Bibliographic record
Abstract
SPIRIT POSSESSION: A PSYCHO-CULTURAL SYNDROME OF DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR The Voodoo trance represents the principal aspect of deviant behaviour among coloured people. This tricky phenomenon, always considered a challenge to any scientific explanation, was subjected to an experimental analysis. We wanted to find out what the trance performers have in common and to check whether a typical psychological structure could be associated with their deviant behaviour. The sample included forty-four subjects divided into three categories: a) a ritual group, b) a non-ritual group, c) a control group. No male subject was used because very few men are ever possessed by spirits. Every subject was submitted to a preliminary medical check-up (physical, neurological and laboratory tests), and to a series of psychological examinations (Raven, Goldstein-Scheerer, Sacks, Rorschach, autobiographical and personality questionnaires). The findings of the neurologist, the pathologist and the laboratory were completely negative as far as somatic predisposition to trance was concerned. But evidence of significant differences between the experimental and the control groups was demonstrated on the basis of personality tests and autobiographical questionnaires. Spirit possession, to be induced, requires not only specific conditioning experiences, but also a disturbed, anxious and depressed personality. The non-ritual form does not imply a higher degree of pathology. An intimate relationship between possession, states of depression and suicide has been indicated. The trance seems to be the only alternative for the neutralization of hostile feelings, either directed to the self or to others. The inhibitory effect of possession could finally prove to be a factor in reducing criminality in Haiti.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".