Kirill Fayn

• PhD
• Cognitive Research Scientist at Solsten

Openness and intellect may differentially predict engagement for two possible reasons. First, engagement with sensory experiences is associated with openness, whereas engagement with abstract information is associated with intellect – a distinction based on content. Second, openness reflects affective, and intellect cognitive processing – a distinc...

Autonomic nervous systems in the human body are named for their operation outside of conscious control. One rare exception is voluntarily generated piloerection (VGP)—the conscious ability to induce goosebumps—whose physiological study, to our knowledge, is confined to three single-individual case studies. Very little is known about the physiologic...

Open people show greater interest in situations that are complex, novel, and difficult to understand-situations that may also be experienced as confusing. Here we investigate the possibility that openness/intellect is centrally characterized by more positive relations between interest and confusion. Interest and confusion are key states experienced...

Research on fine-grained dynamic psychological processes has increasingly come to rely on continuous self-report measures. Recent studies have extended continuous self-report methods to simultaneously collecting ratings on two dimensions of an experience. For all the variety of approaches, several limitations are inherent to most of them. First, cu...

A recent theory proposes that the personality trait openness/intellect is underpinned by differential sensitivity to the reward value of information. This theory draws on evidence that midbrain dopamine neurons respond to unpredicted information gain, mirroring their responses to unpredicted primary rewards. Using a choice task modelled on this sem...

Data on the personality of dancers is sparse, and existing studies generally use small samples and heterogeneous measures of personality across studies. We investigated Big Five personality profiles of dancers in two large representative samples from Sweden (n = 5435) and Germany (n = 574). Musicians have previously been found to be more open, agre...

Complex problem-solving (CPS) tasks have become an increasingly popular tool for understand-ing and assessing cognitive ability. These tasks have been repeatedly shown to be predictors of academic and workplace success above and beyond traditional measures of general intelligence and fluid intelligence. To date, there has been little exploration of...

Emotional intelligence (EI) should relate to people’s emotional experiences. We meta-analytically summarise associations of felt affect with ability EI branches (perception, facilitation, understanding and management) and total scores (k = 7 to 14; N = 1,584 to 2,813). We then use experience sampling (N = 122 undergraduates over 5 days, 24 beeps) t...

Emotional intelligence (EI) should relate to people’s emotional experiences. We meta-analytically summarize associations of felt affect with ability EI branches (perception, facilitation, understanding, and management) and total scores (k = 7–14; N = 1,584–2,813). We then use experience sampling (N = 122 undergraduates over 5 days, 24 beeps) to tes...

Objectives Emotional lability (EL) is an important trans‐diagnostic concept that is associated with significant functional impairment in childhood and adolescence. EL is typically measured with questionnaires, although little is known about the ecological validity of these ratings. In this paper, we undertook 2 studies addressing this issue by exam...

Autonomic systems in the human body are named for their operation outside of conscious control. One rare exception is voluntarily generated piloerection (VGP) – the conscious ability to cause goosebumps – whose physiological study in scientific history is confined to three single-individual case studies. Almost nothing is known about the physiologi...

Autonomic systems in the human body are named for their operation outside of conscious control. One rare exception is voluntarily generated piloerection (VGP) – the conscious ability to cause goosebumps – whose physiological study in scientific history is confined to three single-individual case studies. Almost nothing is known about the physiologi...

We elaborate on the role of individual differences in the processing mechanisms outlined by the Distancing-Embracing model. The role of openness is apparent in appreciating meaning-making art that elicits interest, feeling moved, and mixed emotions. The influence of sensation seeking is likely to manifest in thrill-chasing art that draws on the aro...

Openness/Intellect, a trait domain reflecting a tendency towards cognitive exploration, is positively associated with the tendency to experience mixed emotions (i.e., simultaneous positive and negative feelings). This study examined whether this trait is also positively associated with mixed appraisals (i.e., concurrent positive and negative stimul...

The ability to distinguish between emotions is considered indicative of well-being, but does emotion differentiation (ED) in an aesthetic context also reflect deeper and more knowledgeable aesthetic experiences? Here we examine whether positive and negative ED in response to artistic stimuli reflects higher fluency in an aesthetic domain. Particula...

Music often makes people feel like crying (get a lump in their throat and tears in their eyes) or actually cry. Because crying can co-occur with so many emotions, the present study explored what feeling like crying feels like. A sample of 892 adults reported whether they could remember a time when they cried or felt like crying when listening to mu...

The Katz-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Judaism was developed initially to extend among the Hebrew-speaking Jewish community in Israel a growing body of international research concerned to map the correlates, antecedents and consequences of individual differences in attitude toward religion as assessed by the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Chri...

There is a stable relationship between the Openness/Intellect domain of personality and aesthetic engagement. However, neither of these are simple constructs and while the relationship exists, process based evidence explaining the relationship is still lacking. This research sought to clarify the relationship by evaluating the influence of the Open...

Profound aesthetic experiences associated with awe—often described as a sense of wonder, amazement, fascination, or being moved and touched—have received less attention than milder states like pleasure, liking, and interest. Who tends to experience these powerful states? We suggest that openness to experience, although not normally seen as an emoti...

Openness and Intellect have been proposed as different pathways towards cognitive exploration, yet this distinction remains untested with respect to the exploratory emotion of interest. In this study we examined multi-level appraisal processes to determine whether Openness and Intellect differ in their effects on interest. University undergraduates...

This chapter considers three enduring challenges in psychological aesthetics that neuroaesthetics should confront. One challenge concerns the diversity of aesthetic states: people experience a wide range of emotions, not just pleasure and beauty. Another is the diversity of people: individual differences in aesthetic responses to the same work are...