In Experiment 1, 6- and 9-year-old children and adults were asked to imagine various types of objects. The experimenter then attempted to change the image of those objects in participants' minds by either suggesting that the objects may change against the participants' will, or by asking participants to change the objects as a favor to the experimenter. Two types of suggestive causation were em...

A case of extreme anxiety is described in an Aboriginal man who believed he had been subjected to magical influences. It is hypothesized that extreme anxiety accompanied by a refusal to eat or drink (the latter feature being part of the Aboriginal belief system under these conditions) is part, or all, of the mechanism of death from magical influences.

Magical thinking is of relevance to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and has been most widely investigated in relation to the cognitive bias known as thought-action fusion (TAF). This is seen as playing a role in the formation of fears about responsibility for harm. We suggest that magical thinking may also characterise some types of neutralising behaviour, which arise in response to those ...

with hisextensiveknowledgeof mythologicalstories, astronomy andalchemy, nezamicreatesin haft peykara mysterious narration, which offers new dimensions and colors in every reading.bahrām-egōr, the hero ofnezami’s narration, goes through sevenstages toachieveself-knowledgeand perfection. this process ofindividualityterminateson a friday by his marriage withthe iranian princess. bahrām’s (mars) ma...

George A. Miller said that human beings have only seven chunks in short-term memory, plus or minus two. We counted the number of bunsetsus (phrases) whose modifiees are undetermined in each step of an analysis of the dependency structure of Japanese sentences, and which therefore must be stored in short-term memory. The number was roughly less than nine, the upper bound of seven plus or minus t...