J Kjeldgaard-Christiansen
Biographic Data
| ID | 52755 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Kjeldgaard-Christiansen |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Kjeldgaard-Christiansen |
| SIGNATURE | KJELDGAARD-CHRISTIANSEN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5270-4531 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Kurt Gray, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground
Wrestling Voices: Amplifying Patriotism and Ethnic Stereotypes in 1980s American Professional Wrestling
This article examines the use of promotional interviews (“promos”) in American professional wrestling of the 1980s. I argue that promos introduced a vocal modality into a form of sports entertainment that, as Roland Barthes ([1957] 1972) showed in Mythologies , had always been dominated by visual spectacle. I then undertake a focused linguistic and auditory analysis of promos made by two wrestlers: the Iranian Iron Sheik and his American opponent…
Speaking “Evil”: Quantifying Donald Trump’s Demonization of Political Opponents and Other Targets
American presidents have frequently invoked the concept of evil to condemn foreign enemies: Ronald Reagan, for example, denounced the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, and George W. Bush grouped Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” This study analyzes Donald J. Trump’s historically distinctive use of the term. A structured typology was used to code 750 public instances in which Trump employed the word evil between 2015 and 2025. Dev…
Three Conceptions of Culture
I found much to agree with in Hogan’s wide-ranging essay, particularly concerning an explanatory overreliance on “culture” in literary and more broadly humanistic research. However, I want here to suggest that Hogan conflates two misconceptions of culture against which a modern, biocultural perspective supplies a more adequate and explanatory alternative.As referenced by Hogan, the first misconception of culture is “as if it were some sort of enc…
The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories
Why is there so much diversity in fictional plots? Why are some fictional stories more popular in certain countries or during specific historical periods? In this paper, we propose an evolutionary psychological framework to address these questions. Fictional stories trigger a range of evolved psychological mechanisms—such as finding mates (romance fiction), exploring the world (adventure fiction), or avoiding threats (horror fiction). While these…
Teaching children to discriminate: A quantitative study of linguistic representation in Disney’s “Revival Era” animated films
Rosina Lippi-Green’s (1997, 2012) classic quantitative study of linguistic representation in animated Disney films of the 20th century found these films to be discriminatory. Her main and most publicized finding was that characters who spoke varieties of American English tended to be morally good, while characters with a foreign accent were often evil and untrustworthy. Following a methodological discussion of Lippi-Green’s approach as it relates…
What Science Can't Know: On Scientific Objectivity and the Human Subject
The humanities are centrally concerned with such human subjectivity-such thinking, feeling, and wondering-as goes into the appreciation of a painting or the absorbed and responsive reading of a novel. It is often argued that the intrinsic subjectivity of these experiences renders them inaccessible to objective science, which seeks to avoid subjectivity. However, this fallacious argument confuses an ontological and an epistemic sense of the distin…
The Voice of the People: Populism and Donald Trump's Use of Informal Voice
Many studies have examined characteristic verbal aspects of Donald J. Trump's political communication, from his authoritarian rhetoric to his preference for short words and simple sentences, as expressions of his populism. This article focuses on his use of non-verbal voice quality. In analyzing the "Trump rallies" and other materials from his successful campaigning before the 2016 United States presidential election, I argue that Trump's evocati…
Creepiness and the Uncanny
To feel nervously and apprehensively “creeped out” is a familiar emotional state, but its cause—what makes something or someone “creepy”—is poorly understood. A recent evolutionary account of creepiness suggests that the emotion arises from a perceived “ambiguity about the presence of threat” (McAndrew and Koehnke 10). However, not all ambiguous threats are perceived as creepy. This article argues that specifically creepy threats arise from disru…
The Voices of Game Worlds: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Disco Elysium
This article examines how vocal performances of characters can contribute to sociocritical storytelling in video games. We argue that the vocal performances of video game characters–and in particular their accents–can “fill in” the fictional story worlds of video games through associations with real people and places. These associations allow video games to evoke such social themes as are connected with accent, including privilege, conflict, clas…
Evil Voices in Popular Fictions: The Case of The Exorcist
THE EXORCIST (1973), an adolescent girl, Regan MacNeil, is possessed by an evil demon that makes her act in increasingly erratic and immoral ways.She starts to swear and urinates on the floor at a house party.Later, she violates herself with a cross, violently attacks her mother, and goes on to murder two people: a friend of the house and a Catholic priest come to save her soul.But it is not just Regan's behavior that changes.The demon also corru…
Audiovisual Media
Relatable Motives and Righteous Causes; or, Why the Sympathetic Antihero is Not a Moral Psychological Mystery
Morally flawed antiheroes in TV and film, such as Dexter Morgan and Dirty Harry, often inspire sympathetic engagement from audiences. Media scholars have argued that it is these antiheroes’ status as fictional characters that allows audiences to flout their moral principles and side with the antiheroes. Against this view, I argue that these problematic sympathies can be explained without reference to a special fictional attitude. Human morality i…
Audiovisual Media
Review of recent publications in the evolutionary/biocultural humanities that fall under the rubric of audiovisual media
Audiovisual Media
Do dark personalities prefer dark characters? A personality psychological approach to positive engagement with fictional villainy
Paradoxically, villainous characters in film, literature, and video games can be very popular. Previous research in the traditions of cognitive media theory and affective disposition theory has assumed that villainous characters can inspire positive engagement only when audiences discount the villains’ immorality by focusing on positive traits or mitigating circumstances. Challenging this assumption, we argue that audiences with a conventionally …
Narrative video game aesthetics and egocentric ethics: A Deweyan perspective
This article argues that video gaming allows for player-focused (egocentric) moral experience that can be distinguished from the other-focused (allocentric) moral experience that characterizes literature and film. Specifically, a Deweyan perspective reveals that video games aff ord fi rst-personal rehearsals of moral scenarios that parallel how, in real life, individuals mentally rehearse the diff erent courses of moral action available to them. …
Disney’s Shifting Visions of Villainy from the 1990s to the 2010s: A Biocultural Analysis
Disney’s animated villains have recently changed to show less conventionally villainous traits: They look and express themselves more like sympathetic characters, and they are usually only outed as villains late in the plot. This shift has prompted much academic commentary on the psychological and cultural significance of Disney’s new villains. We add to the existing literature on Disney’s new villains in two ways. First, we analyze shifts in th…
Boudry, Maarten, and Massimo Pigliucci. 2017. Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism
Article Boudry, Maarten, and Massimo Pigliucci. 2017. Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism. was published on October 1, 2018 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 2, issue 2)
Social Signals and Antisocial Essences: The Function of Evil Laughter in Popular Culture
A Cross-Disciplinary Survey of Beliefs about Human Nature, Culture, and Science
How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring p…
The Bad Breaks of Walter White: An Evolutionary Approach to the Fictional Antihero
This article investigates the nature and appeal of morally ambiguous protagonists, or anti-heroes, through an evolutionary lens. It argues that morally ambiguous protagonists navigate conflicts between prosocial and antisocial motivational pulls. In so doing they present audiences with a window onto the conflicts inherent in human sociality. Working from this premise, the article analyzes the morally ambiguous protagonist Walter White from the TV…
Do dark personalities prefer dark characters? A personality psychological approach to positive engagement with fictional villainy
Paradoxically, villainous characters in film, literature, and video games can be very popular. Previous research in the traditions of cognitive media theory and affective disposition theory has assumed that villainous characters can inspire positive engagement only when audiences discount the villains’ immorality by focusing on positive traits or mitigating circumstances. Challenging this assumption, we argue that audiences with a conventionally …
The Voice of the People: Populism and Donald Trump's Use of Informal Voice
Many studies have examined characteristic verbal aspects of Donald J. Trump's political communication, from his authoritarian rhetoric to his preference for short words and simple sentences, as expressions of his populism. This article focuses on his use of non-verbal voice quality. In analyzing the "Trump rallies" and other materials from his successful campaigning before the 2016 United States presidential election, I argue that Trump's evocati…
Evil Voices in Popular Fictions: The Case of The Exorcist
THE EXORCIST (1973), an adolescent girl, Regan MacNeil, is possessed by an evil demon that makes her act in increasingly erratic and immoral ways.She starts to swear and urinates on the floor at a house party.Later, she violates herself with a cross, violently attacks her mother, and goes on to murder two people: a friend of the house and a Catholic priest come to save her soul.But it is not just Regan's behavior that changes.The demon also corru…
Social Signals and Antisocial Essences: The Function of Evil Laughter in Popular Culture
A Cross-Disciplinary Survey of Beliefs about Human Nature, Culture, and Science
How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring p…
The Bad Breaks of Walter White: An Evolutionary Approach to the Fictional Antihero
This article investigates the nature and appeal of morally ambiguous protagonists, or anti-heroes, through an evolutionary lens. It argues that morally ambiguous protagonists navigate conflicts between prosocial and antisocial motivational pulls. In so doing they present audiences with a window onto the conflicts inherent in human sociality. Working from this premise, the article analyzes the morally ambiguous protagonist Walter White from the TV…
Boudry, Maarten, and Massimo Pigliucci. 2017. Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism
Article Boudry, Maarten, and Massimo Pigliucci. 2017. Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism. was published on October 1, 2018 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 2, issue 2)
Social Signals and Antisocial Essences: The Function of Evil Laughter in Popular Culture
Disney’s Shifting Visions of Villainy from the 1990s to the 2010s: A Biocultural Analysis
Disney’s animated villains have recently changed to show less conventionally villainous traits: They look and express themselves more like sympathetic characters, and they are usually only outed as villains late in the plot. This shift has prompted much academic commentary on the psychological and cultural significance of Disney’s new villains. We add to the existing literature on Disney’s new villains in two ways. First, we analyze shifts in th…
Narrative video game aesthetics and egocentric ethics: A Deweyan perspective
This article argues that video gaming allows for player-focused (egocentric) moral experience that can be distinguished from the other-focused (allocentric) moral experience that characterizes literature and film. Specifically, a Deweyan perspective reveals that video games aff ord fi rst-personal rehearsals of moral scenarios that parallel how, in real life, individuals mentally rehearse the diff erent courses of moral action available to them. …
Relatable Motives and Righteous Causes; or, Why the Sympathetic Antihero is Not a Moral Psychological Mystery
Morally flawed antiheroes in TV and film, such as Dexter Morgan and Dirty Harry, often inspire sympathetic engagement from audiences. Media scholars have argued that it is these antiheroes’ status as fictional characters that allows audiences to flout their moral principles and side with the antiheroes. Against this view, I argue that these problematic sympathies can be explained without reference to a special fictional attitude. Human morality i…
Audiovisual Media
Review of recent publications in the evolutionary/biocultural humanities that fall under the rubric of audiovisual media
Audiovisual Media
Do dark personalities prefer dark characters? A personality psychological approach to positive engagement with fictional villainy
Paradoxically, villainous characters in film, literature, and video games can be very popular. Previous research in the traditions of cognitive media theory and affective disposition theory has assumed that villainous characters can inspire positive engagement only when audiences discount the villains’ immorality by focusing on positive traits or mitigating circumstances. Challenging this assumption, we argue that audiences with a conventionally …
Audiovisual Media
Creepiness and the Uncanny
To feel nervously and apprehensively “creeped out” is a familiar emotional state, but its cause—what makes something or someone “creepy”—is poorly understood. A recent evolutionary account of creepiness suggests that the emotion arises from a perceived “ambiguity about the presence of threat” (McAndrew and Koehnke 10). However, not all ambiguous threats are perceived as creepy. This article argues that specifically creepy threats arise from disru…
The Voices of Game Worlds: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Disco Elysium
This article examines how vocal performances of characters can contribute to sociocritical storytelling in video games. We argue that the vocal performances of video game characters–and in particular their accents–can “fill in” the fictional story worlds of video games through associations with real people and places. These associations allow video games to evoke such social themes as are connected with accent, including privilege, conflict, clas…
Evil Voices in Popular Fictions: The Case of The Exorcist
THE EXORCIST (1973), an adolescent girl, Regan MacNeil, is possessed by an evil demon that makes her act in increasingly erratic and immoral ways.She starts to swear and urinates on the floor at a house party.Later, she violates herself with a cross, violently attacks her mother, and goes on to murder two people: a friend of the house and a Catholic priest come to save her soul.But it is not just Regan's behavior that changes.The demon also corru…
Three Conceptions of Culture
I found much to agree with in Hogan’s wide-ranging essay, particularly concerning an explanatory overreliance on “culture” in literary and more broadly humanistic research. However, I want here to suggest that Hogan conflates two misconceptions of culture against which a modern, biocultural perspective supplies a more adequate and explanatory alternative.As referenced by Hogan, the first misconception of culture is “as if it were some sort of enc…
The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories
Why is there so much diversity in fictional plots? Why are some fictional stories more popular in certain countries or during specific historical periods? In this paper, we propose an evolutionary psychological framework to address these questions. Fictional stories trigger a range of evolved psychological mechanisms—such as finding mates (romance fiction), exploring the world (adventure fiction), or avoiding threats (horror fiction). While these…
Teaching children to discriminate: A quantitative study of linguistic representation in Disney’s “Revival Era” animated films
Rosina Lippi-Green’s (1997, 2012) classic quantitative study of linguistic representation in animated Disney films of the 20th century found these films to be discriminatory. Her main and most publicized finding was that characters who spoke varieties of American English tended to be morally good, while characters with a foreign accent were often evil and untrustworthy. Following a methodological discussion of Lippi-Green’s approach as it relates…
What Science Can't Know: On Scientific Objectivity and the Human Subject
The humanities are centrally concerned with such human subjectivity-such thinking, feeling, and wondering-as goes into the appreciation of a painting or the absorbed and responsive reading of a novel. It is often argued that the intrinsic subjectivity of these experiences renders them inaccessible to objective science, which seeks to avoid subjectivity. However, this fallacious argument confuses an ontological and an epistemic sense of the distin…
The Voice of the People: Populism and Donald Trump's Use of Informal Voice
Many studies have examined characteristic verbal aspects of Donald J. Trump's political communication, from his authoritarian rhetoric to his preference for short words and simple sentences, as expressions of his populism. This article focuses on his use of non-verbal voice quality. In analyzing the "Trump rallies" and other materials from his successful campaigning before the 2016 United States presidential election, I argue that Trump's evocati…
Wrestling Voices: Amplifying Patriotism and Ethnic Stereotypes in 1980s American Professional Wrestling
This article examines the use of promotional interviews (“promos”) in American professional wrestling of the 1980s. I argue that promos introduced a vocal modality into a form of sports entertainment that, as Roland Barthes ([1957] 1972) showed in Mythologies , had always been dominated by visual spectacle. I then undertake a focused linguistic and auditory analysis of promos made by two wrestlers: the Iranian Iron Sheik and his American opponent…
Speaking “Evil”: Quantifying Donald Trump’s Demonization of Political Opponents and Other Targets
American presidents have frequently invoked the concept of evil to condemn foreign enemies: Ronald Reagan, for example, denounced the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, and George W. Bush grouped Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” This study analyzes Donald J. Trump’s historically distinctive use of the term. A structured typology was used to code 750 public instances in which Trump employed the word evil between 2015 and 2025. Dev…
Kurt Gray, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground
Psychology (13 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Media Influence and Health (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Law (4 works)