Potential: The valuation of imagined future achievement

The concept of potential is central to a number of decisions, ranging from organizational hiring, to athletic recruiting, to the evaluation of artistic performances. While potential may often be valued for its future payoffs, the present studies investigate whether people value potential even when making decisions about goods and experiences that can only be consumed in the present. Experiment 1 demonstrates that potential makes people more likely to consume inferior performances in the present. Experiment 2 manipulated temporal focus and demonstrates that focusing on the present (vs. the future) attenuates the effect of potential on enjoyment. Experiment 3 demonstrates that merely moving the performance into the past negates the effect of potential. And, Experiment 4 demonstrates that potential increases valuation only when value is tied to abstract, hedonic dimensions, but not when it is tied to concrete, utilitarian dimensions.     

The Processing Wheel: An Arts-based Intervention for Clinical Supervision

The primary goal of supervision is to promote professional growth among counselors-in-training. Art making is an under-explored method of promoting exploration and self-awareness, and thus professional growth, within the process of supervision. While outlining the literature on creativity in counselor education and implementing art into supervision, the author also includes details about her experience of infusing art into supervision. Additionally, a case example of a new specific art-based intervention, dubbed the “Processing Wheel,” is described. Finally, implications, limitations, and future directions for counselor educators are discussed.     

Effectiveness of Coloring Mandala Designs to Reduce Anxiety in Graduate Counseling Students

An exploration of the role that creativity can play in anxiety reduction was conducted using a quantitative study design. Participants completed the State Anxiety Inventory (SAI) before and after completing a coloring activity and results were compared. The experimental group colored a mandala design and the control group colored a blank piece of paper. This study hypothesized that partaking in the mandala coloring activity would produce a greater reduction in anxiety than coloring a blank piece of paper. Results revealed that coloring a blank piece of paper and coloring a mandala were equally effective techniques for reducing anxiety in master’s-level counseling students. Implications for the findings are discussed.     

The Arts and the Future City

The framework in which, better than in any other, cultural complexity becomes clear as a network of perspectives is the city: it is here that the greatest variety of subcultures, together with the widest range of contrasting modalities, seems able to handle its meaning. The city is at the same time an active place of cultural production and a passive and active place of memory keeping. It fuels styles and models of sensitivity also, and especially, through art and architecture. Therefore, it becomes itself a cultural model able to orient taste, but also to continually disorient it through agency. Starting from the revitalization of the cultural capital of the cities, art can play the important role of cultural magnet by catalyzing moods and emotions, conveying otherwise chaotic needs and languages, promoting new tolerance and social and cultural integration. However, in the meantime, from a secluded and distinct place that organizes the use of cultural and artistic products within recognizable boundaries, the city is becoming an undifferentiated place, a city-beyond, scattered and/or boundless. Characterized by the undifferentiated and the mutant, the uncertain and the liquid, the deformable and the relative, the space of art perception will be rethought within and without the city.     

The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference: prospects and pitfalls for an emerging field

Neuroaesthetics is a young field of research concerned primarily with the neural basis of cognitive and affective processes engaged when an individual takes an aesthetic or artistic approach towards a work of art, a non-artistic object or a natural phenomenon. In September 2009, the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference brought together leading researchers in the field to present and discuss current advances. We summarize some of the principal themes of the conference, placing neuroaesthetics in a historical context and discussing its scope and relation to other disciplines. We also identify what we believe to be the key outstanding questions, the main pitfalls and challenges faced by the field, and some promising avenues for future research.     

孟荀的“性—情”结构论及艺术本体性

本文从孟子和荀子思想中的“性”与“情”两大范畴入手 ,构建了一个作为生命本体存在形式的“性—情”结构论样式。通过对统领“性—情”结构论的“心”本体的聚合和分解作用 ,梳理了一个心—性—情的逻辑脉络。将“乐”作为形式本体与审美快感体验的主要体现方式进行解剖 ,而使之成为艺术本体存在和审美愉悦的现实参照。本文认为 ,由“心”本体而建构的“性—情”结构论 ,是后世的艺术创造活动中人们提出的所谓“吟咏情性”和“心统性情”等命题的始基 ,它既有张扬艺术情感而创构艺术魅力的作用 ,也有以伦理文化制约艺术一审美体验的局限性。     

Community, Communication and Multiplicity in Proust

The essay examines the relation between the explicit aesthetic ideology of Proust’s Recherche and the structure of the “involuntary memory” that is supposed to serve as that ideology’s empirical basis. I challenge the apparent solipsism and idealism of the narrator’s aesthetics by focusing on the one experience of involuntary memory that he omits from his final reflections, in Time Regained, on the relation between memory and art: this is the involuntary memory, in the earlier volume Sodom and Gomorrah, of his dead grandmother, a memory that he describes there as an experience of true otherness. Through a close reading of this passage, I argue that Proust’s interest in involuntary memory implies a concept of literary art as above all ethical in nature, in so far as it is the only means by which individuals can emerge from the solitude to which they are otherwise existentially condemned. In both the Sodom and Gomorrah passage and a later passage from Time Regained this emergence is cast in terms of a rhetoric of multiplicity that emphasizes both the disturbing and the productive dimensions connecting literature with life.

Van Gogh, Chagall and pigeons: picture discrimination in pigeons and humans

The author has previously reported that pigeons can discriminate paintings by different artists. Here, I replicated the previous findings, carried out additional tests and compared discrimination by pigeons with that of humans. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained to discriminate between paintings by Van Gogh and Chagall. After training, the subjects were tested with different paintings by the same artists. The subjects showed generalization to these paintings. The subjects maintained their discriminative ability for black-and-white paintings and partially occluded paintings. When they were tested with mosaic paintings, the number of correct responses decreased, depending on the level of processing needed. In Experiment 2, human subjects were tested with the same paintings. The subjects showed generalization and decrement of correct responses depending on the degree of mosaic processing. These observations suggest that the visual cognitive function of pigeons is comparable to that of humans. The convergence of higher visual cognition between the two species may stem from similar selection pressures on avian ancestors and our ancestors through their evolution. Accepted after revision: 19 August 2001 Electronic Publication     

Viewing artworks: Contributions of cognitive control and perceptual facilitation to aesthetic experience

When we view visual images in everyday life, our perception is oriented toward object identification. In contrast, when viewing visual images as artworks, we also tend to experience subjective reactions to their stylistic and structural properties. This experiment sought to determine how cognitive control and perceptual facilitation contribute to aesthetic perception along with the experience of emotion. Using functional MRI, we show that aesthetic perception activated bilateral insula which we attribute to the experience of emotion. Moreover, while adopting the aesthetic orientation activated the left lateral prefrontal cortex, paintings that facilitated visuospatial exploration activated the left superior parietal lobule. The results suggest that aesthetic experience is a function of the interaction between top-down orienting of attention and bottom-up perceptual facilitation.