The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference: prospects and pitfalls for an emerging field

Neuroaesthetics is a young field of research concerned primarily with the neural basis of cognitive and affective processes engaged when an individual takes an aesthetic or artistic approach towards a work of art, a non-artistic object or a natural phenomenon. In September 2009, the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference brought together leading researchers in the field to present and discuss current advances. We summarize some of the principal themes of the conference, placing neuroaesthetics in a historical context and discussing its scope and relation to other disciplines. We also identify what we believe to be the key outstanding questions, the main pitfalls and challenges faced by the field, and some promising avenues for future research.     

Identifying Emergent Social Networks at a Federally Qualified Health Center-Based Farmers’ Market

Identifying potential mechanisms connecting farmers’ market interventions with health, economic, and community outcomes could inform strategies for addressing health disparities. The present study used social network theory to guide the in-depth examination of naturally occurring social interactions at a farmers’ market located at a federally qualified health center located in a rural, low-income community. Trained observers recorded 61 observation logs at the market over 18 weeks. Thematic analysis revealed a range of actors and nonhuman facilitators instrumental to the farmers’ market context. These actors connected with one another for communication and relationship development, economic and financial exchange, education, resource sharing, community ownership of the farmers’ market, and conflict resolution. These interactions provided opportunities for social networks to develop among attendees, which may have facilitated the acquisition of social supports related to improved health, economic and community outcomes. Results provide insight into the role social networks may play in mediating the relationship between a farmers’ market intervention and individual benefits. Findings also contribute to defining the typology of social networks, which may further disentangle the complex relationships between social networks and health outcomes. Future research should identify strategies for purposefully targeting social networks as a way to reduce diet-related health disparities.     

Flexibility and security? ‘Flexicurity’ and its implications for lifelong guidance

This article sets out to trigger research and policy attention among the career guidance community to the increasingly important notion of ‘flexicurity’. It first explores the different meanings of the term, particularly as these have evolved in discussions across the European Union. It then goes on to consider why ‘flexicurity’ has attracted so much policy interest, particularly in its promise to both support labour market competitiveness and increase economic efficiency on the one hand, while protecting the interests of workers on the other. Next, the article documents some of the key debates around the notion of flexicurity, highlighting the fact that any consideration of ‘flexicure’ arrangements needs to be empirically grounded in time and space, and carefully contextualised. The article concludes by making a series of critical reflections on the need to ‘insert’ career guidance in the European discourse on ‘flexicurity’.     

The Big Sleep

ABSTRACT

This paper illustrates the link between creativity and psychotherapy as an art. Clinical examples are given first, followed by significant events that affected this therapist's creative activities. Then personal views of creativity arc described with the conclusion showing different aspects of creativity as applicable to psychotherapy.     

科学创造力与艺术创造力:启动效应及领域影响

如何有效地提升创造力,是创造力研究和实践领域的核心问题之一.而对创造力表达及其影响机制的把握则是创造力提升的必要前提.本研究计划通过实施科学创造力及艺术创造力的启动实验,以不同专业大学生为被试,来探索科学创造力和艺术创造力表达的个体心理机制,及外部影响的作用模式,从而厘清在动机启动、样例启动和自我启动之间,究竟何种启动模式对创造力的表达最为有效;进而,通过对来自理工科和艺术专业领域评分者对科学创造力及艺术创造力作品的评分比较,来考查两种创造力模式间可能存在的领域影响.经由以上的探究,试图为科学与艺术创造力的发展与促进提供科学依据和建构理论框架.     

Potential: The valuation of imagined future achievement

The concept of potential is central to a number of decisions, ranging from organizational hiring, to athletic recruiting, to the evaluation of artistic performances. While potential may often be valued for its future payoffs, the present studies investigate whether people value potential even when making decisions about goods and experiences that can only be consumed in the present. Experiment 1 demonstrates that potential makes people more likely to consume inferior performances in the present. Experiment 2 manipulated temporal focus and demonstrates that focusing on the present (vs. the future) attenuates the effect of potential on enjoyment. Experiment 3 demonstrates that merely moving the performance into the past negates the effect of potential. And, Experiment 4 demonstrates that potential increases valuation only when value is tied to abstract, hedonic dimensions, but not when it is tied to concrete, utilitarian dimensions.     

Between art tourism and ‘Protestant pilgrimage’: individual journeys to artworks in two churches of Reformed denomination near Bern,Switzerland

ABSTRACT

Can an individual trip to an artwork in a Protestant church, that evokes experiences of transcendence, be understood as a ‘Protestant pilgrimage’? The question is discussed with a historical example from the eighteenth century and a contemporary example from the twenty-first century, both of which refer to the transcendental dimension of (religious) art and raise the question about the interrelationship between art tourism and pilgrimage. Although the motivation for such journeys is often aesthetic and not spiritual, visitors may be deeply touched by the artworks and experience feelings that transcend the mundane present. If these examples are considered as ‘pilgrimages’ (and not only in a merely metaphorical sense), attention must be paid to their ecumenical, potentially heterodox character. For in the Reformed tradition, the importance of the pilgrimage is the journey itself, and not the final destination.     

Constructing sacred space under the forces of the market: A study of an ‘upper-floor’ Protestant church in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, over half of the Protestant churches are located in the upper-floor units in commercial and residential buildings. Because of their physical locations, these churches are sometimes dubbed ‘upper-floor churches’. Unlike those that occupy stand-alone religious buildings or dwell in church-run schools and social service centres, these are often invisible in the landscapes of the city. Through analysis of a case study, this paper aims to explore the spatial practices that a Protestant community has adopted in acquiring, representing, and ritualising a business unit in a residential high-rise for building up their church. Our analysis of the case study shows that in a metropolis like contemporary Hong Kong, the construction of sacred space is full of tensions between utilitarian calculations and concerns of human relations and religious values. While the congregation had been very creative in transforming a commercial unit into a religious site, it did not show much awareness of the oppressive powers of the capitalist market and had a strong tendency to represent its spatial practices as commodities for consumption.     

The Turning of the Tide: Theology,Religion, and Economics1

Abstract : Although capitalist free market economics is in crisis, its assumptions continue to shape not only how we do business or politics but also how we think and feel, and even what we believe. For theologians and scholars of religion this means that we can no longer do our work without taking into consideration what is happening in the economy and how it affects us; before religion can become part of the solution we need to understand how it has become part of the problem. This article investigates how economics has shaped religion and theology and develops alternative perspectives.     

The Art of Sculpture: Jan Patočka’s Concept of Incarnate Being

Jan Pato?ka is known as a philosophical analyst of the phenomenological concept of the live-word (Lebenswelt), which contradicts the preoccupations expressed in Sir Herbert Read’s Art of Sculpture. This essay interprets Pato?ka’s “philosophy of sculpture” in the intellectual context of communist Czechoslovakia, arguing that he regarded sculpture as an incarnate being. His phenomenological interpretation defies all attempts to narrow such a being to the realm of mere haptic or visual sensibilities.