Affect, Belief, and the Arts
Frontiers in Psychology December 2, 2021 Rami Gabriel 8 citations
Spiritual emotions generated through imaginative culture—myth, ritual, and art—help fix metaphysical beliefs by making certain information feel salient and true. Evolved affective systems are domesticated through social practices, adapting people to cooperative group life. Conditioning, symbols, and language bond groups via shared imaginative formats. Art, as a form of self-knowledge, provides motivated understanding of oneself in the world. In sacred states produced by arts and religious acts, affect infuses experience with a noetically distinct sense of meaning, making humans attentive to subtle signs and broad truths. This salience, saturated with emotion and alterity, becomes the basis for belief fixation. The theory draws on mimetic arts and arts of immanence to explain how sensible affective knowledge is mediated through affective systems, direct perception, and imagination.