Consumption of Organic Foods from a Life History Perspective:An Explorative Study among Italian consumers

Taking into consideration individuals’ cognitive reasoning, and assuming that consumption of organic food has involved a change of mind about food experiences and food habits, we have identified the concepts, stories and theories mentioned by respondents in their discourses about organic food. Regular consumers trust organic products because they believe that they are healthier and tastier than any other product. A growing stock of information supports their food choice and confidence in organic food. Occasional consumers have strong beliefs about the better taste and the higher quality of organic food in general. Non organic users sometimes perceive organic food as a new fashion, the last fad. Organic food is still confused with close ‘substitutes’, such as ‘natural’, ‘macrobiotic’ and similar products. Many occasional consumers believe that regular consumers are somewhat obsessed with organic food and that they look and behave strangely. Organic products are generally perceived and experienced as expensive products, when compared to conventional alternatives. To organic consumer the rewards they perceive to gain from organic food is well beyond the resources (in terms of time and money) they employ to search for the higher quality of organic products. Institutional attempts to change consumer behaviour are commonly categorized into consumer information, consumer education and consumer advice (Peter et al., 1999).In order to increase both behavioural and attitudinal loyalty, the level of consumer information and product knowledge should be increased. Besides, consumers will become more committed if their beliefs regarding the intrinsic self-relevance of organic food will increase in the future

National security: A propositional study to develop resilience indicators as an aid to personnel vetting

Within the National Security domain there is a convergence of security responsibility across the national security agencies, law enforcement and private security sectors. The sensitivity of this environment requires individuals operating in the domain to be honest, trustworthy and loyal. Personnel vetting is a formal process used to determine an individual’s suitability for access to this domain. Notwithstanding this process, significant breaches of trust, security, and corruption still occur. In psychology, resilience is a well researched phenomenon that is considered a multidimensional construct where individual attributes, family aspects and social environment interact in aiding individuals to deal with vulnerability. There are many understandings and definitions of resilience based on theorists’ different perspectives; however, most agree that resilience is represented by a minimum of two aspects. The first is adversity and second, how the individual deals with adversity that demonstrates situational adaptation in a positive manner. The study is a work in progress and proposes the use of a recently developed Lifespan Resilience Scale. This scale will use resilience markers as an aid to National Security by providing vetting agencies with an additional tool for proactive intervention. The Lifespan Resilience Scale is currently undergoing reliability and validity testing within a student population. Once validated within this population, the scale will be adjusted and tested within the vetting environment using cross validated cohorts and expert opinion. Such a tool will assist National Security through better personnel risk management

European Literature and the Ethics of Leadership: Cyrano de Bergerac

This paper is built on an ‘organizational' reading of ‘great' texts, a reading focused on the leader, considering in a implicit way that he/she is a person with specific characters, circumstances being at left the background. This method is similar to the partial criticism made by the queer critic or the colonial critic. It is a reading, which consists in a de-contextualization of the literature from its category (the theater here) and its country to only retain what can be considered as relevant towards an archetype of the leader. This method raises a major epistemological difficulty because of the ‘over' consideration of the tragic and heroic characters of the leader. It is a way of generalizing the leadership, but within the universalism of the literature. The following arguments of this text will be: - an attempt to define the nature of an organizational critic, - a short analysis of the cultural relativism to remind how far an archetypical production of a national culture can be understood (or not) in universal dimensions, - an approach of the three notions of ‘figure', ‘person' and ‘portrait', - an analysis of the characteristics in common between Cyrano and the leader.Leadership;leader

The Contextual Semantic Realizations Of The Lexial Units “Hesitate, Waver, Vacillate, and Falter” and “Hesitation, Hesitancy”

This article is dedicated to the research of synonymous groups for the designation of doubt “Hesitate, Waver, Vacillate, Falter” and “Hesitation, Hesitancy” in contemporary English-language fictional discourse. Doubt is defined as an epistemic state in the cognitive world of individuals which provides motivation to undertake a further quest for information. The purpose of this work is to investigate how the set of semes identified in each component of the synonymous group is presented in the context of modern English fictional discourse. This research is directed towards verifying whether the use of all the components of the given synonymous groups is of equal importance in modern language discourse, as well as checking whether all the semes of “Hesitate, Waver, Vacillate, Falter” and “Hesitation, Hesitancy” are used correctly, based on the results of the componential analysis. The results of the research make it possible to form conclusions regarding the homogeneity or heterogeneity of contextual sematic representations in discourse, dependent upon the number of constituents which make up the synonymous group. Стаття присвячена дослідженню синонімічних рядів на позначення сумніву “Hesitate, Waver, Vacillate, Falter” та “Hesitation, Hesitancy” у сучасному художньому англомовному дискурсі. Сумнів дефініціюється як епістемічний стан, що має місце у когнітивному світі людини та є рушійною силою до пошуку нової інформації. Дослідження має на меті виявити, яким чином набір сем, виділений у складі кожного компонента синонімічного ряду, представлений у контексті сучасного художнього англомовного дискурсу. Науковий пошук спрямовано для розпізнавання тенденції представлення компонентів синонімічного ряду у сучасному дискурсі, переважання чи відсутності деяких його складників, а також із метою з’ясування подібностей та відмінностей між набором сем, виявлених у результаті компонентного аналізу та фактичним набором, представленим у дискурсі. Отримані результати допомагають зробити висновок про гомогенність чи гетерогенність представлення семного набору у дискурсі

"Lean not on your own understanding" : belief that morality is founded on divine authority and non-utilitarian moral thinking

Recent research has shown that religious individuals are much more resistant to utilitarian modes of thinking than their less religious counterparts, but the reason for this is not clear. We propose that a meta-ethical belief that morality is rooted in inviolable divine commands (i.e., endorsement of Divine Command Theory) may help explain this finding. We present a novel 20-item scale measuring a belief that morality is founded on divine authority. The scale shows good internal reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. Study 1 found that this scale fully mediated the relationship that various religiosity measures had with a deontological thinking style in our sample of American adults. It also accounted for the link between religiosity and social conservative values. Furthermore, the relationship between the scale and these outcome variables held after statistically controlling for variables related to actively open-minded thinking and the Big Five. Study 2 replicated the results using naturalistic moral dilemmas that placed deontological and utilitarian concerns in conflict, and showed that the results of Study 1 cannot be explained by differences in moral foundations (e.g., concern for authority more generally) or differences in the perceived function of rules. Quite the contrary, endorsement of the divine origins of morality fully mediated the relationship religiosity had with the so-called “binding” foundations (i.e., Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity). Our findings highlight the importance of meta-ethical beliefs for understanding individual differences in moral judgment

Values, ideological attitudes and patriotism

We tested a series of discriminant associations, investigating how dimensions of patriotism (i.e. blind and constructive) differently relate to value orientations, and to ideological attitudes such as Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). Using an Italian student sample (N = 146) we found that blind patriotism correlated positively with tradition and negatively with univer- salism, whilst constructive patriotism correlated negatively with tradition and positively with universal- ism. Both RWA and SDO correlated negatively with universalism, whilst only RWA was associated with security and tradition and only SDO related positively to power and self-direction. Mediation analyses revealed that most of the effects of value orientations on patriotism were mediated by SDO and RWA

Spartan Daily, September 28, 1954

Volume 43, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/12057/thumbnail.jp