Sunday, June 20, 2010

IAPS Emotional Gategories



I found an article that has just what I need! Mikels, Fredrickson, Larkin, and Lindberg (2005) took the IAPS, a dimensional model of emotion, and put it into categories!

The category names were chosen based on a free-response pilot study, and two subsequent studies were run with guided responses, one for negative emotions, and one for positive ones. The results give me 8 examples which were categorized as fear, 12 for sadness, 12 for amusement, 15 for contentment, 20 for awe, and 10 for excitement (excluding mixed and undifferentiated images, and excluding those with gender differences).

Altogether, these emotions seem to correlate with lists I have seen throughout my sources that describe models and ideas of what the basic emotions are. These may be the terms that I end up using for my dances, and I'm sure I'll be drawing from these images for my "stimuli!" Once I get I get in touch with the right people to get the images (which are listed by number in the study's archives), I'll try to post some sample images.

I'm really hoping that I can find similar articles for categorizing the IADS and ANEW!

Resources:
Mikels, J. A., Fredrickson, B. L., Larkin, G. R., & Lindberg, C. M. (2005a).
Mikels, et al.(2005b).
Mikels, et al. (2005c).

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Non-expression and expression

In post-modern dance, choreographers try to create movements that are not representational or expressive. This is opposed to the idea that the human body, and hence dance, is inherently expressive.
By considering works that intend to remove expressiveness from dance, I may learn about elements that could be useful for expressing emotions.

For example, Rainer's Trio A has no climax, no key images or poses that I could easily identify to you, no repetition of segments or variations on a motif, no clear floor plan, no tempo developments, just a moment-to-moment presence as a moving point in space, according to Carroll.



Even in such non-expressive dances, though, we might think of dance as being expressive by its discursive nature. In this case, because of contextual knowledge of the developments within dance history and Rainer's intent to create non-expressive dance, this dance still expresses something about a belief in non-expressive dance. (It's kind of like Duchamp's urinal "Fountain" having ironic status as art; the statement and meaning comes from context about it, not from the object itself.)

Dance communicates ideas as much as it does emotions; it can show us what the choreographer wants to show us of their view of the world more so than it gives us an expression of the dancer's own present emotions. For my project, my dances will show my understanding of invocation of emotions, what cues them, and somewhat how they feel to experience (thought that is more the audience's role). I can consider the many things that are absent from Trio A as tools for that expression, which Rainer was attempting to get away from.

Resource:
Carroll, N. (1981). Post-modern dance and expression. In G. Fancher & G. Myers (Eds.), Philosophical essays on dance (pp. 95-114). Brooklyn, N.Y.: Dance Horizons.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The problem of inducing negative emotions

My goal with this project will be to inspire feelings related to several contrasting emotions in separate pieces. This means that some of these studies will deliberately evoke emotions that will have negative valence and naturally will be unpleasant.

Considering this, though, I may want even the negative emotions to bring some sort of satisfaction, and not just be torturous to the audience. In spite of negatively-valenced intended responses, I know from seeing others' dances that this sort of art can lead to a kind of appreciation, respect, fulfillment - as if we are relieved to have such a deep buried feeling met onstage in another's body. In fact, personally, I feel that this relates most to dance for me, above the other arts. Like mirroring in therapy, seeing an emotion we recognize, maybe even particularly for negative ones, though immediately unpleasant, validates some part of our human emotional experience (probably some part that we would not normally allow to see the light of day, or even admit to ourselves). This video has a great introduction that illustrates this relief...




The catch to this whole string of thought is that this may not be the most honest reproduction of the experience of perceiving the original stimuli. Maybe I'll go to the source and ask the experimenters more about that though- it may not be a pure recreation if I make the relief described above my goal. Having sat through the IAPS myself as an undergrad participant, I know that some of the negative images truly are horrendous and sickening, with no sense of personal relief as if anything had been mirrored. In fact, they're such strong images (most likely from the extremes of the catalog) that it is unlikely that it could mirror anything an average person could relate to. I'm not sure yet how liberal I'm willing to be in re-interpreting the participant/audience experience regarding this and other factors. It'll definitely be a challenge if I choose to delve into the areas such as those referred to as "mutilation" images (with some of the strongest positive ones being fairly sexually explicit)... they'd certainly be a well-defined reaction, but I'll have to gear up to actually processing and re-presenting that with my dancers and audience.

The pleasanter dances may also prove difficult to portray meaningfully without looking silly or shallow... it will be the nuances and subtle colorings between the emotions and the blends of their effects on us that will enrich the dances to bring them beyond "well, clearly this dance is meant to be pleasant/beautiful" to "this dance makes me feel joy/love/anticipation..."

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Subjectivity

I’m trying to catch up to my reading- my latest book to share is “Philosophical Essays on Dance” presented during a week in 1979’s American Dance Festival (which I hope to go to eventually!)

The first essay in this resource brings up concerns about subjectivity in dance, partly because of its temporal nature. Essentially from the outset, everything we see is from the past due to the time required for light travel (Bertrand Russell). On top of that, to remove us even further from the art we observe, one dance critic (Croce) described how we remember dance as “afterimages” which were debated for their validity as a basis of evaluation: if we describe movements based on our mental images, are we actually describing the qualities of the movements themselves, or our memories?

Besides that philosophical back-and-forth- which was simmered down to accept that we can indeed discuss dance itself as an objectively existent object of our attention- there is then the consideration of the subjective way in which we receive dance. Viewers of dance do not receive the art form directly as-is, but through a lens of context. The Gestalt mantra that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” reminds us that we can’t take dance movements individually, or even the dance itself as the sole source of the message we ultimately percieve; the context of the time period, culture, dance history, audience experience, and many other factors complicate what a dance expresses, amplifying the subjectivity of the experience of viewing a dance. “Each belohder must experience his/her own act of perception” in order for the viewing to become an experience of art. In order for the basic understanding of the untrained audience to become deeper and more meaningful, they must be allowed to process the work over time and through their own frames, which essentially subjectifies the objective object of dance.

Audiences may hesitate to allow thought to invade their experience of dance, but some thoughtfulness in the reception of art can allow more depth of understanding and enhance the experience. Yet with dance, art’s definitive bridging of the inner and outer arenas of man’s life is achieved within our actual mode of experiencing life: through the body itself, as the dancer becomes the work of art, so dance has an advantage of being able to be received at a basic kinaesthetic level regardless of the training of the audience. In this then there is no need to ask the meanings of individual movements and it is not absolutely necessary for the uneducated audience to cognitively investigate their response (though there is only more to discover with this!) Different theories such as Jungian ideas of archetypes, physiognomy, and embodied consciousness highlight what we have in common that allows universality in spite of the array of individuals who see a dance. We have associations for our emotions from life experience, including physical sensations and mental patterns which may be shared across people. As a choreographer, I will be able to choose qualities for my dance that will remind the audience metaphorically of the contexts for the emotions that I will want to induce.

~

In designing my project, this all brings up a few points. I will be presenting my works in progress to dancers and trained eyes who are practiced in verbalizing the visceral, but ultimately, it is my goal to have these studies performed for general audiences to hopefully have the fullest emotional effect possible (and hopefully have that effect communicated back to me by them). I have to think about how I might practically take data from the general audience (it’s easy enough to get feedback from the dancers if I give them the survey I’ll create) but in a theater setting, people may be put off by questions following the work. It will also be interesting to see the different verbalized responses I could get from dancers versus non-dancers in the free-response parts of the survey. I’ll also have to consider when I’ll ask the audience to fill out my questionnaire- if it’s during the dance, or after, which could get different effects. I might also want to do a pre-test to look at initial conditions… I feel like it would be a poor research technique not to do that. Of course at the same time, this is a dance project, in spite of my inspiration from and training in psych, so I should only expect research conscientiousness to go so far.

As far as subjectivity, I intend to handle that by using averages of sorts. While art has value in its combination of universality and uniqueness, my studies won’t necessarily seek to stand out as unique, but will seek to appeal as powerfully as possible to as broad a spectrum of people as possible. Sacrificing broadness of effect for powerful influence on a few individuals is not the goal in this case. The stimuli which I will be basing my dances off of will have been chosen for their average effects for a huge population of psychologically “normal” people. For my smaller dance-model, the choreography will rely on a less statistically powerful “average” that will combine the perspectives and input of my small group of dancers to recreate the effects of the initial stimuli.


There’s so much more to write about, even just for this one book. And so many more things to read- I haven’t even shown you what the IAPS, IADS, and ANEW are, which will be my original stimuli! I’ll be delving into those studies soon- I’ve started reading up on emotions and have found some good things there to tell about later.

Resource:
Fancher, 1981.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Cognitive processes in the perception of art

I found a great book called "Advances in Psychology: Cognitive Processes in the Perception of Art." It focused on several of the fine arts, with one chapter by R.D. Walk on event perception that particularly looked at dance. Here are some interesting things from this read...

Gestalt psychology views the perception of expressiveness as directly tied in with the perception of the object itself- prior experience with the object isn't required! Objects, even nonsense figures, have physiognomic properties which cue a sense of expressiveness; something I can look more into. A book I skimmed earlier, called "Rings" which is a collection of works of art into five emotional categories, introduced me to the origins of the idea of physiognomic characteristics. Humbert DeSuperville said "man is upright" and any change from this has potential to express (Brown, 1996), which says something exciting for my purpose to create expressive dances! The section discusses unconditioned universally expressive signs in art, which can include angles, colors, tempo and other elements to cue emotions in the absence of an actual emotional display (Brown, 1996).

These drawings demonstrate the facial expressions that correspond to the physiognomic guides to the left.
The three directions (expansive, horizontal, convergent) are connected with emotions such as agitation/order/solemness. Colors roughly correspond as well in this view: red, white, and black, respectively.

Something I found personally interesting was a claim that we might seek out tension-arousing or displeasing art as a form of relief. The art gives us a focus for otherwise cue-less more general tension that we had before we encountered the art, it lets us attribute that tension to something, the art object (Crozier and Chapman, 1984). I think this is an important thing to address, because we often relate art to beauty- and while awe is beauty with a sense of fear and is a common reaction to art such as religious art- we forget in this definition that there is plenty of art that disgusts or saddens us or leads to many other negative emotional reactions. I know that personally, while generally a pleasant person who enjoys pleasant things, I have found myself deeply "enjoying" or maybe more appropriately, finding a sense of relief, in negatively-valenced artistic experiences. This theory is something that I want to keep in mind when I address negative emotions which I intend to include in my choreography. The satisfaction that can come out of experiencing a negative work of art is an interesting situation that I want to look more into when taking feedback from dancers and audience. Also, with my professional goals, I have thought how this idea might be valuable in therapy.

Between my resources, there seems to be a debate forming between the idea of the universality of art's power to express, and the opinion that it is a more elite expression, best understood by those who are trained. My preference is to work more with universal kinds of expression as much as possible, because I will be showing my dance not only to fellow dancers, but hopefully to audiences from the general (though university-connected) public. In some studies, students and even artists are not able to appropriately identify the expression of a work without guidance on what terms to use (Crozier and Chapman, 1984). But this conclusion is drawn after they are challenged to put the appropriate term to the expression they experience with no word bank, and I think that if they were instead asked to describe the emotion or mood differently that they might have fared better. I will be using Self Assessment Manikins (SAM) with my participants to let them "describe" their emotions through simple illustrated scales of valence, activation, and control (see photo) and I hope that this might let me see, without necessitating vocabulary, how closely they react to my expectations.

Self-Assessment Manikin: this simple set of three illustrated scales has been used in the creation of the stimuli that I will base my dances off of. It measures emotional reactions in terms of valence (negative-positive), activation (calm-excited), and control (dominated-dominant), and the participant bubbles in one image for each of the three scales to overall describe a single emotional reaction. (Example: something scary might cause a reaction with negative valence, high activation, and low control, which is essentially fear.) I have yet to define sets of SAM results in terms of common emotion-names, which will be a helpful step later.


An interesting thing that came of some related experiments was the fact that participants across cultures and countries generally identify some emotions better than others. Negative emotions tend to be most easily identified. This leads us to the alarm hypothesis. This idea comes from studies of animals, in which different species can recognize each others' warning signals, while pleasanter communications are not as well understood between species or even human cultures. Behaviors stemming from fear and anger tend to be best understood, which makes me think that these emotions might be easier to recognizably portray in dance (though I don't want this to take away from the authenticity and depth of the portrayal, just because a basic image is so easily understood. of course, I also don't want to overcomplicate things either!) Human body posture is cited as the best human example for the alarm hypothesis (Crozier and Chapman, 1984). Accordingly, studies of dot-figures in Johansson's 1975 paradigm proved that impressions of anger and fear were most easily identified (bottom).

Clearly this shows a negative emotion- probably something along the lines of sadness...
...and this is harder to pin an emotion to- it's less distinctly emotional, and likely not as negative, in line with the alarm hypothesis.

Johansson's paradigm for assessing sensitivity to human movement is illustrated here by a "walking" figure's dots. People generally interpret videos of this type as human movement, and attribute emotions or actions with varying degrees of accuracy.

Finally, a note on tempo and volume which may be useful to me in creating dances and were discussed in relation to expressive value in the physiognomic sections of these readings. Volume, according to Sundberg (1982) is "mere translation into the acoustic domain of general body movements," so with dance, I will can reclaim from music a sense of volume. This statement was made in reference to the alarm hypothesis, indicating a particular tie of volume to the negative emotions. And as for tempo, Brown considers the heartbeat: it is fast when we are excited, and slows when we are calm; dance tunes are fast while dirges are slower. Slower tempos also produce tension in the "negative" empty temporal space between the beats (Brown, 1996). This physical origin for the value of tempo differences contributes to arguments for universality as well as the strengths of dance for expressiveness because of its physical and temporal nature (temporal value in addressing emotions will also be discussed later in my next note). I also note the reference to tension, which can be useful in processing emotions with dance later.


Resources:
Brown, J.C., 1996.
Crozier, 1984.