Thammasat University students who are interested in philosophy, religion, ethics, education, art, gender studies, sociology, psychology, allied health sciences and related subjects may find two new Open Access books available for free download useful.
Queer Compassion in 15 Comics is edited by Phillip Joy and others.
The Seven Virtues of Highly Compassionate People: Tools for Cultivating a Life of Harmony and Joy is by Nancy Guerra and Kirk R. Williams.
The TU Library collection includes a number of other books on different aspects of compassion.
Assistant Professor Phillip Joy teaches applied human nutrition at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
His book gathers comics by artists from India, Greece, Scotland, Canada, and the United States of America, on the theme of compassion.
In Buddhism, compassion means to wish others to be free from suffering.
Compassion is associated with loving kindness, and the wish for others to be happy.
Around the world, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer/questioning, asexual and other (LGBTIQA+) are subjected to violence, bigoted laws, conversion therapies, and death. Assistant Professor Joy notes that even in LGBTIQA+ communities, some people face discrimination, racism, and colonialism.
In 2021, Dr. Phrakhru Pariyattiphatcharadhamma of Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University at Wat Mahathat Yuwaratrangsarit in Bangkok and at Wang Noi in Ayutthaya Province, published an article on Creating Motivation for Compassion in Thai Society According to Buddhist Principles.
He observed that according to Buddhist beliefs, true love has the power to create great virtue, and the spread of compassion, with people treating each other with kindness and gentleness, provides hope for world peace one day.
For this reason, Thai Buddhists are familiar with the spread of compassion and practice it on a daily basis.
Monks and laypersons finish their prayers with a message of compassion.
They point out that the Buddha had compassion for all animals, and not just humans.
In the Vinaya Piṭaka, the first of the three divisions of the Tripiṭaka, the canonical collection of scripture of Theravada Buddhism, there are stories of his compassion for elephants and monkeys.
This appreciation for life means that humans should be kind to animals, which helps prevent the extinction of animals.
By not killing animals for sport or other trivial reasons, we follow the message of compassion that is expressed in this book.
Emerita Professor Nancy Guerra taught psychological science at the School of Social Ecology of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), the United States of America.
Emeritus Professor Kirk Williams taught criminology, law and society at UCI.
The authors note:
We often focus on how we differ from others and what divides us either as individuals or based on the groups we belong to.
But the truth is, we have many more commonalities than differences.
We all need and want many of the same things, for example, food, shelter, safety, good health, recognition, companionship, love, and purpose come to mind.
And we all suffer when these needs are not met.
As the 14th Dalai Lama has said:
Whether we like it or not, we have all been born into this world as part of one great human family. Rich or poor, educated or un‑educated, belonging to one nation or another, to one religion or another, adhering to this ideology or that, ultimately each of us is just a human being like everyone else. We all desire happiness and do not want suffering.
Every single person on this planet has good days and bad days, successes and failures.
Professors Guerra and Williams coauthored with others an article published in School Psychology Quarterly in 2010, a publication of the American Psychological Association, Predictors of Bullying and Victimization in Childhood and Adolescence: A Meta-analytic Investigation.
The article’s abstract:
Research on the predictors of 3 bully status groups (bullies, victims, and bully victims) for school-age children and adolescents was synthesized using meta-analytic procedures. The primary purpose was to determine the relative strength of individual and contextual predictors to identify targets for prevention and intervention. Age and how bullying was measured were also considered as moderators. From an original pool of 1,622 studies conducted since 1970 (when research on bullying increased significantly), 153 studies were identified that met criteria for inclusion. A number of common and unique predictors were found for the bully status groups. The implications of the meta-analytic findings for future research on bullying and victimization prevention and intervention are discussed.
The article begins:
Prevention of childhood aggression has long been considered an important social and clinical problem.
In recent years, emphasis has shifted somewhat, particularly for school-based programs, to understanding and preventing a specific form of aggression labeled bullying.
This shift becomes evident when one examines the publication trends from 1980 to 2009. Whereas there were fewer than 190 peer-reviewed articles published on bullying during the 20-year span from 1980 to 2000, there have been well over 600 articles published on this topic from 2000 to the present time.
Bullying has been conceptualized as a distinct type of aggression characterized by a repeated and systematic abuse of power.
In addition to acts of deliberate physical aggression, bullying also includes verbal aggression (e.g., name calling and threats), relational aggression (e.g., social isolation and rumor spreading), and cyber-aggression (e.g., text messaging and e-mailing hurtful messages or images), a new venue for inflicting harm in an increasingly electronic youth culture.
Because bullying involves a bully and a victim, early research tended to dichotomize children into one of these two mutually exclusive groups. However, there also appears to be a third group of bully victims who both bully and are bullied by others, although children typically fall along a bully–victim continuum.
Research indicates that between 10% and 30% of children and youth are involved in bullying, although prevalence rates vary significantly as a function of how bullying is measured.
Bullying also increases during the middle school period as children enter adolescence. Moreover, bullying is not an isolated problem unique to specific cultures but is prevalent worldwide, as evidenced by a large international research base.
Concerns about prevalence are magnified by concerns about the consequences of bullying for children’s adjustment. Adverse behavioral and psychological outcomes have been found across the three bully status groups. For instance, studies have shown that bullies are significantly more likely to be convicted of a criminal offense when they are adults than their noninvolved peers. Bullies appear to be at heightened risk for experiencing psychiatric problems, and substance abuse problems.
Victims of bullying often suffer long-term psychological problems, including loneliness, diminishing self-esteem, psychosomatic complaints, and depression. […]
The purpose of this study was to conduct a meta-analysis to examine factors that predict bullying and victimization in childhood and adolescence across multiple investigations. A sufficient number of studies have been conducted to support systematic review of predictors. Thirteen predictors were identified in the extant literature.
Eight represented characteristics of individuals, and five represented contextual factors.
Although not exhaustive, these 13 predictors provided sufficient coverage of constructs examined in previous bullying research most relevant for the development of prevention and intervention programs. The emphasis of previous research on bullying has been on individual-level predictors. However, by definition, bullying occurs in a social context where individuals are engaged in ongoing relationships. Without a social context, repeated aggressive acts toward others are not possible.
Hence, a related focus of the present meta-analysis was to evaluate the relative strength of effect sizes across individual and contextual predictors. Several individual-level predictors have received attention in the literature, which include gender, externalizing behaviors, internalizing behaviors, self-related cognitions, other-related cognitions, social problem solving, and academic performance.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)