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Literature Review #4



Citation:

 Pasricha, Satwant K. “Do Attitudes of Families Concerned Influence Features of Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives?” Indian Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 53, no. 1, Medknow Publications and Media Pvt. Ltd, 2011, pp. 21–24, doi:10.4103/0019-5545.75554.


Summary:

Pasricha used data collected from a child’s mother, outsiders, and the previous personalities’ families. Data was collected by a series of interviews in which attitudes and acceptance from these corresponding groups were organized. Out of the 292 mothers interviewed, 21% of them encouraged children to speak, and Pasricha saw that 28% of mothers to suppress or ridicule thoughts. The 51% of mothers remained neutral. For previous families, the majority of them (79%) believed in these cases. 14% were neutral in acceptance, and 7% rejected the claims overall. In terms of outsiders who added the attention, most people had moderate (43.25%) to little to none (41.67%) interaction with the two families involved in the case. 
In summation, the statistical data brought on by this study finds that the attitudes of people who are involved within these CORT cases do not get influenced to a point where individuals  could alter facts because mostly the data points towards a neutral understanding of the child’s position in which further stimulation to create/ falsify information is mainly not given. In terms of suppression, the author finds that while a child can tend to stop making references (which can be due to the physical non-violent, and violent methods which a child can receive), her other study which was conducted on a larger scale using this same data did not indicate any additional features to have changed.


Author: 

Influenced by the known pioneer Ian Stevenson, Satwant Pasricha is the head of the Department of Clinical Psychology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences at Bangalore. Her work includes being a member of 500 cases involving reincarnation amongst children. As her home base in India, she looks to find similarities or differences between children from a country relatively known for its belief in reincarnation against children from countries with a significant impression in it. Given her position and the many reports written with other well-known individuals in this field, Pasricha has sustained a high level of knowledge on reincarnation within children.


Key Terms:

Attitudes: how a person (parents, the family of past personalities, or outside influences) views this child’s remarks. Individuals can see this as both positive and negative.


CORT: acronym for cases of the reincarnation type the description when children present such symptoms are labeled as within her studies


Suppression: the act of using an negative attitude in addition to non-violent measures, such as rebuking or carrying out certain harmless rituals to violent measures 


Three Quotes:

“However, irrespective of the attitudes of the parents, of the previous families, or the outsiders, the features of the cases do not seem to get influenced” (Pasricha)


“Their features do not appear to be much altered by the measures taken to suppress memories of the previous life, although in some cases children stop making reference to a previous life even if they do remember some of it. Nor are their features changed by the parental guidance or modeled after the available cases.” (Pasricha)


“Subjects generally stop making spontaneous references to the previous lives between the ages of 5 and 8; they rarely continue to talk about that life beyond the age of 10. However their behavioral memories generally continue beyond their imaged memories.” (Pasricha)


Value:

Knowing that my cases had some form of suppression, like the act of telling the child that these aren’t real or even in other parts of the world where is this accepted, the main point that occurs is that no matter what attitude is placed on a child when they have experiences of this past life there is nothing that either reduces their memory or supports the socio-physiological hypothesis.

 

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