Monthly Archives: May 2017

Maintaining monogamy in committed romantic relationships

Show up your hand those you are currently in a relationship. Thank you

Now I would like you to imagine, or may be think back, when it was the last time, when you were at the party and your partner was not with you. Someone cute from across the room, lost eyes with you and smiled, and your heart flattens then oh no! what you doing in that situation, right? Now what previous research has taught us is that finding somebody else attractive when you are in a relationship is very common. But at the same time, our brains has a mechanisms to protect our relationships from outside threat. For example, we will try to rate the attractiveness of opposite sex is lower as compared to a single threats. We will also try to pay them less attention and even when we do pay them less attention, our recall of their attractiveness is actually less accurate as compared to our single threats and all of these are ways by which we protect our relationships from outside threats.

What happens if the outside threat is not a stranger at the party, no one has previously looked at if the the threat to your relationship is someone who is consistently in your life, or more long standing threat your relationship. And this is what I thought to find out. I asked over 750 adults about an experience of attraction they had while they were in a relationship and some of them not with partner, and the behaviour they engaged is fall into 3 broad categories. The first of which is practical points include things like I deleted this person from my phone. Enhancing the relationship, so for example I bought a present for my partner. The third of which is management threat, included behaviours like i told myself about negative consequences if i cheated on my partner.

And behaviours like these were endorsed by over 9 and 10 of my participants which indicates that majority of us are motivated and engaged and trying to protect our relationships from infidelity. What was even more interesting, were the people who use more of these behaviours compared to rest of samples. So I found out that those who are more sexually commissive, those who have more access, those who are more flirtatious towards opposite sex, and those who found themselves in episodes of receipt contraction i.e. the other person was also interested back, tended to use more of these behaviours than the rest of the sample.

And this shows that, there is sensitivity to the level of relationships threats that one can perceive and they amp up their efforts to protect their relationship likewise. This is very interesting that why should I know, what should I do with this information without monogamy elements? What we know that relationships are very important for our wellbeing. On the other hand, we also know that attractions to the people who are not our partners and infidelity by extension are quite common. By knowing more about how we protect our relationships, we can learn to better strengthen them, and increase our own wellbeing to the process.

Speaker, Brenda Lee is a student in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Brunswick Fredericton. Maintaining monogamy in committed romantic relationships won second prize of 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) Eastern Regional competition held at University of New Brunswick Fredericton on Apr 20th, 2017.

Life to Scans

Instead of rising on one of the morning in 2008, my older sister Devon felt on the ground, unable to move or feel her legs. After six month of misdiagnosis, she was finally given a definitive answer for why numbness ran though her body.Her doctor causally pointed to the bright lesions now exposes on her MRI scans, and unable or unwillingly to take his eyes off the computer screen proclaimed its multiple sclerosis; and instead of answering her questions on how he could be sure, he quieted her; totally stating that he was a specialist.

Like that doctor, I too was not able to verbalize my empathy towards Devon. I lacked the words to express the pain I felt when every six months she has to lie still for hours on and on the MRI scanner, and nothing but in a flimsy hospital gown. But, perhaps by using my background as an artist and print-maker, I could create an image that can somehow show her my empathy. After receiving her latest round of scans from the hospital, Devon and I looked at them together and concluded that if these scans had a context of what it is like to live with chronic illness on a daily basis? They could have the power to create an empathetic exchange between doctors, patients and caregivers. And then set to combine my sister’s MRI scans with images from her daily life to give a more honest betrayal of living with disease.

The goals of this project are threefold. First: to better understand how identity is transformed by biomedical imaging technologies; Second: to create meaningful collaborations with those who are impacted by illness; and Third: to educate doctors in empathy creation using the fine arts.The mass amount of art work I have created thus far have been exhibited in over 20 solo and group exhibitions around the world. In the art gallery, attendees will often share their own story of impairment with me and together we created interpersonal dialogue around the patient experience and a new collaboration is formed.

My artwork is also making its way into the medical classroom. My sister is now a professor of clinical ethics and she uses the images that we have created as a teaching tool, to ignite the conversation on empathetic patient care with these future doctors. The arts based research I present, is not a final answer nor end, but an interdisciplinary untangling of the social issues surrounding the unwell body. Unlike a doctor, I’m not interested in pointing to bright lesion in MRI scans, instead I use these scans as a visual metaphor for living with disease.   My aim is not to celebrate or fight difference, but to foster an ethical turn in medicine and greater society where difference accepted and respected.

Speaker, Darian Goldin Stahl is a student in the Department of Humanities at Concordia University Montreal. Life to Scans won third prize of 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) Eastern Regional competition held at University of New Brunswick Fredericton on Apr 20th, 2017.