Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices

Dee Reynolds, Dee Reynolds

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781841507002
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

A key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction across creative and cultural practices, kinesthetic empathy describes the ability to experience empathy merely by observing the movements of another human being. Encouraging readers to sidestep the methodological and disciplinary boundaries associated with the arts and sciences, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices offers innovative and critical perspectives on topics ranging from art to sport, film to physical therapy.

Part I

Mirroring Movements: Empathy and Social Interactions

Introduction

Dee Reynolds

This part explores the uses and effects of kinesthetic empathy in very different environments and disciplinary contexts – applied theatre, dance movement psychotherapy, and cognitive psychology – looking at a range of ways in which kinesthetic empathy impacts on social interactions. A shared concern is the affective implications of kinesthetic empathy. For Shaughnessy and Meekums, this is central to their practices, which aim to influence participants and effect positive change. Hayes and Tipper highlight the impact on everyday actions of motor affect, which generally goes unnoticed.

Nicola Shaughnessy’s chapter, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance’, discusses a project that drew upon scientific and physiological understandings of empathy (related to the context of mirror neuron research) to shape and focus the practice of participatory theatre. She recounts her work with drama practitioners and a cognitive psychologist to devise a theatrical experience that could facilitate autistic children in overcoming their difficulties in engaging with others. In the performance this engagement was mediated by a specially constructed theatrical environment, which was multisensory and immersive and which connected the real with the make-believe and facilitated individuals on the autistic spectrum to enter into imaginative play. For example, the performance used puppets – which are solid and real, and which have the appearance of life, but are less threatening than dealing with the full otherness of other people – to give participants the opportunity to act out social relations in a predictable, non-threatening way. At times the children were invited to help operate the puppets, and this along with other techniques (such as interaction between participant and performer, and the use of a live video feed) invited a kind of play that was spontaneous but also self-reflexive and always conscious of its own pretence.

The interactive environment, then, enabled the children to develop their abilities to play spontaneously and consequently also their skills of communication, social interaction and imagination. Alongside the children’s development and discovery through the performance, the researchers themselves were involved in a process of engaging imaginatively with autism by interacting empathically with the participants in the multisensory space. Rather than assimilation (as critiqued by Bertolt Brecht), this was an ‘encounter’ that recognised and valued the difference of a ‘neuro divergent imagination’, which privileges visual and imagistic modes of thinking. The performances therefore provided the researchers with a liminal space where they could experience the autistic imagination at work. Through embodied, multisensory engagement both with the environment and with each other, participants and researchers alike learned new ways of behaving and new ways of knowing. As well as mobilising kinesthetic empathy to ‘intervene’ in autistic consciousness, this experience points to a model for scholarship based on empathy and dialogue with difference.

In her chapter, ‘Kinesthetic Empathy and Movement Metaphor in Dance Movement Psychotherapy’, Bonnie Meekums in turn explores kinesthetic communication, this time in the context of dance movement psychotherapy, where therapist and client (or group of clients) use movement as a mode of exploration and transformation. The embodied experience of moving constructs ‘dialogues’ between individuals where cognition and understanding are brought into play. This encounter is mediated by the ‘movement metaphor’, where movements suggest meanings and allow creative interaction between what is unconscious and unsymbolised, and what is consciously known and accessible to verbalisation. The therapist’s ‘mirroring’ of the client’s movement and postural shifts is different from mimicry, as the process of reflecting back also subtly alters and inflects the other’s movement. (Meekums’ argument here resonates with aspects of kinesthetic mirroring explored in Chris Nash’s photos and discussed by Matthew Reason later in this book.) The therapist also becomes subjectively involved in this process and brings their own experience into play, to create a kinesthetic dialogue predicated both on empathic engagement and cognitive awareness.

The mediating space of the movement metaphor provides a degree of emotional distance, which is significant particularly where the therapist or group has the role of ‘witnessing’ another’s (potentially traumatic) experience. This involves an empathic relation to the person being witnessed, in an attitude of ‘not knowing’, where embodied connection is intertwined with conscious intention and awareness that one can only approximate the truth of another. Moreover, in order for insights for both client and therapist to emerge from mirroring and/ or witnessing, the creative process needs to lead to evaluation and ultimately to releasing and separation, initiated by the therapist and enacted through metaphors of grounding and containment.

While Shaughnessy’s theatre practice and Meekums’ therapeutic practice are designed to lead to kinesthetic learning and insights, Amy Hayes and Steven Tipper, coming from cognitive psychology, explore through experimentation how performing or observing motor actions in everyday life can influence our affective states, even without any conscious awareness or evaluation. As they point out in their chapter, ‘Affective Responses to Everyday Actions’, whereas considerable attention has been paid to how emotions influence motor responses (e.g. fear leading to running away), their own focus is on how motor processes can evoke emotions. Hayes and Tipper hold in common with Shaughnessy and Meekums a concern with how the body, and particularly the body in movement, can evoke affect, and with how empathic understanding is linked with simulation on the part of the observer. Following James Gibson’s ecological model of perception, they consider the role of vision in observing an action, where the body acts in and interacts with the environment. For instance, fluent actions, which appear not to involve much effort, are easier to process and are more readily perceived as opportunities for action on the part of the observer.

Through a series of experiments, Hayes and Tipper and their colleagues tested their hypothesis that fluent actions lead to positive affect for both performer and observer. The actions included moving objects in either an obstructed or a non-obstructed trajectory; performing fluent or non-fluent actions; or observing others interacting with objects in a more or less fluent way. This approach was unusual in that it was the first time that the affective impact of watching emotionally neutral actions had been tested in relation to the qualities of the movement itself. Their results indicated that participants had a preference for fluent over non-fluent actions.

Hayes and Tipper’s experimental approach is of course very different to the practice-based research of Shaughnessy and Meekums, and of several other contributors to this book. This is reflected, for instance, in the greater distance between researchers and ‘participants’ where there is no question of empathic relationships; rather, the researchers dispassionately observe the participants’ behaviour. Also, as is quite common in cognitive psychology, they enquire into the possible (evolutionary) reasons for the behaviour patterns they observe. What potential benefits might there be in connecting motor fluency with positive affect? The authors surmise that pleasure in perceptual fluency may be linked with familiarity, indicating that an object is safe to approach, while motor fluency might act as a reward for well executed actions, hence motivating skill learning. For motor events, goal-related evaluations, which may be unconscious, are a particularly important source of affect. Also, more unusually in the context of their discipline, Hayes and Tipper reflect on the implications of differences between the laboratory environment and everyday life, where goals can be multiple and complex, requiring appraisal on many levels at once and being influenced by contextual factors, which can be cultural and social. Although the context within which these experiments were conducted was restricted, the implications for the affective impact of performing and watching fluent actions are very broad, ranging from influence on consumer preferences (e.g. in advertising) to impact on skills learning.

All three chapters treat empathy and affect as embodied, as involving movement, and also as mediated by interactions with objects as well as direct interactions between people. The role of objects in kinesthetic and empathic interactions is particularly interesting, as it links up with the history of kinesthetic empathy (see introduction to this book) and also points to the importance in kinesthetic empathy of interactions with the material environment as well as direct intersubjective relations. Related issues emerge in the chapters by McKinney and Whatley in their discussions of theatrical and virtual environments, and in the context of design in the chapter by Fogtmann.

Chapter 1

Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance

Nicola Shaughnessy

Knowing refers to those embodied, sensuous experiences that create the conditions for understanding … performed experiences are the sites where felt emotion, memory, desire and understanding come together.

(Denzin 2003: 13)

In his discussion of performance ethnography, from which the title of this chapter draws its inspiration, Denzin succinctly summarises what drama practitioners refer to variously as embodied knowledge, kinesthetic learning and empathetic understanding. Recent research in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, phenomenology, philosophy and psychology shows how embodied activities shape human cognition and perception. According to Raymond Gibbs:

Our bodies, and our felt experiences of our bodies in action, finally take center stage in the empirical study of perception, cognition and language and in cognitive science’s theoretical accounts of human behaviour.

(Gibbs 2006: 13)

This chapter explores the dialogue between cognitive neuroscience and ‘applied theatre’, a term used to refer to participatory theatre activities in educational, social or community contexts. In particular it discusses a pilot project involving autistic children in participatory performance, where drama, performance and digital media are used as interventions for autistic spectrum conditions. The project was directed and designed by myself and Melissa Trimingham in collaboration with four drama practitioners and a psychologist specialising in autism and learning disability.¹ The work is part of ongoing research at Kent University’s Research Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance.

My account is informed by recent research in cognitive neuroscience, particularly mirror neuron theory as this has significant implications for both applied theatre and autism. Mirror neurons are brain cells that are activated not only in the individual performing an action, but also in the brain of the observer witnessing the action and are thought to be the neural mechanism underpinning our ability to perceive emotions, intentions and gestures.² Discussion of mirror neurons is now pervasive as a cross-disciplinary dialogue between the arts, humanities and sciences, proposing a physiological basis for empathy, language, culture and morality.³

The mirror neuron system is also discussed in the context of autism, a condition in which language, communication, social interaction, imagination and empathy with others are problematised:⁴

How is it possible to imagine that children can coherently evaluate the people they see if they cannot evaluate relationships between their own bodies and the environment? … How can beings whose brains are the center of multiple incongruities have even the slightest desire to communicate with a world with which they cannot identify?

(Berthoz 2002: 96)

This account examines how drama can be used as a means of engaging with autism through interactive encounters in sensory environments, promoting empathic responses between performers and participants. The methods used, drawing upon contemporary performance strategies, facilitate embodied understanding and the felt emotion, desire, pleasure and memory to which Denzin refers. In this liminal space, we were able to engage imaginatively in the experience of autism and a mutual process of ‘knowing’ was begun. As our work developed, we became increasingly aware of the differences involved in the autistic individual’s engagement with and perception of their environment. Writing on autism increasingly explores ‘difference’ and suggests that the autistic brain processes the world in a particular way (Mills 2008; Baron-Cohen 2009).

With the increased incidence of autism and the insights arising from autists’ self-reporting and artistic work … we might begin to re-think past paradigms that oppose typical/ normal with atypical/abnormal creative processes. In the continuum that marks the different cognitive processes that produce ‘art’, we might begin to refine an understanding of the imagination in relation to autism.

(Mills 2008: 118)

I begin with an exercise in empathy to offer an account of the experience of autism.

The neuro diversion

Imagine a situation in which parents are told that their two-year-old son has autism. The child (let us call him Finn) had very little language: ‘He knows his alphabet and can count to 100’ his mother explained to a health visitor, ‘but he doesn’t speak in sentences and he doesn’t respond to his name’. He could identify colours, animals, objects on picture cards, but did not initiate communication. His mother felt he was becoming increasingly withdrawn and isolated. She had noticed him tracking and stroking lines in a fence when she took him to an animal park; she was concerned that he did not point like other toddlers and did not appear to be interested in playing with his siblings. The diagnosis was swift and bleak; he was autistic and was unlikely to talk, would never achieve independence and would need constant support.

Finn’s parents embarked on the journey described by Emily Perl Kingsley (1987) in her oft-cited account of the experience of parenting a disabled child. There is frustration and disappointment that you are denied the pleasures and experiences you had anticipated, but there are alternative surprises, challenges and fulfillment. Finn’s parents became aware of their son’s alternative reality through his pictures and writing depicting a visual, sensual world. While ‘typically’ developing children learn through imitation and role play, Finn copied only in a literal sense, struggling to conceptualise and engage with the confusing social world he inhabited. He copied his siblings dressing up but had no idea how to interact ‘in role’ and his idiosyncratic combination of costume items appeared to be chosen on the basis of colour and texture rather than through any understanding of representation.

Finn communicated through a script of ‘learned’ phrases, mostly requests for food, in appropriate contexts. One day, his mother observed a therapist telling Finn to ‘copy me’ and sadly noted the accuracy and emptiness of his imitation; like an automaton he learned his social scripts, reciting his name, address and set responses to questions about days of the week, the weather, his family etc. The drills were repeated and delivered in a voice devoid of emotional expression or spontaneous engagement. Finn the robot, his mother sadly reflected. Until one day she observed him acting out his therapy sessions with a puppet: ‘What is your name?’ Finn was saying to the puppet and the puppet answered ‘my name is Finn’. Although Finn was ‘generalising’ by transferring the dialogue he had learned with his therapist to a play situation, so it could be argued that Finn was ‘pretending to pretend’; this was the first indication of a potential...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I: Mirroring Movements: Empathy and Social Interactions
• PART II: Kinesthetic Engagement: Embodied Responses and Intersubjectivity
• PART III: Kinesthetic Impact: Performance and Embodied Engagement
• PART IV: Artistic Enquiries: Kinesthetic Empathy and Practice-Based Research
• PART V: Technological Practices: Kinesthetic Empathy in Virtual and Interactive Environments
• Conclusion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index