Attachment with altruistic others requires the ability to appropriately process affiliative and kind facial cues. Yet there is no stimulus set available to investigate such processes. Here, we developed a stimulus set depicting compassionate and critical facial expressions, and validated its effectiveness using well-established visual-probe methodology. In Study 1, 62 participants rated photogr...

This review essay surveys recent literature in the history of science, literary theory, anthropology, and art criticism dedicated to exploring how the artificial life enterprise has been inflected by--and might also reshape--existing social, historical, cognitive, and cultural frames of thought and action. The piece works through various possible interpretations of Kevin Kelly's phrase "life is...

The multiple historical layers of Roger Chillingworth's character have been overlooked in criticism of The Scarlet Letter. By considering the possible influence of Robert Browning's dramatic poem Paracelsus (1835) on Hawthorne's romance (1850), as well as the ways in which overtones of both herbalism and clinical medicine complicate Chillingworth's character, one rediscovers Chillingworth as Ha...

Composers working with text-based software synthesis languages (such as the “Music N” languages) tend to produce rich documentation of their compositional process as a byproduct of their work. This evidence, in the form of custom programs and synthesis specifications, documents the technical means of a work’s realization; insights into the composer’s creative process may be extended if multiple...

Most of the literary theorists and critics of classical antiquity who are still studied today – Plato, Aristotle, ‘Longinus’, and a few others – are Greeks. The Romans, who by reputation came late to literature and lacked a theoretical cast of mind, are not generally accorded a prominent place in the development of this discourse. Indeed, few surviving Roman texts address as their main topic th...