Tag Archives: psychology

Research

Me and You, You and Me

For those “ball and chain” jokes and the idea that relationships always come before the self, here’s a ripost in favor of mutually-enriching relationships: “The Happy Marriage Is the ‘Me’ Marriage,” by Tara Parker-Pope (NY Times, December 31, 2010).

Research shows that the more self-expansion people experience from their partner, the more committed and satisfied they are in the relationship.

To measure this, Dr. Lewandowski developed a series of questions for couples: How much has being with your partner resulted in your learning new things? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person?

The article is accompanied by a great infographic.

Standard
Art & Development

Unlimited/Unrealised/UnactualizedPromise/Potentials

Tomorrow night (Thursday, May 6), We have as much time as it takes opens at the Wattis. My text and light installation, Unlimited Promise, will make its superterranean San Francisco debut.

In June, one of my ideas for an art project will be on display in an exhibition called Unrealised Potentials at Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK.

So this morning, I was tickled to read this interview with David Shenk (“Why genius isn’t in the genes,” by Robin McKie, Guardian.co.uk, May 2, 2010), which ends with the phrase, “unactualized potential.”

Shenk, the author of The Genius in All of Us (Icon), advances the idea that genes get too much credit for genius and talent. Instead, we ought pay more attention to personality and psychology. According to Shenk, attitudes like drive, motivation and resilience are important factors:

For example, they looked at how [professional] violists practise. To the untrained eye and ear, it seems obvious: they all do a great deal of practising – hours, hours and hours. But if you look very carefully at those who end up being the best, you discover – by doing intensive tracking of them – that they do practise more, and better, than those in the class below them.

That is a theme that extends to all achievements. There is a quantitative and qualitative difference in the practice undertaken by the super-greats – say in basketball – and the mere greats. They work hard at being great. It isn’t bestowed at birth.

I read this as an affirmation of what I learned about professional practices in the arts — to be successful and sustain a lifelong career, artists have to have a sense of agency; that what one does matters, that one’s destiny as an artist is not limited to being in the right time at the right place, being friendly with the right people, or making the trendiest/most outrageous art.

Instead, first, one makes the art that one wants to be making; then one plans and partners with others strategically to find success, however it is personally defined. As Shenk said, it’s valuable to “work hard at being great.”

Standard
Research

hug it out!

Making exhibitions requires a lot of teamwork, so I’ve been practicing sharing epic high-fives. Just the other day, K, R and I shared a spinning jump triple. That momentary gesture turned a feeling of mild accomplishment into floaty elation.

In “Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much,” (NYTimes.com, February 22, 2010) Benedict Carey examines the psychology and neuroscience of meaningful touches.

Momentary touches, [researchers] say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words….

“We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions,” Dr. [Matthew] Hertenstein [a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana] said. Now it turns out to be “a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined.

As an artist working with installation and phenomenology, I’m really interested in embodied experiences. As Lakoff & Johnson explain in “Metaphors We Live By,” metaphors are not merely linguistic devices, but cognitive tools; we think using metaphors grounded in our physical experience.

High-fives express shared excitement or accomplishment (“Nice one!”). It conveys that this experience is good, and yay for sharing it with me. It is harmless hedonism, of taking pleasure in the present. It’s dorky, hip, sweet, and maybe a little ironic, but maybe also infused with feel-good, unabashed enthusiasm (like Ugo Rodinone’s “Hell Yes!”). I hope I never feel too old to share a high-five.

As usual, I’d like to participate in an art world characterized by community and reciprocity. Supportive touches express mutuality; maybe more curators, artists, critics and collectors should be hugging it out.

…In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”

“We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”

Carey also quotes Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life.” Incidentally, Keltner’s mentor was San Francisco psychologist Paul Ekman, who was profiled by Malcolm Gladwell in an eye-opening article about emotions and facial expressions (“The Naked Face,” New Yorker, 2002). If you’ve heard of the wide, genuine, impossible-to-fake Duchenne smile, then you’ve been touched by Ekman’s influence.

Standard