Humans around the world use narrative art as storage of information about local moral norms which coordinate their social living, and also as a tool to criticize and transgress them. However, scientific literature often mentions narrative art rather as a side note that is sketched and not developed in-depth. To further our understanding, Horský developed an interdisciplinary and integrative account of the role of narrative art in the acquisition of moral information.
In the first part of the paper, Horský claims that narrative art plays an important role in shaping the moral outlook of its recipients. In the second part of this paper, he analyzes American rap music as a case study of one contemporary type of narrative art. Horský argues that rap music, due to its massive popularity, repeated consumption, and harnessing of the influence of several transmission biases, constitutes an especially fruitful object for the study of the cultural transmission of value systems through narrative art forms.
You can find the paper here:
https://brill.com/view/journals/jocc/22/3-4/article-p264_5.xml
Recent article in journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, where LEVYNA members contributed data, asks whether religious denominations accumulate gradually or are generated in rapid bursts associated with specific historical events.
A recently published qualitative study by Jana Nenadalová explores Dark therapy, an alternative spiritual practice combining prolonged sensory deprivation with guidance from an authority figure, to understand how religious and spiritual experiences are induced. Drawing on predictive processing theory, the research shows that complete darkness can trigger intense psychological and perceptual phenomena, especially when participants feel a sense of control and bring expectations or prior beliefs into the experience.
