Resources

We have a strong vision and a strong mission and highly qualified trainers, educators and practitioners.

This area is designed to compliment our psychodrama training programs as well as hold articles that are stimulating and challenging.

Dan Ariely - Applying the concept of warm-up to psychological research on lying

Dan Ariely has a number of great TED talks and we have some of them here. The article here is a brief radio interview on NPR, USA public radio, where he discusses some of his experiments with regards to lying. The main interest for us, or me at least, is not so much the remarkable creativity he has displayed to catch everyday people being a ‘bit’ crooked, but how the psychodramatic concept of warm-up would enrich his theorizing. I have also added a couple of his papers for those who like to read. His talk on What makes us feel good at work may be found by clicking here; his talk on Intuition and how wrong it may be can be found by clicking here.

 

Heros come in many forms and this is certainly one of them - continuing and never letting go: Diana Nyad.

About Diana Nyad's TedTalk

Stung by jellyfish, choking on salt water, hallucinating in the pitch black, 64-year-old Diana Nyad kept swimming. She describes the journey of her historic 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida.

About Diana Nyad

From 1969 to 1979, Diana Nyad was known as the world's best long-distance swimmer. In 1979, she finished the then-longest swim in history: 102.5 miles from Bimini to Florida. At age 60, she began preparing for her most ambitious swim: 110 miles from Cuba to Florida. She'd tried it once in her 20s and didn't make it. With a strong team and new commitment, she jumped back into the sea decades later.

How Do We Change When We Really Listen To The People We Love?

This talk is included because it is wonderful and because it shows again the capacity human beings have for being creative and remarkable creatures, the power of stories, and the power of listening and being listened to.

About Dave Isay's TED Talk

Dave Isay started StoryCorps with a recording booth in Grand Central Terminal, and an open invitation for people to interview one another. Since then, it's turned into a massive archive of intimate conversations.

About Dave Isay

Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps, an audio project that has collected more than 50,000 personal interviews. The archives of StoryCorps are kept at the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center, and constitute the largest single collection of recorded voices in history.

StoryCorps invites friends and loved ones to conduct 40-minute interviews at small recording booths across the country. Offering moving and surprising glimpses into the lives of often marginalized and forgotten subjects, the interviews are a familiar feature of NPR's Morning Edition and Storycorps.org.

Leadership and Evelyn Glennie: How Do We Listen When We're Unable to Hear?

This is a great article about passion, staying the course, leadership and music. We have both a video of this remarkable woman as well as the great radio transcript. Her leadership changed the way music was done in the UK and allowed proficient deaf people access to all the major orchestras and performance spaces.

Testing intuition

This short TED talk, by behavioural economist Dan Ariely, is a great piece of watching. His book Predictably Irrational is also a highly entertaining read. Especially the chapter on people continuing to rate the best beer as being the one with vinegar in it simply because it was in the expensive beer bottles. While the 'better' beer - the actual beer from the bottles - was rated lower. They also paid more for the beer and vinegar than for the 'real' beer. Thats from memory so don't quote me.

Ariely has a nice take on intuition. Basically the area of what do we do when your intuition and my intuition are at loggerheadds? Whose intuition is 'correct', or are either of them 'correct'? It takes us into the area of 'certaintiy'. According to Robert Burton who wrote On Being Certain certainty is a feeling much like anger, sadness, fear and other such strong emotions. If certainty is indeed an emotion, instead of an outcome of a series of reasonable, perhaps logical processes, then how do we work with it? If it arises much like fight/flight arises then ..... HUH!

I am so certain that this is an important piece of information, jigsaw piece about the human world. I am, so there!

For my money, Morenian action methods such as group processes, group psychotherapy, psychodrama, role training and sociodrama are brilliant ways for working with certainty and treating it as a feeling in a larger process, and for looking at the larger process. Let me know what you think at peter@moreno.com.au

 

What makes us feel good about our work?

What motivates us to work? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it isn't just money. But it's not exactly joy either. It seems that most of us thrive by making constant progress and feeling a sense of purpose. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely presents two eye-opening experiments that reveal our unexpected and nuanced attitudes toward meaning in our work

The transmogrification of warm-up: from drama to psychodrama

This paper, The transmogrification of warm-up: from drama to psychodrama, will be published in the journal The Arts in Psychotherapy Volume 44 in July. It was written by Peter Howie and Richard Bagnall. Please download or click on the link above if you would prefer to read the article online. The reference will be: Howie, P, & Bagnall, R. (2015) The transmogrification of warm-up: From drama to psychodrama.The arts in psychotherapy, 44, 35-44.

Download the paper by clicking here: The transmogrification of warm-up: from drama to psychodrama.

Cold reading: a great fun discussion with Richard Dawkins and Derren Brown

"You either live on your own or you live with other people?" is a great cold reading line. This is a really neat clip of Richard Dawkins chatting with a professional illusionist about the skills of cold reading. Cold reading is an ability that some psychic readers employ to hook you or into believing they are communicating with spirits, and especially spirits that appear to know you. They are both thoroughly British in their polite and revealing discussion and their gentle and thorough wiping of the floor with the whole area. Its is about 50 minutes but I found I just got engaged and it kept my attention.

 

Leadership of another sort

This is a short and worthwhile video with a decent narration. It suggests leadership comes from many sources not just the leader. The leader is defined by people following, who also need to take leadership. It is also incredibly silly and fun.

Stepping into the same river every week.

Abstract: The desired outcome of group psychotherapy, indeed, of any psychotherapy, is therapeutic change. But is fundamental change possible, or is there only a rearrangement of a preexisting state? This paper explores the question of the existence and nature of therapeutic change from the perspectives of the Greek philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus using concepts from chaos theory to examine the process. I conclude that the actuality is a melding of the two ideas; that change occurs within continuity, and that continuity requires change.