Book Review: “APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY – India Specific and Cross Cultural Approaches”

AUTHOR: SMARAK SWAIN

My 150th Blog posting, I thought to make it special. The book review is my work at Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Executive Interns Training Programme, Chennai. I tried to include as much interpretations as I could in the book review!

Psychology defined is general terms is a study of human mind, his behaviours and his thoughts. Applied psychology is an applied science of psychology, where psychological knowledge is applied, to study and solve various human problems in society. Though the book, “Applied Psychology: India-specific and Cross-cultural Approaches,” written by Smarak Swain, organised and formatted in a form to suit aspirants preparing for Civil Service Examination with Psychology optional, the book contains whole sets of psychological interpretations which can help people to look into their day-to-day experience and current social problems from psychological perspective.

Can a healthy body without disease still be unhealthy? The author says ‘yes’ by substantiating it, with the definition of health as defined by World Health Organisation (WHO), “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely as the absence of disease and infirmity.” So, in order to maintain a sound health, it requires a holistic well-being of body, mind and our relationships. There are inferences from various philosophical and spiritual works that the mind well maintained and controlled can indeed be more powerful in treating other ailments of body and relationship. For instance, take the Placebo Effect, where Placebo is something that is prescribed for a patient that contains no medicine, but given for the positive psychological effect because the patient believes that he is receiving treatment and his ailment goes off, but in reality no effect the medicine leaves over the body.

Defining the concept of well being, the author touches the two facets of well being: Economic well being and Subjective well being. Economic well being is a general economic status of an individual, while Subjective well being defined in crude terms as general feeling of happiness. Reflecting on Psychologist Seligman works, the author subscribes three ways to improve our subjective well being or happiness. First, maintaining a ‘pleasure state of mind’ or positive emotions. Second, ‘engagement of activities’ that leads to intrinsic gratification. And third, finding ‘meaning in life’ through knowledge, altruism, family and community welfare, and spirituality.

In the part Educational Psychology, for explaining Value Education and its role in Personality Development, the author exposes the concept that our values are stronger and indelible than our attitude. For a person, values represent principles or standards ingrained in his life since his early stages of life. While attitude evolves or forms during our developmental stages and it gets altered many times during our lifetime. Unlike attitude, the values are permanent and once formed cannot be changed or altered. The author places special emphasis on Values because Values form a basic part of our personality structure, so, it has to be properly formulated at early stages, for healthy personality development. A child normally develops three types of values during its development stage, learned specially in family, school and social environment, which is classified as: First, Universal values, highest order of values like sensitivity to humanity, love, brotherhood, compassion and empathy; Second, Cultural values, learned from family and significant others; and Third, Personal Values, affect individual’s motivation and strive for success. All the three values render its significant role in the personality development of an individual.

In Human Resource Development and Entrepreneurship topic, the author questions: What drives hard-core entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Mark Zukerberg, Bill Gates, Ratan Tata, and Dhirubhai Ambani in their venture? The author aided with supporting research works exposes the truth by stating, “For ‘super-achieving’ entrepreneurs profit motive is not their ulterior motive in their entrepreneurship venture. But, they are characterised to possess higher need for achievement and interested in ‘excellence’ in their chosen area of expertise, than just being content with monetary rewards.”

The author while putting forth various leadership styles gives special emphasis on Transformation Leaders, who are in need of much demand in developing and changing societies like India. Transformation leaders are those who rise into prominence in times, especially when organisation faces change and transition. Such leaders exert considerable influence over their followers by imbibing on them a clear vision and they design and articulate to their followers the means of attaining the vision. Such leaders possess all enchanting charisma which gets expressed in their personality and interpersonal skills. Such leaders posses high consideration for their followers and they are highly proactive. Through their intellectual stimulation, the leader tries to initiates his followers to venture into new areas for solving their perplexing problems. Rhyming with the author’s claim that Transformation Leadership is in high demand in Indian Society, I will quote a saying by an anonymous writer, “Swami Vivekananda promised that he would bring change in the world, if ten highly motivated and determined youths are ready to follow his ideals. Look at current situation, we have more than ten determined and motivated youths to follow, but we lack single Swami Vivekananda to provide leadership!”

Giving some psychological touch in the economic sphere, the author describes the reason for failure of our development programmes, proposed soon after Independence. India initiated comprehensive development programmes for bringing wide scale social change and development. The programmes, designed by Economist and policy makers, focussed on ‘Village as prime factor for India’s development.’ They packed their ideologies and philosophies in the name of Five Year Plans and mechanistically enforced over nation with intention of bringing nation development. But, however, all attempts made by them fraught with failure and didn’t achieve the real expectations. The Psychologist, who critically analysed Economist Models found inherent contradictions with basic fundamentals of social change and development. They criticised it for lacking the basic concern for human factor in social change, participation of stake holders, centralised decision-making, and it was devoid of humanism in development.

The concept of social energy discussed by author, especially, validates itself in the background of current events like violence and riots raging in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries and Anti-corruptions movement in India. Such, collective behaviours by citizens in the form of social movements or social actions are driven by social energy. The author compares phenomenon by stating that ‘just like fossil fuel drives an automobile, the social energy drives the collective social actions.’ The source of origin of such social energies roots from extreme social deficit, high inequality, social dependency, social fallacy, etc, which exposes itself as social movements. The author advises the current political leadership for constructive use of social energies by providing proactive leadership through proper redirection or channelization of social energies towards super-ordinate social goals. Otherwise, they tend evolve as destructive forces and detrimental to our current social cohesion.

Describing every concept in brief and lucid manner, the author has covered every ideas of applied psychology with parallel connection with current social, economic, political and individual problems and he guides the reader by providing constructive solutions. As a whole, the 384 page book will provide the reader an edifying and enjoyable experience in psychology, as such.

ASHOK KURIEN – DYSLEXIC ACHIEVER

The oft-repeated principle, “Failures are stepping stone of success,” gets validated number of times when we look into histories. To further fortify the Universal Principle, we look into a life of man, who endured failures with determination all his young age to taste the sweet of success at later age. His failures which knock down him are listed below,

1. His educated mother was a teacher and the Head of the English Department of Bombay University, but, he was inept to even step up just one step higher from the lowest grade in his class.

2. His neural muscles couldn't understand simple arithmetic and he often made mistakes in simple spellings. He was not able to comprehend complex scientific concepts, principles and remember long numbers.

3. He repeatedly faced corporal punishments in his classes, at home, and even within his peer group leader, perfects. He was criticised dumb, stupid, useless, worthless, waste, etc, which killed his motivation to ashes.

4. Failing in his Seventh and Ninth grade, made him to study with comparatively younger students. Continuous abuses and punishments made him a rebel, aggressive and addict to alcohol and drugs. He was even placed behind bars for his negative social relationship.

5. In college, he was not able clear even single semester without bunch of arrears. So, he was able to graduate only at the age of 27.

6. In professional circles, he was not able to assimilate various marketing strategies discussed by his colleagues. So, they dumped down him as "useless and worthless," killing up his spirits.

With such negative profile, depressive experiences at his back of his definition, Mr. Ashok Kurien, now at the age of Sixties, is the founder of famous Advertising company, Ambience (famous for its Ad campaigns, like Thumps Up “Taste the Thunder”, Lakme, etc.). He was the co-founder India’s first private television entertainment channel, Zee TV. He was the motivating force behind the success of Playwin, India’s first online lottery and soul behind popular DishTV service.

How the phoenix, Mr. Ashok Kurien, was able to surge from the ‘ashes of criticisms’ to the ‘riches of achievements.’ The secret of success was due his attitude to configure his negatives into his strengths, which unfurl successes and riches. His stepping stones of success are listed below,

1. Though termed incompetent in terms of contemporary educational system, he was able to recognise and focus on his strength without caring his criticised weakness. His aggressive nature and acuity in sports made him the Gym captain, the boxing captain and the sports captain within his school sports circle. This sportive attitude helped him to look all failures and criticisms as challenges.

2. Before earning his degree, he performed several mundane jobs which helped him to understand the basic marketing tactics within various strata of consumer levels, from bottom poor households to rich industrial houses.

3. Understanding his impotence in learning complex concepts, he designed strategies to disintegrate complex terms into simple notions. For instance, he developed a strategy of clearing one or two papers in a semester in college examinations rather than facing all papers in a time through his “Break-it-down” strategy. He began to understand slowly his creative or lateral thinking abilities, which rarely endowed in other people. Rather than caught with his negativities, he was able to mull over his strengths.

4. With his knowledge of marketing behaviours, his “Out-of-Box” creative thinking, and “Break-it-down” strategies, he was able to provide solutions to various problematic phenomenons, with simple, creative and original solutions, which were rarely provided by others.

5. He recognised Partnership or Team Work. He never did anything alone, he performed task only with his partners. He believed that “If your partner’s strengths are your weaknesses and if your partner’s weaknesses are your strengths, then you have a team that is extremely powerful because there is no conflict or differences.”

Dare to face his negatives, critics, and failures, Mr. Ashok Kurien, after his unprecedented success, was identified as “Dyslexic” or “Learning Disability” by an expert in ‘Learning Disability.’ Thanked for delayed identification of his weakness, he replied enthusiastically, “All the drive to succeed in my life would have dried up, if I had known about the disability early in my life. Thank God! I owe all my success to my Dyslexia.”

SHORT STORY: GOD’S GUIDANCE PRINCIPLE

A lone man suddenly rose from deep slumber and was shocked to find his house blazing with fire everywhere. He peeped through window for help and found surprisingly, the God standing near his house. He was a stern believer in God and spent all his life in devotion to the Ultimate Saviour. He implored God to save his life from the flaring fire. But, the God was careless of his earnest demand and was engrossed on something. Got Anger on God and felt that it is of no use of depending on God, the man searched for some tools to escape. He found a fire extinguisher lying near him and he used it to escape through an opening. Infuriated with anger for not showing blessing on his ardent devotee, he disrespected the God, “I wasted my whole life on praying and propagating your greatness! How cruel your nature is!” But, the empathetic God replied in calm and benevolence, “Courageous child! Foreseeing the problem, it was I who placed the fire extinguisher in your room a day before.”

Many times, bad experiences perceived from high cognizance turn out to be a perfect protection of the Infinite Potential. Our constrained knowledge and intelligence fails to gain awareness of guidance mechanism of the Omnipotent’s influence on us. The God’s guidance on earthly beings is based on his fundamental intention of holistic growth of his children in their lifetime. The challenges experienced by living organisms on earth can be considered as a basic training or teaching exercise of God. Those, who endure the training or challenges, successfully emerge, exist and succeed in life. The rest, failing organisms, impotent to endure the challenges are wiped out without consideration. In scientific terms, it may be called, “survival of fittest.”

Perfection, Individuality, Autonomy, Confidence, Patience, truth, courage to face life and clarity in thinking are the characteristics the Omniscience tries to imbibe on us and he expects his children to develop into complete enriched beings on earth.

The core concept expressed in the words of Swami Vivekananda: “If you have faith in all the three hundred and thirty millions of your mythological gods and still have no faith in yourselves, there is no salvation for you. Have faith in yourselves, and stand up on that faith and be strong; that is what we need.” So, the God guidance intention can be summarised as ‘a phenomenon of gradual development of autonomy in living beings by increasing the faith on their resources and abilities, with Almighty’s protection working background.’

EXPLAINING THE UNEXPLAINED – '3 IDIOTS' PHILOSOPHY

Social Psychology supports that, people, a main component of society, are influenced and influence the social environment. The influence occurs through the forces of relationships, culture, customs, social ethics, etc, and leaves substantial impact over every ingredient of our life. Though, social influence is a life-supporting factor and has positive contribution in our life, astoundingly, they are problematic too, if we are just a passive recipient of such social influence. Negative impact becomes obvious overtly, during selection of our professional career, when it is just based on social imposition of parents, relatives, friends, social factors, attractiveness, etc. This fundamental mistake we make at young age, spew out ill-effects that resurface frequently to disturb us rest of the life. This ‘ignorance’ holds the sole responsibility for the talent-crunch that has engulfed the Employment Sector and various others field in India. This lead to human resource with misgivings like: Workforce with mediocre performance, talents and knowledge; people afflicted with stress and life-style diseases; lack of interdependence (relationship problems); drug dependency and abuse; crimes, etc.

The solution to the problem dwells in proper understanding of human nature. Human Psychology edifies our intellect with ‘wisdom’ which subscribes that our career selection shouldn’t be just a social imposition through parents, relatives, friends, social factors, attractiveness, etc, but one that provides us joy, pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfilment. The appreciation of above concept requires understanding the innate nature of human mind. Basically, humans are satisfaction seekers. They have deep inner ‘urges’ or ‘drives’ or ‘desires’ and they interact with environment to satisfy it. Satisfaction of urges gives him a sense of pleasure or happiness or joy. The people strive to gratify their urges by performing various activities in their lifetime. The important feature is that ‘People differ in wide ways in satisfying their urges, and it is based on the difference existing in their Genes.’ For instance, some people enjoy reading and writing books or blogs, some satiate their urge by playing games or hard exercises, some derive pleasure by working on music or singing, some get mesmerised in their research works or engineering, etc. The action which brings us joy is called ‘Source of Satisfaction.’ Thus, every individual has unique characteristics of satisfying their urges and it differs from individual to individual.

Problem occurs when we select our career which is highly incompatible with our ‘Source of Satisfaction.’ The career, which is incompatible with our Source of Satisfaction, will never act as a source of pleasure or joy and thus, we start to allocate limited time in performing it and get ranked as ‘mediocre performers.’ Following this, majority of young people fail to identify their core ‘Source of Satisfaction’ and develop coping mechanism to derive pleasure through mundane habits or physical sensations. This will lead to talent-crunch in the field they could specialise, that is, their Source of Satisfaction activity. Others, small portion of population, fortunate enough to identify their Core Competence (Source of Satisfaction), divert their career into their Pleasure Source and get ranked as ‘super performers.’

The above philosophy forms the core idea of the 3 Idiots film, one of the best films in Indian film industry, released sometime back. Raju Hirani, the director of 3 Idiots, centres the film with the above “Career Philosophy,” which is engraved spectacularly in every component of the movie. The Career Philosophy is: “Never select your career on basis of social or family imposition. Rather, select the one which ‘you’ find the most suitable, matching and enjoyable. This is the secret behind every super-achiever.”

The above truth is validated, when we interact with star performers in various fields. It will be the source of their success. To quote one instance, a friend of Thomas Alva Edison, once asked Edison, “You must have worked hard day and night for making such a historical invention of Electric Lamp!” Edison replied, “You have mistaken my work. Really, I enjoyed day and night before inventing the Electric Lamp. Because, I love researching and working with materials.” Research was the ‘Source of Satisfaction’ for Edison and selecting properly his career begot success in form of 1,093 US Patents, which remains unchallenged by any other inventor.

PERCEPTION - CONTROLLER OF OUR DESTINY

“We are creator or destroyer of our own destiny,” the common phrase found in most books on Self-Development. It views humans as an active agent of his life and capable of constructing his own experiences out of external real-life experiences. Earthly experiences can be considered as an unprocessed sender of data but humans are active, process-abled recipients of the data. It means that world experiences before reaching us may be either positive or negative, but, once it reaches us, we have ultimate ‘decision making power’ to allow the influence to impinge us positively or negatively. Thus, the phrase “we are the creator or destroyer of our own destiny” validates itself.

This is not a human formulated principle. It is innate, natural, universal phenomenon of human science. Ancient Indian Rishis and Gurus have recognized this super-competence of humans and reflected it in their writings. Recently, Psychologists acknowledging the above concept have described the complex phenomenon in terms of “Perception.” They portray Perception process into various stages as step-wise process.

Human Perceptual Experience can be divided into three stages: 1. Sensation Stage, 2. Attention Stage, and 3. Perception Stage. Each stage performs specific functions and the external experience (data) reaches our consciousness after traversing through the three stages in an orderly manner. The data flowing through ‘mental medium’ is considered as a complex mixture of the basic forms like visual images, sounds, taste, feelings, smell, etc. These basic constituents form a complex aggregation called Gestalt in our consciousness, thus creating complete, real world experience. (E.g. Reading – visual images of letters, Success – sound of appreciation and images as our status in ranking list)

External world experiences (i.e. Data) reaches our sense organs in an uncontrolled manner forming the Sensation Stage Process. The basic sensory receivers represent our sense of vision, smell, taste, sound, etc.

The Attention Stage, second stage of processing, can be compared with “Control Valve” in mechanical terms. Even though, we have the ability to control the valve, the control is partial and many times captivating data easily passes through the control valve to reach third stage. In reality, hundreds of data reach our senses every second, but, attention process limit the number of data to flow to next stage.

The third stage of human perception, the Perception Stage is a complex process, and it is a prerogative of individual. It is the most important stage that distinguishes Humans from other animals. The Perception process invoke our intelligence, our memory, our learning, our motivation, our attitude, values, beliefs, etc, stored in our Brain and act on the incoming data to form “well processed information.” This processed information in our conscious mind represents our understanding of our world.

Since, intelligence, memory, learning and motivation differ in quantity and quality across individuals, the interpretation of incoming data varies across individuals in quantity and quality wise. Because of highly subjective perception process, two individual encountering similar life experiences view it differently. For example, a person with pure knowledge, positive attitude, and purified memory, views even a negative experience in a positive manner.

Thus, our memory, our intelligence, our learning, our motivation, our attitudes, our values, etc, has to be enriched with positive principles based on pure knowledge. For this, initially, we have to control the basic elements of sensual inputs i.e. images, sounds, smell, feelings, etc. Later, our brain can be enriched by reading books with positive outlook on life, avoiding captivating images and sounds, meditation (which helps easier control of senses), relationship with noble people and minds, etc.

With this knowledge, we could assert intelligently that “We are the creator or destroyer of our own destiny. Since the prerogative of selection exist in my mind.”