Research Methods and Methodologies Used in Studies on Social Accounting

Accounting as a social science considers an objective and subjective reality that must be seen and understood under the institutional context where it is developed. Thus, this chapter discusses the roles and effects of the paradigms in accounting research, in general, and social accounting research, in particular, aiming to know and understand the research lines that better define a theoretical scope of analysis for the social accounting practice. This research tries to better fit the answers to some questions about social accounting. The results argue for the importance of keeping a theoretical paradigm alive in order to foster multidimensional openness and true scholarship in accounting research and application. A multi-disciplinary appreciation with different perspectives will enrich the research in social accounting.

THE CONCEPTS OF IMAGINATION, FANTASIES, DREAMS, AND HALLUCINATIONS IN MENTALLY HEALTHY PEOPLE

Imagination, fantasies, dreams, and hallucinations are contiguous mental processes that reflect various forms of image processing at the internal level. The ability to maintain boundaries between them, reflecting as they do either external or profoundly internal, subjective reality (reality testing), is considered to be one of the most widely accepted criteria of mental health. Nevertheless, traditionally these processes have been investigated independently by different authors adopting different approaches, and there is a discernible lack of studies dedicated to the comparative analysis of these phenomena, both in their theoretical and empirical aspects. At the same time, such data could be used to develop diagnostic methods of investigating mental processes in normal conditions as well as in cases of mental disorders. The aim of this study is to investigate people's common ideas about imagination, fantasies, dreams and hallucinations, as well as the subjective experience of them in comparison with each other. The study's group of participants consisted of 45 nominally mentally healthy people (32 women and 13 men) aged between 17 and 29 years old. The following methods were used during the study: a semistructured interview aimed at studying the respondents' ideas about imagination, fantasy, dreams and hallucinations, and visual drawings of the forms, which these processes took. According to the results of the study, in the case of 15% of the respondents, their ideas about imagination, fantasies, dreams and hallucinations differed from their scientific definitions. The drawings of the images of imagination, fantasies, dreams and hallucinations varied in terms of emotional experience. The more the mental process is voluntary and subjectively controlled, the more these images are associated with positive emotions. In particular, images of imagination are mainly associated with a positive emotional charge, images of fantasy more often evoke positive emotions, but also ambivalent experiences, and drawings of the images of dreams and hallucinations are most often associated with negative emotions.

The Reality of Digital Travel

It is the experience that counts, there and then. When a person talks about the experience, he or she can also reflect on and interpret the experience. In this chapter we use findings from empirical studies and surveys to write about the subjective reality of digital travel. We discussed the theoretical foundation for why we can have the feeling of being there (and what we referred to as the Spinozan model of perception) in Chapters 2 and 3. The first studies we report are on factors affecting the sense of place experience, and telepresence, using video games to create a sightseeing environment for participants. The second study is a survey of citizens on the topic of vacation planning, digital travel applications before, during and after visiting a tourist destination.

The Art of Immersion with Smell and Sensorial Theatre Language

In recent decades, the trend or the need for an experience of the effect of immersion into theatre events, other branches of art, tourism, everyday business and private life has become quite evident. We are used to audio-visual communication, which, from the Renaissance onwards, became the dominant channel for delivering messages, while other senses became less important. Until the middle of the 20th century, the role of smell in theatre practices was neglected, and more important senses took over the place of communication and staging. Rarely it was used as a direct prop, but always very carefully, because, according to many experts, it cannot be controlled like sound and light. However, we have forgotten that the smell, especially in combination with the sound, can have a strong emotional impact on a spectator. Like the other senses, the scent recreates the context of memories and can evoke an intense reliving of emotions and events. It can also provoke an evaluation or re-evaluation of the past, thereby affecting the perception of the present. Reality is perceived through the adaptation of sensory information, which is shaped and interpreted under the influence of past experiences. Experiences create expectations, and expectations create our subjective reality considering everyday life and theatrical performance. This relationship is especially noticeable in sensorial theatre. In the last decade, an effort has been made to bring scents and other tools of sensorial theatre back to the stage, just as – according to foreign sources – they were an important part of events in antiquity. In this way, the stage can be enriched with an additional dimension of communication and expression. The paper presents various methods and experiments on the use of scent and other tools of sensorial theatre, evaluating their phenomenology and effectiveness from the perspective of the performing arts and psychological science.

Animal Representation on UK Children’s Television

It is widely accepted that television is a powerful medium and that its influence, particularly on children and young people, can be profound (see for example Canadian Paediatric Society 2003; Strasburger 2004; Matyjas 2015). The representation and categorisation of non-humans in such content may therefore influence a culture’s attitudes towards those species and, by extension, its children’s views. This article investigates animal characters on three hundred and fourteen children’s TV shows across five days of ‘free’ to view UK programming during summer 2020, and is the first study in over twenty-five years (since Elizabeth Paul’s in 1996) to focus specifically on mainstream children’s TV, and the only one to have sole regard for pre- and early primary-age UK viewers. With research clear that the media is so influential, recognising the role of such culture transmission is vital to ‘undo’ unhelpful assumptions about animals that result in their exploitation, and change future norms (Joy 2009). Television media either ignores or misrepresents the subjective reality of many (particularly food) species, but with children preferring anthropomorphised animals to most others (Geerdts, Van de Walle and LoBue 2016), this carries implications in terms of responsibility for our ideas and subsequent treatment of those non-humans in everyday life.

The potential of a marginal approach in the study of deviations in human behavior

Актуальность статьи обусловлена необходимостью междисциплинарного изучения отклонений в поведении человека. В статье показаны предпосылки раскрытия потенциала предельного подхода в изучении отклоняющегося поведения и делается акцент на философском исследовании данного феномена как элемента субъективной реальности. Это согласуется с построением онтологии знания позволяющего раскрыть новую предельную реальность поведения человека. Выявлена необходимость обозначения границ предельной реальности, проявляющейся в настоящем. Определены условия, в которых проявится потенциал идентификации возможных отклонений в представлении человека, а это существование двух пространств (событийное и не событийное), создающих рассогласование во взаимодействии с миром. Автором делается анализ основных философских тем описания объективной реальности и теоретико-методологическое описание возникновения закономерностей отклонения в поведении с точки зрения предельного подхода. В результате проведённого анализа показано, что предельная реальность заключает в себе эффективность, результативность и нормативность окружающей среды. Выявлено, что при проведении исследований отклоняющегося поведения необходимо учитывать предельную реальность с позиции ее эффективности связанной с соотношением достижений и возможностей и результативности проявляющейся на уровне реализации цели. Статья предназначена для аспирантов, соискателей ученой степени, исследователей, изучающих проблемы межличностного взаимодействия, педагогов и психологов. Limiting approach in the study of deviant behavior and focuses on the philosophical study of this phenomenon as an element of subjective reality. This is consistent with the construction of an ontology of knowledge that allows you to reveal a new ultimate reality of human behavior. Revealed the need to designate the boundaries of the ultimate reality, manifested in the present. The conditions are determined in which the potential of identifying possible deviations in a person's representation will manifest itself, and this is the existence of two spaces (eventual and non-eventual) that create a mismatch in interaction with the world. The author analyzes the main philosophical themes of describing objective reality and a theoretical and methodological description of the emergence of patterns of deviation in behavior from the point of view of the limiting approach. As a result of the conducted reflections, it is shown that the ultimate reality includes the effectiveness, efficiency and normativity of the environment. It was revealed that when conducting research on deviant behavior, it is necessary to take into account the ultimate reality from the standpoint of its effectiveness associated with the ratio of achievements and opportunities and the effectiveness manifested at the level of goal implementation. The article is intended for graduate students, degree seekers, researchers studying the problems of interpersonal interaction, teachers and psychologists.

The Anatomy of Uncertainty

Chapter 3 describes the anatomy of medical uncertainty, identifying key attributes that give it a three-dimensional conceptual shape, form, and structure. It characterizes uncertainty in terms of its (1) fundamental sources (root causes), (2) issues (substantive problems), and (3) loci (persons in whose minds uncertainty resides) and presents a conceptual framework that allows the variety of uncertainties in medicine to be classified and better understood. The chapter makes the case that in all of these ways, a three-dimensional conceptual framework can facilitate a more intentional, targeted, and rational approach to evaluating medical uncertainty. By providing a way of visualizing, ordering, and objectifying an otherwise invisible, disordered, subjective reality, the framework can ultimately enable clinicians and patients to better manage medical uncertainty.

Ego sentio, ergō sum!

The article offered to your attention is, in substance, a series of conceptually connected excerpts from authorial treatise on the psychological background of pre-cognitive brain activism and some little-known hidden features of the functioning of the higher nervous system. Well and besides, a couple of chapters are devoted here to the innate physiological asymmetry of the hemispheres, and also to the denial of the relevance of true free will to humans. But in general, by and large, in his scientific views the author tries to adhere to the idea of the subjective reality of emotions and the relative illusory nature of sensations. In its spirit, this position is most likely close to Lenin’s than to the earlier - the German classical one (the founder is H. von Helmholtz). The latter, we recall, exactly one and a half centuries ago, developed own theory of perception, whereby subjective images do not resemble the objective qualities of perceived things, but are just their abstract signs (characters). That is, any momentary perception was determined, according to Helmholtz, by the "habitual means" already formed in a given individual, due to which the constancy of the visible world is preserved. While in this article the link between an object and a corresponding mental picture - vice versa - is rather considered as a relation of homomorphism between two non-equinumerous sets. However, to say that such homomorphic images of the same object can, in principle, exist an infinite number - this, perhaps, would be the easiest here. That’s why the author is willy-nilly forced sometimes to turn in the mind's eye to the hierarchical evolution of natural systems (starting from the primary monads) in the context of the progressive development of their psyche. And as far as the actuality around us is concerned, then final correct answer about the sought-for type of the mapping would, obviously, first of all depend here on the spatiotemporal parameters of the Universe and the comprehensive set of quantum characteristics of 5 (at least) stable elementary particles that have lied at the origins of being.

A Postmodern Reading of Don DeLillo’s Short Stories

The focus of this paper is to study how different techniques are incorporated in the postmodern fiction to present the multiplicity of meaning and subjectivity of the reality. For this purpose, the researcher has selected American novelist and short story writer Donald Richard DeLillo’s short stories “The Itch” and “Coming. Sun. Mon. Tues”. The researcher has analyzed the selected works using the theoretical frameworks provided by Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon and Henri Bergson. The theoretical insights of the selected theorists help understand the subjective reality of the postmodernism. Textual analysis has been used as a method to study the selected fictional work. Postmodernism is critical of certain foundational conventions of philosophy, specifically, the Enlightenment thinking, as it symbolizes the pursuit of reason and logic. On the other hand, it focuses on the personalization and subjectivity in the construction of truth and worldviews. The rejection of objective reality gives way to multiple realities and subjectivity. American fiction, in the second half of the twentieth century, has been influenced by postmodernism to a great extent. The analyzed short stories provide a good postmodern reading since they cover a range of features that are relatable in the postmodern world.

The Task of the Creation of Artificial General Intelligence and the Problem of Consciousness

The article discusses the task of creation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that is, an artificial intelligence system that approaches the functional capabilities of natural intelligence. Emphasis is made on the leading role of Sberbank in updating and organizing a special research program in order to develop this problem, which is of strategic importance for Russia. It has been established that the successful implementation of this program presupposes solving fundamental methodological issues that require input of philosophers - specialists in the field of epistemology and methodology of science. We show the relations of the concepts of “artificial” and “natural,” “strong” and “weak,” “general” and “narrow” intelligence. The article reveals the theoretical difficulties associated with a clear definition of the properties of general intelligence and the ways of its practical implementation. The author draws attention to the importance of studies of consciousness for the development of general artificial intelligence and comes to the conclusion that the priority issues are using the results of the phenomenological analysis of subjective reality, its value-semantic and op-erational structures. The paper discusses these issues in detail, as they are of direct relevance to the construction of new cognitive architectures. The latter make it possible, to go beyond the limits of “narrow” artificial intelligence and create AGI with a high degree of autonomy and independent solutions to a wide range of problems in different environments. It demonstrates the limitation of Turing's operationalist methodology that excludes the use of the results of special studies of consciousness as a subjective reality. Application of such results is associated with the development of post-Turing methodology, which opens up significant opportunities for creating an AGI.