Theatre Glendon theatre students are pushing the boundaries of audience interaction in their upcoming  production,  , opening Feb. 28.

Inspired by the Occupy movement and adapted from Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade by student Dan Pelletier, this play explores class struggle and questions the nature of revolution. Directed by Glendon theatre instructor and award-winning director Aleksandar Lukac, it will take its audiences deep into the struggles of the 99 per cent.

Here’s the unusual bit. Every performance will be on the Internet. And – a very big and – viewers will be invited to send comments via and about the production. Those comments will be projected in real time onto the tent city set, raw and uncensored, and the student actors will answer them on stage during the performance.

“This hasn’t been done before that I know of,” says Lukac. Known for mounting , especially in his native Serbia, Lukac has alerted Toronto theatre companies about this experiment so they can witness what happens. The tweets and Facebook messages “will be a distraction or a help. Once we open the gate anything can pass through. It will show who’s watching, anyway.”

The play runs Feb. 28 through March 3 at Theatre Glendon, Glendon campus, at 7pm. Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for students. Call the box office for tickets: 416-487-6822.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The study, published this summer, examined the effects of exercises that build positivity on more than 250 participants. It found that people with needy personalities reported lower self-esteem after listening to three or four uplifting songs of their choosing every day over the course of a week.

Needy individuals suffer from deep insecurities and need interpersonal support to ward off acute feelings of despair and loneliness. They tend to be submissive in interpersonal relationships, feel helpless and fear abandonment.

“We were quite surprised at this result,” says study lead author Myriam Mongrain (right), professor of psychology in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health. “Until now, the vast majority of studies have suggested that positive psychology exercises result in either improvements for participants or no change over time. This result hints that self-help exercises may actually be detrimental for those with needy personalities,” she says.

Study participants were randomly assigned one of three daily exercises: recalling five things that they were grateful for over the course of the day; listening to three or four uplifting songs of their choosing; or writing about a specific memory from their early life (the latter was used as a control exercise). Participants then completed questionnaires to measure changes in their mood and outlook; these same measures were administered at intervals of one, three and six months post-study.

Those with needy personalities reported no significant benefits from the gratitude exercise, while the music exercise dragged them down further. Highly self-critical individuals experienced the greatest improvement to their subjective happiness when they practiced the gratitude exercise. They also demonstrated a larger increase in self-esteem and greater decrease in physical symptom severity in both the gratitude condition and the music condition.

“We hypothesized that listening to happy music was a kind of self-soothing that would benefit people with needy personalities. However, this independent activity, which involved no interaction with others, may have had a negative effect on participants,” says Mongrain.

“Needy people rely on secure intimate bonds with others in order to experience well-being, and they may have felt frustrated with the lack of improvement and expressed their disappointment on the outcome measures. Given these results, one-on-one counselling is likely more appropriate for this personality type.”

The study was published in August 2011 in the Journal of Positive Psychology. It is co-authored by Susan Sergeant, a PhD student in 91��ɫ’s Department of Psychology.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post 91��ɫ study finds self-help no help for certain personality types appeared first on Research & Innovation.