Yoko

Yoko Ono (if you don’t already know) is the wife of the late Beatles legend John Lennon, and one cool lady. Both propagators of “peace” and “anti-war” since their hippie-era days, Yoko Ono’s work has always been laced with a strong symbolism of “wishing” and hope. Above are pictures from her most recent project, Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree (Imagine Peace). Here’s an abstract from a Yoko Ono website that I found, that very aptly describes her work:

Wishing in Yoko Ono’s Art
“Keep wishing while you participate”

Yoko Ono: “As a child in Japan, I used to go to a temple and write out a wish on a piece of thin paper and tie it around the branch of a tree. Trees in temple courtyards were always filled with people’s wish knots, which looked like white flowers blossoming from afar.”

The Wish Tree has been a part of many exhibitions by Yoko Ono since the 1990s. People are invited to write their wish on a piece of paper and hang it to a tree branch. It’s like a collective prayer in a way. Some wishes are deeply personal, some global wishes for peace and better future for humankind.

Yoko Ono: “All my works are a form of wishing. Keep wishing while you participate.”

Yoko Ono has used different kinds of trees at different exhibition venues, to fit the particular venue’s nature.

Wish Piece by Yoko Ono (1996)

Make a wish
Write it down on a piece of paper
Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree
Ask your friends to do the same
Keep wishing
Until the branches are covered with wishes

There is something very poignant about having the wishes of individuals in a collective environment; where the hopes, dreams, aspirations, regrets and desires of humanity sort of come together in a single place.

Research Analysis: Factors in Wish-Making

Developmental and Experiential Factors in Making Wishes
Norman A. Milgram and Wolfgang W. Riedel, Child Development, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Sep., 1969), pp. 763-771

Children in grades made up 3 wishes they hoped would come true. With increasing age, children wished for abstract or intangible human conditions rather than for concrete or tangible possessions; wished for things consistent with adult rather than child status; and made altruistic wishes, benefiting others rather than themselves.

“A projective technique commonly employed to investigate personality development in young children is to ask them to make up wishes that they hope will come true; these wishes are assumed to reflect the ungratified needs, the unexpressed impulses, and the unresolved fears of the children making the wishes. Analyses of…special adult groups from the vantage point of their particular life experiences, are absent from the research literature.”

Assumptions in wish-making:
1. A person will only wish for something of which he has some knowledge. As a bare minimum, he must possess a verbal label for the desired entity to communicate the wish to another person. 2. While a person need not possess extensive knowledge of the thing desired, he must necessarily recognize and value highly one or more of its properties.
3. No matter how valued the thing may be, it will not be wished for if it is readily available; it will simply be taken for granted under these circumstances.
The desired thing must be relatively high in the hierarchy of things valued by the person; otherwise, some other thing more valued will have been given priority in making wishes.

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Wishes, Gender, Personality, and Well-Being
Laura A. King and Sheri J. Broyles, Southern Methodist University

Study participants made three wishes and completed measures of the five-factor model of personality, optimism, life
satisfaction, and depression. Common wishes were for achievement, affiliation, intimacy, and power as well as for happiness and money. Tests showed women were more likely to wish for improved appearance, happiness, and health; men were more likely to make power wishes and wishes for sex. Extraversion was related to making more interpersonal wishes and wishes for positive affect. Neuroticism was related to wishes for emotional stability. Agreeableness and Openness to Experience related to wishes reflective of these traits. Conscientiousness was related to low impulsivity. Depression was related to making highly idiosyncratic, specific wishes, suggesting the use of wishful thinking as a coping mechanism. In addition, happy participants were more likely to rate their wishes as likely to come true. Results indicate that the relatively commonplace process of wishing relates to traits, gender, and well-being.

“We make a wish over birthday candles, as we toss coins in a fountain, on shooting stars, and first stars. In some sense, these wishes reveal a latent optimism about the world, as if wishing for something might actually make it so…In fairy tales and in psychology, wishes have been portrayed as revealing important information about wish makers…More recently, wishes have been defined as aims that are unconstrained by the limitations of the real world…lacking the potency to become “wants”…Wishes have the potential to be less reality-bound than goals, although they may take the form of goals…wishes are mental statements…to express a more or less fantastic desire. These types of wishes represent samples of deliberate fantasy, rather than…wishes that might emerge in the stream of natural thought. Wish lists have been used previously in research and practice as measures of personal preference, bases for discussions, creativity enhancers, and as “ice breakers” in clinical settings. An invitation to “make a wish” is an invitation to engage in mundane fantasy.”

“Wishes are utterly unconstrained even by reality. Thus, wishes might be expected to be even more strongly related to aspects of the person than goals…There is no risk involved in making a wish, given the relatively low probability that a fantastical wish will “come true.”…wishes may express fleeting interests, colored by long-term concerns (e.g., “world peace”) but also potentially momentary situational factors (e.g., “to meet the woman sitting next to me”). Given the influence of caprice in wish making, the links between wishes and personality and well-being might be expected to be somewhat less than that typically found in goal research.”

“In any case, this study indicates that aspects of everyday fantasy have demonstrable relations to stable personality characteristics and to psychological well-being. To paraphrase Walt Disney, “When you wish upon a star” what you wish for depends on who you are.”

These two studies are probably the most exciting of the lot, because they are very closely related (in fact, they have practically covered half of my “research” for me!) to my intended topic. They deal with the particular aspect of making wishes, and how personal traits, characteristics, social- and experiential-development of individuals affect the contents of these wishes. The readings have helped me especially in the area of terminology – labeling types/categories of wishes, classifying different factors (gender, personality, well-being, experience) – which will help me to further my research in this area. The references provided in the studies also provide me with more material to look up. I think this is definitely an area that I want to look into deeper, as it corresponds closely to what I intended when I started on the topic of “wishes”. I have quite a few more papers/readings which I’ve found that cover the topics of motives and intentions with regards to wishes, so I’ll post up my thoughts when I’m done with them.

Research Analysis: Dreams

The Psychological Analysis of Dreams
S. Ferenczi, The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 1910), pp. 309-328

“…the dream is nothing else than the concealed fulfillment of a repressed wish.”

“Some of the dreams of adults and most of the dreams of children are purely wish-fulfillment dreams…For the most part we attain in dreams just that which we painfully miss on waking.”

“The same tendency to wish-fulfillment rules not only nocturnal, but day dreams as well, the fancies in which we can catch ourselves at unoccupied moments or monotonous activity.”

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Students’ Views on the Role of Dreams in Human Life
Barbara Szmigielska and Malgorzata Holda

The present study examined the private concepts of dreams and dreaming, attitude toward dreams, and the influence of dreams on behavior, which can manifest in sharing dreams with other people, trying to interpret one’s own dreams, believing they have special meaning, or behaving according to the clues given by the dream.

“…participants claimed that dreams reflect their thoughts, emotions, or events that happen to them. Also, sub-consciousness is often specified as a source of dreams. Furthermore, subjects indicate biological sources and functions of dreams.”

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Dream Emotions, Waking Emotions, Personality Characteristics and Well-Being—A Positive Psychology Approach
Sue Gilchrist, John Davidson and Jane Shakespeare-Finch

The study aimed to discover whether personality characteristics and waking emotions relate to dreaming emotions. It was hypothesized that participants with significant positive emotional trait and state ratings in waking life would experience more positive dreams.

The Staats Hope Scale (SHS; Staats & Stassen, 1985) comprises 16 items representing two subscales: Hope for Self and Hope for Others. Participants rate their wish for a specific item and their expectation for the same item ranging from not at all (0) to very much (5). Sample items were “To what extent do you wish/expect to have good health” (hope for self) and “To what extent do you wish/expect peace in the world” (hope for others).

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As mentioned, one cannot escape Freudian theories when it comes to studies in psychoanalysis, and especially with relation to dreams. While the studies do concur that dreams, as Freud put forth, are the fulfillment of repressed wishes, most do not go to extent of concluding that these are all based on sexual desires. Dreams are also said to be what “keeps us asleep”, instead of previous theories that proposed dreams as subconscious thoughts that keep our minds restless when we sleep. Dreams tend to fulfill wishes or worries which in turn keeps us “satisfied” in our sleep; for example we do well in tests or get our dream job. This, however, does not seem to take into account what we call “nightmares”, in which the opposite happens (ie. we flunk badly). These can hardly be called wish-fulfillments, although they are still rooted in our desires – or rather what we strongly desire will not happen. The concept and study of dreams has been done to no end in psychology, and they are interesting because they deal mostly with the subconscious mind – something few people understand, even with regards to their own – but I have chosen to focus more on the conscious act of wishing, and the kind of motives, intentions, characteristics, emotions and personal situations behind making those wishes. So, it was necessary to cover this subject of “dreaming” not only because it is so closely related, but also because it is such a huge topic in the field of psychology, but its time to move on to something closer to what I intended.

Research Analysis: Hope

Notes on the Psychology of Hope
W. W. Meissner, Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Apr., 1973), pp. 120-139

“In his hopelessness, the patient makes a basic presumption that he possesses no inner resources to bring to bear on the solution of problems or the fulfillment of wishes, or at least that his inner resources are completely inadequate.”

“A particular manifestation and expression of hopelessness is boredom. Boredom carries within it a sense of purposelessness, of the meaninglessness of things, of a lack of interest, of apathy and general disinterestedness. It is the death of wishing.”

This article brings to light the discussion about whether “wishing” or “hoping” is man’s greatest weakness, or whether it is what sustains us. It links hopelessness with the idea that one no longer has the capacity to fulfill his own wishes, and therefore has nothing to look forward to in life and depression sinks in. Meissner puts forth that most “depressed, withdrawn, and apathetic states” in disturbed or neurotic patients are caused by a lack of hope. While the concept of “hope” is not exactly the area I want to explore in my research, I find myself leaning more toward the view that “hope” – and in turn, the ability to wish – is something that drives everyone in life. Our wishes may all be different (and this is actually the part that interests me), but without the knowledge or hope that these wishes may actually sooner or later be fulfilled, our lives lose meaning and purpose. Of course, this then leads to the question of why people lose hope – often, it is because people wish too much or too big, and the lack of fulfillment of these then lead to a sense of hopelessness. So, I guess its always important to strike a balance between the realistic and the whimsical!

Sickkkkk

I have not been well :(

Head-achey and stomach-achey and flu-ey and sore-throaty and all that nonsense, which essentially has rendered me rather useless this week. But actually I did do many many readings for research this week, so above I have posted my thoughts/conclusions/analysis for the various topics (all still under the heading of “psychology”).

Go away, flu.