Why and how people perceive special anthropomorphic agents? How do gods and spirits become real for them? In her research, Jana will focus on the role of culture, which contextually specifies the forms that the special anthropomorphic agents can take in a given environment.
Relying on experimental manipulation, Jana plans to investigate how situational context and priming transform the anthropomorphic agents’ forms and the intensity of the encounter’s experience for people in a state of sensory deprivation. She expects that genetically inherited intuitions on the presence of predators and fear of them in combination with the sensory deprivation and semantic priming will lead to more frequent and more culturally specific experiences of special anthropomorphic agents.
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.
