Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory ( STAI) and Shostrom' s Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) were completed by three groups of undergraduates at the University of New England at Armidale, Australia, a few days prior to either beginning a program of Transcendental Meditation (TM group, N = 25), a parallel program of progressive relaxation (PR group, N =40), or acting as controls (N =...

We used the Fiscal Observatory Survey of the University of Murcia (2007) to examine the antecedents of trust in the Spanish government (at city, regional and state levels). We found that the main drivers of trust are individuals’ perception of the government’s performance and the socio-economic environment in which they live. Regarding the consequences, we tested a variant of the rule complianc...

Recent publications have highlighted alternative analytical thinking strategies to inform and facilitate improved intelligence analysis. Red teaming, fast and slow thinking, divergent thinking, as well as other strategies have been identified as essential to understanding today's radically different, nontraditional landscape that analysts and collectors are expected to operate in: to understand...

In previous work, we have developed a “Glance-Look” model, which has replicated a broad profile of data on the semantic Attentional Blink (AB) task and characterized how attention deployment is modulated by emotion. The model relies on a distinction between two levels of meaning: implicational and propositional, which are supported by two corresponding mental subsystems. The somatic contributio...

I question whether it is completely accurate to think of the philosophical meaning of consciousness as being switched-on or switched-off. It may be that, once consciousness is switched-on, it is then found in degrees in animals we deem conscious. In which case, consciousness is more like a switched-on rheostat, rather than a simple on–off switch. Christian de Quincey (2006) gives a list of what...

Despite the compelling subjective experience of executive self-control, we argue that "consciousness" contains no top-down control processes and that "consciousness" involves no executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it. In our view, psychological processing and psychological products are not under the control...

Previous research has suggested that a unique “fourth state” of awareness, Transcendental Consciousness (TC), distinct from waking, dreaming, and sleeping, occurs during the practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique. Subjectively, this state has been described as free of mental content but with alert, broaden awareness. Objectively, this state has been characterized, in part, by very ...