, ontological parity refers to perceived sameness in bei…
Strong Ties and Weak Ties Rationality
Ignorance is Bliss
Harold Cohen and Aaron
This article documents Harold Cohen’s last phase of creativity from 2010 until his death in 2016, a period that witnessed an accelerated coevolution of Cohen’s relationship with the artificial intelligence program AARON on the one hand and his technological and artistic innovations on the other, culminating in a new art form featuring the void. Implications for the human and machine interface are discussed
Passion and qing
This chapter explores emotions as lived in everyday life. It also explores ideas about emotions, that is, explicit theories and teachings. In the West, philosophy and, more recently, science have been major sources of ideas about the emotions; this is not as true in China. It is reasonable to assume, however, that over time a dialectical relation exists between ideas and realities of emotion, such that each helps shape the other. The emotions are…
A History of the Concepts of Harmony in Chinese Culture
This historical overview of the concepts of harmony in Chinese culture situates the topic in the ecological context of a strong-ties society that fosters a type of rationality that privileges symmetry over asymmetry. Analysis of the discourse of harmony focuses on the texts of two native schools of thought—Confucianism and Taoism—and briefly mentions Buddhism (a religion imported from India). The modern history of harmony has just begun but is al…
Hegemonic categorization of the other contributes to epistemological violence
Held (2020) missed one central concern of Indigenous psychology (IP), namely that hegemony of knowledge production in mainstream psychology (MP) is to be resisted. In this commentary, I identify two prevalent assumptions in MP that warrant resistance: first, to gain knowledge of the other is to categorize them; second, the use of neutral categories can reduce epistemic violence against the culturally different other. My critique is based on a cul…
Order against the tide of entropy
Culture, Cognition, and Emotion in China's Religious Ethnic Minorities
Mind and creativity
This article introduces a non-Western approach to mind and creativity, an approach inspired by the notion of sahṛdaya (the appreciative critic) found in the Indian tradition of aesthetics known as rasa. The rasa tradition is preoccupied with a virtual reality governed by the principle of non-duality ( advaita), which we illuminate with another virtual reality—as formulated by the mathematical principle of symmetry in quantum mechanics. Far reachi…
Müntzer and mysticism
As a rebuttal to Harris Friedman's (2015) critique of the psycholinguistic analysis of mysticism by Sundararajan and Kim (2014), this commentary identifies two problems of the critique. First, the text by Sundararajan and Kim have been misread; second, the critique works from insufficient information regarding late medieval German mysticism, which constitutes the historical context for Thomas Muntzer, the self-proclaimed ‘mystic.’
Spiritual suffering from medieval German mysticism to Mother Teresa
Two computer programs, SSWC (Sundararajan-Schubert Word Count) and LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count), were used in combination to analyze the texts of 3 religious writers—one true mystic (Johannes Tauler), one false mystic (Thomas Muntzer) from medieval German Christianity, and one modern “saint,” Mother Teresa (Warren, 2010, p. 7). Results suggest that reflections on spiritual suffering that loom large in both medieval German mysticism an…
Indigenous Psychology
My agenda is to ground psychological science in culture by using complex rather than overly simple models of culture and using indigenous categories as criteria of a translation test to determine the adequacy of scientific models of culture. I first explore the compatibility between Chinese indigenous categories and complex models of culture, by casting in the theoretical framework of symmetry and symmetry breaking (Bolender, 2010) a series of tr…
The Chinese notions of harmony, with special focus on implications for cross-cultural and global psychology
Harmony is a value that is frequently associated with China as much as love is with Christianity. In both cases, misconceptions abound. This article articulates the nuanced conceptualizations of harmony in classical Chinese texts for a two-fold purpose: first, to refute the tendency in cross-cultural psychology to equate harmony with uniformity and status quo; second, to derive from harmony a model of unity that has far reaching implications for …
Belief, emotion, and health
This commentary identifies in Cromby’s formulation of belief the potentials for developing three innovative approaches to belief systems: emotion as meaning, cognition as dialogue, and an aesthetic model of meaning making based on Susanne Langer’s integrative approach to feeling and form. It is argued that the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce can help to weave these threads into an integrative theory to shed some light on the connection betwee…
Spiritual Transformation and Emotion
The semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce is proposed as a theoretical framework that can model more adequately than conventional theories in psychology the emotional transformations in cultural practices that rest squarely upon self-transcendence as the basis for healing. For illustration, the Peircean notion of the sign is applied to an analysis of spirit healing in Puerto Rico. Clinical implications for psychotherapy in general, and treatment fo…
Indigenous Psychology
My agenda is to ground psychological science in culture by using complex rather than overly simple models of culture and using indigenous categories as criteria of a translation test to determine the adequacy of scientific models of culture. I first explore the compatibility between Chinese indigenous categories and complex models of culture, by casting in the theoretical framework of symmetry and symmetry breaking (Bolender, 2010) a series of tr…
Culture, Cognition, and Emotion in China's Religious Ethnic Minorities
Strong Ties and Weak Ties Rationality
The Plot Thickens—or Not
What are emotions good for? This article makes the radical claim that the primary function of emotion is not merely to serve the purpose of coping and adaptation, but to foster an expansion of experience and consciousness that contribute importantly to a subjective self, without which biological survival would be meaningless. This argument is inspired by the Chinese notion of aesthetic savoring, which is explicated by a phenomenological account o…
Beyond I-You-Me
The hypnotic use of language
This paper shows that Heidegger's theory of language has implications for our understanding of hypnosis. A Heideggerian interpretation of samples of trance inductions brings to light the fact that the hypnotic use of language differs from the everyday language in two major dimensions: in hypnosis, language “call” things into being, thus becoming “something more than a simple, practical means of communicating with others and a means of controlling…
Patient as the Other
The “Other” refers to that which is “absolutely other,” which, according to certain postmodern thinkers, signifies the radical difference and autonomy of our fellow humans. To approach the patient as the Other, then, is to accept him or her as someone who is ultimately inaccessible to my grasp, concealed from my truth, and withdrawn from my presence. Ethics of the Other poses manifold challenges to conventional patient care: a) it exposes the inh…
Echoes after Carl Rogers
By means of an analysis based on Heidegger's conceptualization of “authentic language,” this article shows that the Rogerian “reflective listening” is a “speech which maintains silence” and that the therapeutic potential of this “attending skill” lies not so much in its attending to the client's statements, as in its nourishing the silence in the latter's voice. In particular, it demonstrates that “reflective listening” has the capacity to functi…
Alexithymia and the reflexive self
This paper attempts to articulate a so far neglected dimension of congruence theory, the reflexive self to self transaction. My claim is that self reflexivity is a tacit but fundamental assumption behind Carl Rogers’ formulations of the relationship—what he refers to as “congruence” or “incongruence—between experience and its symbolization in awareness. Gendlin's elaboration of the congruence theory in terms of “experiencing” and “inward sensing”…
Humanistic Psychotherapy and the Scientist-Practitioner Debate
This article invites participants in the scientist-practitioner debate to reflect on the nature of psychotherapy. Contrary to the received notion of practice as "applied" theory, the author argues that practice has its own logic, the "prelogical logic" of the body. The author's contention is that the so-called scientist-practitioner split in psychology cannot even begin to be addressed so long as we continue to hold the misguided notion that the …
The Plot Thickens—or Not
What are emotions good for? This article makes the radical claim that the primary function of emotion is not merely to serve the purpose of coping and adaptation, but to foster an expansion of experience and consciousness that contribute importantly to a subjective self, without which biological survival would be meaningless. This argument is inspired by the Chinese notion of aesthetic savoring, which is explicated by a phenomenological account o…
Toward a Reflexive Positive Psychology
This paper claims that the missing value dimension in positive psychology's model of the good life is attributable to its focus on the unreflective first-order desires, as exemplified by hope theory, and its misguided claim of scientific neutrality that renders invisible the moral maps of human experiences. It is argued that the solution of the problem lies in self-reflexivity, which is an extra mental space needed for the drawing and redrawing o…
Spiritual Transformation and Emotion
The semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce is proposed as a theoretical framework that can model more adequately than conventional theories in psychology the emotional transformations in cultural practices that rest squarely upon self-transcendence as the basis for healing. For illustration, the Peircean notion of the sign is applied to an analysis of spirit healing in Puerto Rico. Clinical implications for psychotherapy in general, and treatment fo…
Beyond I-You-Me
Belief, emotion, and health
This commentary identifies in Cromby’s formulation of belief the potentials for developing three innovative approaches to belief systems: emotion as meaning, cognition as dialogue, and an aesthetic model of meaning making based on Susanne Langer’s integrative approach to feeling and form. It is argued that the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce can help to weave these threads into an integrative theory to shed some light on the connection betwee…
The Chinese notions of harmony, with special focus on implications for cross-cultural and global psychology
Harmony is a value that is frequently associated with China as much as love is with Christianity. In both cases, misconceptions abound. This article articulates the nuanced conceptualizations of harmony in classical Chinese texts for a two-fold purpose: first, to refute the tendency in cross-cultural psychology to equate harmony with uniformity and status quo; second, to derive from harmony a model of unity that has far reaching implications for …
Spiritual suffering from medieval German mysticism to Mother Teresa
Two computer programs, SSWC (Sundararajan-Schubert Word Count) and LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count), were used in combination to analyze the texts of 3 religious writers—one true mystic (Johannes Tauler), one false mystic (Thomas Muntzer) from medieval German Christianity, and one modern “saint,” Mother Teresa (Warren, 2010, p. 7). Results suggest that reflections on spiritual suffering that loom large in both medieval German mysticism an…
Indigenous Psychology
My agenda is to ground psychological science in culture by using complex rather than overly simple models of culture and using indigenous categories as criteria of a translation test to determine the adequacy of scientific models of culture. I first explore the compatibility between Chinese indigenous categories and complex models of culture, by casting in the theoretical framework of symmetry and symmetry breaking (Bolender, 2010) a series of tr…
Müntzer and mysticism
As a rebuttal to Harris Friedman's (2015) critique of the psycholinguistic analysis of mysticism by Sundararajan and Kim (2014), this commentary identifies two problems of the critique. First, the text by Sundararajan and Kim have been misread; second, the critique works from insufficient information regarding late medieval German mysticism, which constitutes the historical context for Thomas Muntzer, the self-proclaimed ‘mystic.’
Mind and creativity
This article introduces a non-Western approach to mind and creativity, an approach inspired by the notion of sahṛdaya (the appreciative critic) found in the Indian tradition of aesthetics known as rasa. The rasa tradition is preoccupied with a virtual reality governed by the principle of non-duality ( advaita), which we illuminate with another virtual reality—as formulated by the mathematical principle of symmetry in quantum mechanics. Far reachi…
Culture, Cognition, and Emotion in China's Religious Ethnic Minorities
Passion and qing
This chapter explores emotions as lived in everyday life. It also explores ideas about emotions, that is, explicit theories and teachings. In the West, philosophy and, more recently, science have been major sources of ideas about the emotions; this is not as true in China. It is reasonable to assume, however, that over time a dialectical relation exists between ideas and realities of emotion, such that each helps shape the other. The emotions are…
A History of the Concepts of Harmony in Chinese Culture
This historical overview of the concepts of harmony in Chinese culture situates the topic in the ecological context of a strong-ties society that fosters a type of rationality that privileges symmetry over asymmetry. Analysis of the discourse of harmony focuses on the texts of two native schools of thought—Confucianism and Taoism—and briefly mentions Buddhism (a religion imported from India). The modern history of harmony has just begun but is al…
Hegemonic categorization of the other contributes to epistemological violence
Held (2020) missed one central concern of Indigenous psychology (IP), namely that hegemony of knowledge production in mainstream psychology (MP) is to be resisted. In this commentary, I identify two prevalent assumptions in MP that warrant resistance: first, to gain knowledge of the other is to categorize them; second, the use of neutral categories can reduce epistemic violence against the culturally different other. My critique is based on a cul…
Order against the tide of entropy
Ignorance is Bliss
Harold Cohen and Aaron
This article documents Harold Cohen’s last phase of creativity from 2010 until his death in 2016, a period that witnessed an accelerated coevolution of Cohen’s relationship with the artificial intelligence program AARON on the one hand and his technological and artistic innovations on the other, culminating in a new art form featuring the void. Implications for the human and machine interface are discussed
Resilience revisited
This study attempts to widen the conceptual space of resilience in (Western) psychology in order to better capture the resilience landscape of an ethnic minority group ravaged by the HIV/AIDS pandemic—the Nuosu-Yi in Southwest China. Without decolonizing the construct of resilience, non-Western versions of coping with adversities cannot be properly understood. Our process of decolonization of resilience involved two steps: First, we conducted sem…
Religion, cognition, and emotion
As cultural conflicts are intensifying locally and internationally in the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic, fine-tuned investigation of culture/religion, especially that of the marginalized populations, holds the potential to reduce disparity and suffering in the global village This study used 3 textual analysis programs-Topic Modeling, C-LIWC, and SSWC-Chinese-to shed light on the differences in cognition and emotion between two communities with r…
Expanding our kind
Conducted in four societies—Taiwan, India, Mainland China, and the United States—this pan-cultural study extended and replicated a previous finding, with Iranian samples, of the possibility and benefits of expanding our “kind” via priming. The mechanism behind this phenomenon is explained through the principle of ontological parity. Derived from animism as articulated in Chinese folk beliefs, ontological parity refers to perceived sameness in bei…
Psychology (24 obras) · Philosophy (20 obras) · Epistemology (19 obras) · Social Psychology (15 obras) · Sociology (15 obras) · Cultural Differences and Values (10 obras) · Indigenous (8 obras) · Social Representations and Identity (8 obras) · Emotions and Moral Behavior (6 obras) · Philosophy (6 obras)