Overview
Healthy romantic relationships contribute to human physical health and emotional well-being. Technologies that catalyze human sexuality such as silicone sex toys and video-conferencing are increasingly common today, and disruptive sexological artifacts such as sexbots are speculated to eventually compete directly with human-human sexuality. The consequences of these evolutionary transitions in human sociosexual behavior are entirely unknown at the individual or collective scale. Here we introduce Partner Pen Play in Parallel (PPPiP), the act of simultaneous improvisational drawing on paper without clinical supervision. In this prospective article we sketch out what PPPiP is, then provide interdisciplinary evidence from art therapy, sexology, affective neuroscience, and aesthetics to support PPPiP as a useful strategy for relationship development. PPPiP combines the advantages of individuated artistic practice with the established frameworks of improvisation and dyadic relationship interventions. Relative to traditional art therapy practices, PPPiP is less clinically oriented, features fewer external constraints, and directly encourages the dynamic integration of artistic creation with relationship co-creation. PPPiP emphasizes the importance of narrative structure and controlled novelty at multiple scales in intimate partnerships, connecting art therapy practices more directly to recent neuropsychological research. Evidence from brain imaging in improvisational and aesthetic contexts supports a model in which PPPiP synergistically activates motor and cortico-limbic neural circuits associated with skilled emotive-creative processes. PPPiP thus represents a transdisciplinary answer to the question of what will we carry from our sociosexual past towards a healthier textosexual future.
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- The authors conclude PPPiP shares all five characteristics hypothesized to make art therapy effective in marital contexts.
- They propose a model in which PPPiP synergistically activates motor and cortico-limbic circuits, supported by imaging evidence from improvisational and aesthetic contexts.
- PPPiP is distinguished from traditional art therapy as less clinically oriented, with fewer external constraints and direct integration of art-making with relationship co-creation.
- The authors predict greater neural synchrony between partners than strangers, and in PPPiP versus isolated tandem drawing, as a testable future direction.
Methods
- Definition and practice description of Partner Pen Play in Parallel — Specifies PPPiP as two people simultaneously drawing on one sheet with pens, and outlines how sessions begin, proceed, and end.
- Interdisciplinary synthesis from art therapy, sexology, neuroscience, aesthetics — In the absence of direct studies, the authors synthesize prior research to argue a plausible scientific basis for PPPiP.
- Mapping PPPiP onto Wadeson's five-element art therapy framework — Re-enumerates Wadeson's five advantages of art therapy (Immediate, Genuine, Spatial Expression, Permanent, Shared Pleasure) and checks PPPiP against them.
- Free Energy Principle framing of partner modeling (FEPPPPiP) — Interprets joint drawing as building a generative model of the partner and as collective self-evidencing of the relationship.
- Appendix of example drawings by the authors — Presents author-made examples of the two PPPiP categories, fontplay and pure abstraction.
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- 2018_PPPiP.pdf PDF · 4.94 MiB · extracted-text source
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