Reminder: Research Theories of Personality Traits

Rogers and Maslow
Environment enforces abilities

Book: "Flow" Psychology of Optimal Experiences

You Lookin At Me?

Twenty volunteers looked at faces with exaggerated or reduced male or female features. The faces had been digitally morphed to look either more or less masculine or feminine.

As the faces flashed on a computer screen, the volunteer was supposed to hit a key as quickly as possible to indicate whether the face was looking at or away from him or her.

Both women and men reacted more quickly when the face had exaggerated sexual characteristics.

"Women were quickest to classify gaze direction when they were looking at hunky, masculine-looking guys. Guys were quicker when they were looking at pretty, feminine women," Jones said.

Brain and Cognition

I believe this can be argued till the death. A good thing to try and prove positive or negative.


"There are two reflexive attention systems: one that is mediated subcortically and triggered by abrupt onsets; and one that is mediated cortically and triggered by perceived gaze direction. Moreover, our findings add to a growing body of evidence that reflexive shifts of attention in response to gaze direction are cortically mediated."
(Chris Kelland Friesena,*, Chris Mooreb, Alan Kingstonec)

Men and the Female form

"According to the study men take the same pleasure out of looking at an attractive female form as they do from having a curry or making money whereas women do not take any significant reward from looking at pictures of men."

Direct Gaze

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080813095722.htm

"The results of the research, which measured the function of the brain’s frontal lobes by means of electroencephalography (EEG), indicate that during the observation of a direct gaze the left frontal lobe of the test subjects was more active than the right frontal lobe. During the observation of an averted gaze the situation was opposite. The left-dominated activation asymmetry is linked to an approach and the right-dominated to avoidance. This was the first time it was shown through physiological measurements that another person’s gaze direction affects brain systems that are involved in the regulation of fundamental human motivational reactions."

Gaze and Beauty

http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/12457
"The findings show that human preferences may be more fundamentally tied to "feedback" between the very act of gazing and the internal, cognitive prototype of attractiveness than was formerly assumed. Earlier work by other researchers has relied on the "attractiveness template," which assumes that an individual's ideal conception of beauty has somehow been imprinted on his or her brain due to early exposures to other people's faces, such as the mother."

"The second experiment is "gaze manipulation," in which the faces are not shown simultaneously, but in sequences of varying duration on the two sides of the computer screen. In other words, one face was shown for a longer time (900 milliseconds) than the other face (300 milliseconds), and as a control, the faces were also shown to other subjects in the center of the screen in an alternating sequence."

Artists are Different

http://www.helium.com/items/1407392-what-makes-an-artist-different-from-the-average-person

An artist also asks the questions, " What is this and more importantly, why is this? What would happen if I changed just this one little thing?"

Eye tracking camera

http://painting.about.com/b/2007/03/18/artists-do-see-the-world-differently.htm

The researchers "argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces."

PSY View

http://www.sntp.net/psychology_definition.htm

There is constant activity within each of our "invisible worlds". We are each in some way constantly analyzing problems, entertaining thoughts of tomorrow's occurrences, recalling yesterday's failures, wallowing in the sadness of a loss, concentrating on the creation of a musical composition, or day-dreaming. There are ever changing feelings and emotions about everything we experience, and an endless parade of judgments and commentary about what we see. Actually, for many of us, we have too much mind. It goes on and on and never seems to stop. It is a constant source of images, memories and ideas intruding themselves upon our awareness. Most of us can't control any of this and simply accept as inevitable this continual parade of images and ideas appearing across the landscape of our mind.

Physics POV

http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/spirituality-consciousness-awareness/19399-where-do-souls-come-then.html

Would that then suggest that there's a finite amount of energy in our universe that's simply in a constant state of transition? That we are simply the current incarnation of some form of energy and that the universe itself is alive and we are all part of it?

Soul

http://www.psychicbutsane.com/the-universe-and-you/where-are-you-from

In fact, your soul is not really separate from you. It is you.

Soul into Being?

http://askville.amazon.com/soul/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=3770160

you now have an identity that is separate from your mother. The soul probably "grows" along with your ability to exercise free will over the years.

Inherited a soul?

http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1993/9306fea3.asp
WTF?!? Um... no...

If God creates the soul, he creates it in either a fallen or an unfallen state.

Artists Look Different

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/03/artists_look_different.php

We are not born "knowing", everything we know is learned.

"Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces."

Mastering the World of Psychology

1. Parietal Lobes: The lobes that contain the somatosensory cortex (where touch, pressure, temperature, and pain register) and other areas responsible for body awareness and spatial orientation.

2. The Right Hemisphere: The hemisphere that controls the left side of the body and in most people, is specialized for visual-spatial perception.

An Introduction to Brain and Behavior 9-10

1. Humanistic Psychology: focuses on the uniqueness of human beings and their capacity for choice, growwth, and psychological health.

2. Rene Descartes and Dualism: (1596-1650) Treatise on Man.
- He saw the mind and body as seperate but interconnected. "The mind and body must be joined and united to constitute people."

3. Dualism: philosophical position that behavior is controlled by two entities, the mind and the body.

A Natural History of the Senses

"The Painters Eye" p. 267-270

1. Merleau-Ponty describes, "If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must carry with it this invisible whole, or else his picture will only hint at things and will not give them the insurpassable plentitude which is for us the definition of the real."
2. Merleau-Ponty," Because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible how the world touches us."
3. According to Patrick Trevor-Roper, there is a myopic personality that artists, mathematicians and bookish people tend to share. They have "an interior life" differnt from others.