What is the naturalistic basis of theological interpretation?
October 2017
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Journal article
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Religion Brain & Behavior
5004 Religious Studies, 5005 Theology, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies
The deification of historical figures and the emergence of priesthoods as a solution to a network coordination problem
October 2016
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Journal article
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Religion Brain & Behavior
5004 Religious Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies
Higher-order mentalising and executive functioning
June 2015
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Journal article
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Personality and Individual Differences
Higher-order mentalising is the ability to represent the beliefs and desires of other people at multiple, iterated levels — a capacity that sets humans apart from other species. However, there has not yet been a systematic attempt to determine what cognitive processes underlie this ability. Here we present three correlational studies assessing the extent to which performance on higher-order mentalising tasks relates to emotion recognition, self-reported empathy and self-inhibition. In Study 1a and 1b, examining emotion recognition and empathy, a relationship was identified between individual differences in the ability to mentalise and an emotion recognition task (the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task), but no correlation was found with the empathy quotient, a self-report scale of empathy. Study 2 investigated whether a relationship exists between individual mentalising abilities and four different forms of self-inhibition: motor inhibition, executive inhibition, automatic imitation and temporal discounting. Results demonstrate that only temporal discounting performance relates to mentalising ability; suggesting that cognitive skills relevant to representation of the minds of others' are not influenced by the ability to perform more basic inhibition. Higher-order mentalising appears to rely on the cognitive architecture that serves both low-level social cognition (emotion recognition), and complex forms of inhibition.
mentalising, empathy, inhibition, social networks, executive functioning, social cognition
Women favour dyadic relationships, but men prefer clubs: cross-cultural evidence from social networking
March 2015
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Journal article
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PLoS ONE
The ability to create lasting, trust-based friendships makes it possible for humans to form large and coherent groups. The recent literature on the evolution of sociality and on the network dynamics of human societies suggests that large human groups have a layered structure generated by emotionally supported social relationships. There are also gender differences in adult social style which may involve different trade-offs between the quantity and quality of friendships. Although many have suggested that females tend to focus on intimate relations with a few other females, while males build larger, more hierarchical coalitions, the existence of such gender differences is disputed and data from adults is scarce. Here, we present cross-cultural evidence for gender differences in the preference for close friendships. We use a sample of ∼112,000 profile pictures from nine world regions posted on a popular social networking site to show that, in self-selected displays of social relationships, women favour dyadic relations, whereas men favour larger, all-male cliques. These apparently different solutions to quality-quantity trade-offs suggest a universal and fundamental difference in the function of close friendships for the two sexes.
SBTMR
Social Psychology and the Comic-Book Superhero: A Darwinian Approach
October 2014
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Journal article
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Philosophy and Literature
Why is the comic-book superhero such a persistent topic of cultural representation? Citing Dutton’s evolutionary aesthetic, we argue that comic-book superheroes persist because they offer a cultural means of negotiating the gap between the small group size that human beings have evolved a cognitive architecture to deal with, and the much larger group size that is entailed by modern social arrangements. This position implies four predictions: the superhero should (1) exhibit punitive prosociality, (2) be supernatural or quasi-supernatural, (3) be minimally counterintuitive and (4) display kin-signalling proxies. These predictions are tested against seventeen superhero figures from various comic-book universes.
Comic-book, Cultural Studies, Evolutionary Psychology, Narrative, Cognition and Culture
Inference or enaction? The impact of genre on the narrative processing of other minds.
January 2014
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Journal article
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PloS one
Do narratives shape how humans process other minds or do they presuppose an existing theory of mind? This study experimentally investigated this problem by assessing subject responses to systematic alterations in the genre, levels of intentionality, and linguistic complexity of narratives. It showed that the interaction of genre and intentionality level are crucial in determining how narratives are cognitively processed. Specifically, genres that deployed evolutionarily familiar scenarios (relationship stories) were rated as being higher in quality when levels of intentionality were increased; conversely, stories that lacked evolutionary familiarity (espionage stories) were rated as being lower in quality with increases in intentionality level. Overall, the study showed that narrative is not solely either the origin or the product of our intuitions about other minds; instead, different genres will have different-even opposite-effects on how we understand the mind states of others.
Cohort Studies, Language, research-article, Linear Models, Male, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, Humans, Young Adult, Journal Article, Female, Verbal Behavior, Electronic Mail, Cognition, Models, Psychological, Narration, Theory of Mind
Some previously unrecognised references to classical historians in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s The last man
January 2014
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Journal article
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Notes & Queries
‘We are all Greeks,’ writes Percy Bysshe Shelley (PBS) in the preface to ‘Hellas.’ Given the systematic attempts by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (MWS) to exorcise the post-mortem influence of her husband, we should not be surprised to find that this claim, too, is interrogated in her fiction. Throughout <em>The Last Man</em>, MWS subtly aligns the fate of plague stricken modernity with the collapse of progressive political institutions in the classical world. Though largely unrecognised, this usually occurs by way of implicit reference to the works of classical historians like Herodotus, Livy, Julius Obsequens and Dio Cassius. My goal here is to trace where these allusions occur and comment on the polemical ends to which they are subordinated. Inevitably, however, this project must also form part of a broader critical enterprise that seeks to delineate the influence of antiquity on the second generation Romantics.
Last man (Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft), Allusions in literature, Historians, Greece, Rome
Supernatural intuitions and classic detective fiction: a cognitivist appraisal
January 2014
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Journal article
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Style
Can detective fiction be illuminated by the psychology of religion? In this article I show (1) that classic detective fiction rhetorically accords the “privileged epistemic access” to mental states that we intuitively assign to punitive supernatural agents to the literary detective; and (2) that viewing the genre through this lens addresses several inconsistencies that have thus far resisted easy solution in the critical literature. I then make the argument (3) that this generic blurring results from competing historical pressures that simultaneously engendered greater levels of secularism and an increased propensity to believe in supernatural punishers in nineteenth century urban populations.
Intuition in literature, Supernatural in literature, Criticism, interpretation, etc., Psychology, Religious, in literature, Detective and mystery stories, English, Cognition in literature
Beckett Re-Membered: After the Centenary
January 2012
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Book
Beckett, Philosophy, Drama, Narrative, Poetry
Homo Hibernicus: Myth, Ethnography and Nationalism in Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran
January 2012
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Journal article
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Studies in Documentary Film
Why did Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran resonate so strongly with the cultural milieu of 1930s Ireland? I argue that Flaherty’s documentary, despite its mimetic intentions, has, in fact, the semiotic form of a foundation myth. A consequence of this, I suggest, was that Flaherty’s film would have been instrumental in activating nationalist narratives of self-determination and colonial oppression that were then current in the nascent Irish State. Additionally, a subsidiary (and related) goal of my discussion is to show, by way of Flaherty’s film, that the documentary form is no less structured by normative cultural codes than its fictional counterparts.
Documentary, Flaherty, Ireland, Semiotics, Myth, Aran, Nationalism, Film
The Buzzing of B: The Subject as Insect in Beckett's Molloy
January 2012
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Chapter
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Beckett Re-Membered: After the Centenary
Beckett, Adorno, Matter, Animal, Ecocriticism
Advertising and the Predation Loop: A Biosemiotic Model
January 2008
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Journal article
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Biosemiotics
The basic premise of biosemiotics as a discipline is that there are elementary processes linking signifying strategies in all forms of animate life. Correspondingly, the discoveries of biosemiotics should, in principle, be capable of
revealing new insights about human signification. In the present article, I show that this is in fact the case by constructing a biosemiotic model that links advertising strategies with corresponding structures in animal predation. The methodological framework for this model is the catastrophe theory of René Thom. The end result is a revised understanding of an ostensibly cultural phenomenon that demonstrates its
continuity with signalling processes conventionally associated with the natural world.
Advertising, Biosemiotics, Catastrophe theory, René Thom
The Pangs of the Ulstermen: An Exchangist Perspective
January 2008
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Journal article
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Journal of Indo-European Studies
Why is Cú Chulainn exempt from the curse of Macha in Táin Bó Cuailgne? In the present article, I attempt to resolve the issue of Cú Chulainn’s exceptional status by nominating the curse of Macha and the naming of Cú Chulainn pre-narratives to the Táin as semantic inverses of each other. Specifically, I argue that the
former narrative depicts the breaking of a contract between the third functional group and the combined forces of the first and second functions in Georges Dumézil’s Indo-European social taxonomy; while the latter narrative, I suggest, charts the restoration of this same contract. On this basis, I then identify
Macha’s curse with the spiritual animation that, according to Marcel Mauss, accompanies all violations of social reciprocity.
'Unweaving the rainbow': The Semantic Organization of the Lyric
January 2008
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Journal article
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Journal of Literary Semantics: an international review
This article develops a semantic model of lyric poetry using the mathematical resources of René Thom’s catastrophe theory. In doing this, its central aim is to show that the semantic organization of the lyric can be understood as an
embryonic articulation of the basic actional competencies that underwrite narrative expression. In terms of detail, the model shows that any lyric can be conceived as a system involving three macro-structural components (the
speaker’s consciousness, an indifferent or hostile environment and a desired object) whose reciprocal interactions define what Thom identifies as a cusp catastrophe. In turn, this catastrophist system is shown to correspond with
A. J. Greimas’ notion of a narrative program, and thus narrative is identified as the superimposition of numerically different lyrical trajectories upon one another. The end result of this is a revised understanding of lyrical semantics that postulates a commonality in how both lyric and narrative refer to the world.