How do people describe the effect of prolonged visual deprivation? What special experiences do they describe, and how are experiences connected to—or created by—their personal and cultural context? What is the precise role of the Dark therapy guides as authority figures concerning the form and the whole process of Dark therapy experience?
Jana‘s project will focus on qualitative field research of religious experiences related to the “alternative spirituality” cultural context under the predictive processing framework. She will be using “spiritual experience” as a respective kind of religious experience to describe experiences that are widely cultivated and highly valued in the specific context of alternative spirituality.
Importantly for the cognitive research on religious experience, it is crucial to investigate the effects of prolonged sensory deprivation within their cultural context as such analysis can productively address possible shortcomings in both the framework of predictive processing theory of religious experience and experimental practice.
In a paper published in Religion, Brain & Behavior, J. Nenadalová & D. Řezníček demonstrated that some study participants in a sensory-deprived laboratory environment sensed the presence of another person. This feeling was mostly associated with perceived uncertainty and only somewhat associated with psychological dispositions.
In a cross-national investigation published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, F. M. Saxler with LEVYNA’s E. Kundtová Klocová and other colleagues show that the COVID-19 pandemic affected young people’s normative beliefs about unpaid domestic work; and that this effect is stronger in countries with greater gender inequality.
