The Role of Personality In Moving Encounters with Sacred Art

In Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, the material world is understood to contain access points to the transcendent. An icon may move the awestruck believer to emotional engagement and reflection on moral and religious themes. Personality dispositions potentiating the experience of being moved in religious aesthetic contexts have not been thoroughly studied. The present article describes the development and testing of a cross-sectional study into potential belief and personality-related predictors of being moved by sacred art in a lab environment evocative of a holy site. Ninety (90) Christians in Canada and Greece completed personality measures and viewed and rated thematically matched Latin and Byzantine icons. Findings suggest impacts of attachment, imaginativeness, and traditional vs. mystical dispositions in resonance with sacred art, and point to a secure, mystically oriented perceiver. Those who tended towards structured religious lives also presented with a personality profile favouring logical problem-solving. The paradigm applied the social psychological tradition of an evocative lab situation and use of psychometric tests to pressing questions in aesthetics and transpersonal psychology. This study offers a replicable methodology, inviting further empirical inquiry into the experiential texture of being moved and predictive relationships among individual differences at play in moving encounters

Perspectives théoriques et empiriques sur la peinture impressionniste

Cupchik Gerald C. Perspectives théoriques et empiriques sur la peinture impressionniste. In: Bulletin de psychologie, tome 30 n°329, 1977. Nouvelles perspectives en psychologie de l'art. pp. 720-729

A Synthetic World Population for Agent-Based Social Simulation

pplapi.com (pronounced “people API”) is a web-based data service that provides access to a synthetic world population, n = 7,171,922,938. Researchers can submit queries to pplapi.com using its Application Programming Interface (API) to obtain samples consisting of synthetic agents drawn from this population. Because researchers do not need to host the synthetic population themselves, pplapi.com reduces start-up costs associated with using synthetic agents in research. pplapi.com provides a canonical namespace for Agent Based Social Simulations, permitting comparisons between models implemented with disparate modeling frameworks and programming languages

The Ends Justify the Memes

This talk presents an update on my research into memes.  It begins with an introduction to memes that is suitable for any audience.  It concludes with a detailed description of human research and simulation results that converge with one another.  I also present a short online study on email forwarding chains