The weight of Joy: Choosing joy, autistic joy and art.
Hello, in this episode you are getting a joyful mixed bag including the latest research on autistic joy, what we can take from two pictures in the National Portrait gallery.
Leila delves into the concept of joy, distinguishing it from happiness and exploring its complexities. She discusses various psychological theories of joy, including the broaden and build theory, flow theory, and self-determination theory, while also highlighting the limitations of these theories, particularly in relation to neurodivergent experiences. Ainge introduces a new perspective on autistic joy, emphasizing the importance of creating environments that allow autistic individuals to thrive. The episode also reflects on the emotional weight of joy, using art as a lens to explore how joy coexists with responsibilities and challenges. There are coaching prompts at the end of the episode. To access all of the podcast resources visit www.leilaainge.co.uk/joy
Transcript
Hi, I'm Leela Ainge, psychologist, researcher, and someone who's been thinking a lot
lately about what it feels
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:Hi, I'm Leela Ainge.
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:I'm a psychologist, researcher, and somebody who's been thinking a lot lately about what
really makes life feel good.
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:Welcome back to Psychologically Speaking, a podcast all about human behavior bringing
together fascinating research, insights, and real life experiences.
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:This season, we're exploring joy and...
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:how joy actually moves through our lives, how it shifts us and what it makes us do.
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:Today, we're going to explore the difference between happiness and joy and the relief of
joyful activities, but also the weight of joy.
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:And we'll think about the way in which psychologists explain joy, some of the limitations
in the way that we look at it and how philosophy fills some of those gaps.
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:And I also want to introduce a paper that's just been published on autistic joy and how
that brings a different way of thinking about deep enjoyment.
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:But mostly in psychology, joy is a really positive emotion.
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:It's most often studied with the idea of this positive psychology.
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:So in psychology, this is a historical divide.
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:in the study of what is wrong with humans or how we pathologize people into conditions.
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:And then you had the emergence of this idea of positive psychology, which was this idea
that we should concentrate on looking at the idea or the view of human flourishing.
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:And wouldn't that be interesting?
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:You know, what makes us thrive as humans?
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:So joy is often thought of or seen or studied as a state of high arousal.
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:And so it's what we would call positive valence.
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:So like a burst of delight when you see a friendly face in a crowd or perhaps when you
experience your favourite music or you've been at a gig.
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:But joy is really distinguished from happiness.
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:So joy is seen as this quite fleeting thing and almost very intense.
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:It can be unexplainable, a phenomenon.
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:whereas happiness we know is more stable and long term.
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:In fact, we know that happiness is more stable and it's measured at a population level.
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:So things like happiness and life satisfaction are surprisingly stable over our lifetime
or our life course.
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:It makes some really good indicators so good that they're tracked by the UK government.
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:and they look at this along with other factors such as GDP, so you know what our country
makes, sells and spends, we're also interested in how happy are we and how satisfied.
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:We know that year on year trends in happiness, you know they don't shift a lot but we will
expect to see some shifts with huge kind of national changes.
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:The last one on record that you can see, you can see this on the UKGov website, is the
happiness index and what happened over the pandemic years.
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:So we know that obviously um happiness took a dip during COVID-19 and then it partially
recovered afterwards.
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:But we haven't actually seen a return to pre-pandemic highs.
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:Up until the pandemic, average satisfaction and happiness was increasing.
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:So we know that these types of measures, don't just catch a mood, they're reflecting
broader conditions.
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:What else is going on?
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:And I want you to think about that because we're going to come back to this idea of joy as
something that is studied or thought about in isolation of other factors.
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:So when we think in psychology about joy, we tend to theorise and there's a couple of
really interesting theories that we can think about in terms of joy.
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:One of them, I think I've mentioned before, was this broaden and build theory.
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:So this is the idea that joy is a bit of an enabler because it expands our attention and
builds long term resources.
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:So the more that we broaden our horizons, the more joy we invite into our life.
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:You've got flow theory, which is Csikszentmihal.
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:He wrote the famous book on flow.
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:And really what we learned from that is that flow can emerge from this deep immersion,
this flow state.
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:And actually, the way he wrote about this is that that's something we would want to
achieve as an individual.
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:So his research really looked at the idea that
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:you get flow in that intersection where challenge and skill are balanced out.
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:So you don't want something that's too easy, you don't want something that's too
difficult, but when there's just enough challenge and you've got just enough skill in that
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:process, then that's where joy will happen or flow will happen.
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:You've also got self-determination theory.
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:And this one is interesting.
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:It kind of thinks about how joy arises when our
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:basic needs for three things are met.
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:So this is autonomy, competence and relatedness.
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:That relatedness, you we can think about that in terms of our relationships with people,
our social needs, competence.
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:So where Csikszentmihal was talking about flow theory and skill, competence, have we got
skill in what we want to do?
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:And autonomy, if we got some say in how we do what we do.
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:And all of these theories are really useful to think about emotion and wellbeing and
motivation essentially.
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:You know, they can help us to understand those really practical ways in which we can
increase joy through things like play and purpose and social connection with other
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:peoples.
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:But there's a limitation of these psychological theories and they tend to be quite
individualistic.
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:and they're not looked at in terms of context.
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:So they're not always capturing things like our embodied emotions, sensory or
environmental factors.
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:In fact, you could say that they're often kind of assuming this universal or this
emotional experience that is standard across most people and that might not fit
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:neurodivergent people.
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:was really interested to read a new paper out this month by a researcher at the University
of Birmingham and this is Elliot Wassle and they've researched the experiences of autistic
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:joy and the reason this landed on my emails really is because the researchers used a
community to recruit their participants so we know that
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:these people are already part of an affirming community for neurodivergence.
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:But the study really flips, I suppose, the script or these ideas about how we talk about
autism, because instead of focusing on struggle, this research really saying, well, what
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:brings autistic people joy?
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:And the research themselves is an autistic academic.
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:So they've centred this research from that autistic voice.
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:They wanted to challenge the medical narratives.
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:So I talked about this historical view of psychology, of pathologizing.
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:And a lot of the studies around autism are very much deficit or loss or difficulty.
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:So he looked at 86 autistic adults, mostly women, non-binary participants.
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:It was autistic-led in a participatory study.
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:what he's really saying there is that, you know, this is centred on autistic voices rather
than observing from the outside.
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:And we look at these things as markers of um good, open study really in science.
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:So the key question was, you know, what does bring autistic people joy and what gets in
the way of joy as well?
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:And the reason that the researcher wanted to look at joy was because from a base
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:I suppose an academic and public narratives, know, autistic joy is often ignored.
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:It's possibly seen as something quirky or weird or a regulation strategy.
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:And he's saying that, you know, it's powerful, it's underexplored.
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:So he looks at philosophical ideas to show that joy isn't just a fleeting moment.
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:And isn't that interesting?
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:Because what we said right at the beginning of the podcast was that
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:Joy is often seen as a fleeting moment, something that happens as a bit of a spontaneous
or a phenomenal thing or in a state of flow, and it's not as stable as happiness.
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:So this research isn't saying how do we fix autism, it's like, well, what if we created
environments where autistic people can thrive?
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:I think one of the really joyful things about the research is that it shows just how joy
happens and the themes that emerge were things like sensory pleasure, so know colours and
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:music and swinging movements, the deep absorption which I think you may have seen this
written as monotropism, so it's thought of as uh almost like a medical term of a focused
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:flow state.
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:also how repetition and ritual bring comfort and delight and I think about this a lot
actually I think perhaps in previous generations people had ritual in their life possibly
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:more than we have ritual now as adults and if you think about self-determination theory it
talks about our need for autonomy and autonomy would say that we want to move away from
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:you know regulation or oh
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:ritual, we might want to go our own path and do our own thing.
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:What we're saying here is that structure and ritual actually quite joyful as well.
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:So the research is also showing that things like special interests, like trains, animals,
crafts, you know, these are all sources of joy.
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:But the right conditions matter.
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:So the research says that quiet spaces, supportive relationships and freedom from social
pressure.
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:The
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:real barriers, so what prevents joy, that wasn't described by the participants as autism.
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:So autism in itself wasn't stifling joy but it's other people's lack of acceptance.
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:I suppose as a deeper insight the study is showing that this isn't in spite of being
autistic, that people can experience joy.
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:and I'm going to come back to that idea of in spite of later on.
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:But it supports this neurodiversity paradigm, the idea that there's natural variation in
our human experience and it's not something to be cured.
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:So an act of almost resistance is radical to be who you are in a world that expects people
to conform.
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:And being visibly joyful through stimming and deep focus and immersion in niche passions
can be really liberating.
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:But it also comes with that warning of it might not be accepted in every single uh kind of
circumstance.
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:So I think the reason I wanted to talk about this in terms of joy today is one, it's just
a fantastic paper.
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:But if you're autistic or neurodivergent or just curious about what it looks like to
flourish, I suppose on the margins, this paper is asking us to rethink how we think about
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:joy, how it's experienced, how it's expressed.
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:And a reminder that it's not just a personal thing, it's those political um and kind of
surrounding
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:environmental things that make it happen or stop it from, you know, that would stop joy.
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:One of the theories then that the researcher is using is a philosophical one called
established theory.
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:And I thought I'd explain this a little bit, because I had to go and look it up.
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:And I really like it.
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:I like the way that it uses this theory to understand the world, not as fixed categories.
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:I think anybody who, say if you've got children or you are neurodivergent or you're around
neurodivergent people, this idea of labeling.
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:being both a curse and a blessing sometimes.
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:You need labels in order to get through systems and to get support you need.
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:Labels can be really affirming and identity rich, but labels can also be pathologising and
they can be unhelpful and they can be used to, as a social scientist, we say to, you know,
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:an in-group and an out-group which can have both positive and negative outcomes.
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:But this idea of
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:assemblage theory is saying that actually if we move away from fixed categories and
understanding how complex systems are made up of many interacting parts and I think that's
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:such a human way to think about how we can coexist in multiple identities, this
intersectionality if you like.
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:So the research is really saying, isn't it, when you merge, when all of your parts and
your environment come together in the moment, that is assemblage.
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:And so that includes things like your sensory experiences, your body, your brain, the
music you're listening to.
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:Could be the cat on your lap, memories, the room you're in, the weather, trauma.
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:It could even be your favourite mug that you have your tea in.
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:But all of these things create this kind of temporary
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:situation um and one philosopher, Deleuze, called that a territory of becoming which I
thought was really interesting.
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:I think the key things to take from this paper are is this person in the right environment
doing what they love surrounded by people who get them.
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:And I would say that's possibly at the heart of my research questions as a social
scientist and a social psychologist is how do people flourish in the right environment and
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:what's that right environment.
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:But let's go back to Maslow for a little bit, because his hierarchy needs is, I suppose,
one of those enduring theories.
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:It's been replaced by self-determination theory largely in psychological circles.
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:this triangle, and if you've never seen Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's a triangle.
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:the bottom, you've got basic needs like safety, food, water, for example.
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:And then as you move up the triangle, the hierarchy, you can get to this uh kind of area
of self actualization.
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:quite a few people have hypothesized that some people may never get there, to this self
actualization.
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:But it's a really interesting view because I want to challenge this idea that joy is a
pinnacle of success or that transcendence, if you like, that Maslow was talking about.
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:and that joy can coexist with emotional weight too.
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:So I'm going to talk, well, I'm going to do something different now and turn to two
portraits in the National Portrait Gallery to explain this idea of emotional weight.
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:If you want to see these images for yourself, then head to www.leelaange.com, so that's
L-E-I-L-A-A-I-N-G-E.co.uk forward slash joy.
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:I've uploaded the images that I've taken and full links to the artists and their websites
for you to enjoy.
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:Both of these portraits are on exhibition and they're free to view at the National
Portrait Gallery in London and it is a child-friendly place.
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:So last weekend I was at the Oasis concert and in itself it was one of the most joyful
experiences I have had in the last two decades.
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:A number of things made it really joyful, being with my husband, singing with 90,000 other
people.
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:We know that music and singing in psychology is rich for joy, but Monday morning came and
the joy had left the building.
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:And after a very good breakfast, we had time to kill.
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:So we decided we'd go to the other end of the cultural spectrum and from Wembley Stadium
and go to an art gallery.
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:So we went to the National Portrait Gallery and I'm going to describe the image that first
caught my attention.
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:So this is by an artist called Yuvatni Davis.
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:And in this picture you have the image of the artist.
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:It's a self-portrait and she's sat on a brown sofa and she sat to one side and she looks
visibly exhausted.
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:She's in this pink kind of two-piece, I don't know, kind of loungewear suit with a red
design on it, a red kind of um pattern.
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:And you can see the weight of tiredness on this individual.
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:But what makes this so striking is in the background, you've got this child who's in
movement and they are what looks like running across the back of the sofa.
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:And want you to imagine a small child running across the back of a sofa and squashing down
those back sofa cushions.
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:And I mean, I was drawn to this because, I don't know, it's the summer holidays and I feel
like I'm constantly moving around my own house and re-fluffing up pillows and putting
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:things back in place.
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:But also it was just such a relatable image.
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:It's something I remember doing myself as a child, pulling things off the sofa and playing
on a sofa.
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:and having that joy.
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:And so you've got this image, you've got this self-portrait of what we presume is the
mother and the child, mother exhausted, child playing, you know, joyfully in the
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:background.
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:That's how I've interpreted it.
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:There was a nostalgic element for this for me too, because it was a brown sofa.
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:There was a brown sofa in my childhood and I could remember the texture of this like kind
of velour, velvety type of sofa.
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:And
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:just the memory of, you know, messing around and playing.
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:And this child's in this bright red kind of party dress.
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:But that wasn't the thing that I suppose brought me the most joy about this picture,
because when I got closer, so as I walked into the gallery, I could see this in the middle
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:of the room.
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:And as I walked closer to read the caption, the title of this piece by Jovanni Davis is
called Inset Day.
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:And I thought, well, isn't that just amazing?
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:You know, I've been talking this year about the fact that adults need their own inset day.
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:And here's a picture that describes, I suppose, the weight and the tension and the joy of
being a parent of, you know, holding space for that child to have that joyful experience
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:while you're sat there looking utterly exhausted and, you know, like you've got the weight
of the world on your face.
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:And there was something just really
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:interesting about that piece that made me think about the weight of joy and the idea that
you know joy isn't it coexists around tiredness and an exhaustion.
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:The second piece of art then was a portrait by the actor, of the actor sorry, Kush Jumbo.
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:And you probably know her, she's most well known in the UK I think for playing Lady
Macbeth alongside David Tennant in the theatre.
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:And she was also in a brilliant TV series called The Good Fight.
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:So.
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:The Good Fight was described, it's an American TV series, but it was described as a
controlled explosion of fury at the Trump era by um the journalist Lucy Mangan.
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:And it also stars Christine Borancki.
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:So if you're interested in that kind of thing, it's very satire.
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:I would go and give that a watch.
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:But this is by an artist, this portrait of Cush Jumbo is by Zoe Buchman.
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:And what you see,
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:is a piece of vintage textile and it looked to me to be like an old I suppose cushion with
a scalloped edge and then on top of this the artist has embroidered in line embroidery
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:Cush Jumbo's portrait.
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:The really interesting thing is you know there are threads hanging and I thought that was
quite interesting the idea that
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:you know, it was undone, that it was not quite finished, if you like, or that these lines
were still, you know, ready to be sewn in.
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:And I thought that was quite interesting from a portrait perspective.
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:But then when you read the caption next to this piece and the title of it is called, I'm
gonna have look at my notes now, why don't you just tell me how you want me to be, baby?
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:And I'll live like...
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:water around you and so Zoe is saying that this is part of a series of portraits.
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:She's saying that this series of portraits were really celebrating the idea of women's
capacity to go through experiences such as miscarriage and violence and you know all of
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:these you know terrible things in life.
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:and yet to still choose joy.
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:And I thought that was really interesting, this idea of, you know, choice in joy.
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:And it is a choice, isn't it?
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:And I was thinking about that then um in contrast to the other piece and how, you know,
parenting is tough and it's hard, but it's simultaneously joyful.
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:know, parenthood is one of those unique experiences that can make you feel like you've
been in a car crash whilst...
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:marvelling at the awe and wonder of Tiny Toes in the next moment.
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:And I thought it was really interesting that Zoe Buckman was kind of saying that these
portraits were showing that.
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:When I went home I looked up the work of Yvadni Davis because I really really enjoyed that
piece and frustratingly they didn't have the postcard of it in the shops, I've ordered
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:that online, but Yvadni's actually done a couple of other pieces.
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:and I'll link to these on my website but she's done a series of oil paintings on reclaimed
or you know vintage wallpaper and then you've got Zoe Bookman who's also using vintage
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:textile so it was interesting the two pieces that really kind of got my attention were
about joy but they're both using old textiles or thinking about
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:both artists are using old textiles in their work which is quite interesting.
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:So today in today's podcast, we've explored joy, not just as a fleeting emotional high,
but something that's really textured and meaningful and, you know, it's sometimes heavy.
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:We looked at how psychology frames joy through theories like broaden and build and flow,
how theories such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs might cut fall a bit short in
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:understanding how joy really
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:co-exists in our environment.
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:We looked at the emerging philosophical views and research in neurodivergent areas of joy
being very relational and situational.
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:We looked at that assemblage theory.
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:And I like the idea that, you know, that new research challenges the idea that joy only
comes from people once people are fixed, that our
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:basic needs, of these like kind of layers of life need to be perfectly in place to
experience joy.
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:You know, who gets to decide that?
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:We get to choose joy, I think is what I'm taking from Zoe Bookman's work here.
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:So in reflecting on those two artworks from the National Portrait Gallery, I thought about
the emotional weight of joy and how it co-exists with tiredness, grief, duty, know,
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:history.
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:It weaves through everything.
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:So the coaching prompt or reflection for today, then, if you're still with me, is where in
your life is joy?
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:So today's coaching prompt or reflection is where in life is
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:joy showing up with weight?
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:Is there a moment, a memory or an experience where joy coexists with responsibility,
exhaustion or contradiction?
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:What happens then if you stop waiting for joy to feel light and start thinking about the
version of joy that is with you with weight?
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:And you might want to journal this or think about it or simply notice it in your everyday
life.
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:know, for me, it looks a little bit like coming out to the pavilion and having a coffee
when I've got a to-do list, you know, longer than my shopping list.
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:Or the joy of being with your kid, even when they're moaning about being bored, you know.
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:And it might even be the joy of doing a piece of work well.
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:even when there's nobody there to say well done or you know you've not got an audience.
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:Thank you for listening to this episode of Psychologically Speaking.
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:I'm Leela Ainge, your host, and we have explored joy today.
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:We've explored joy, the weight of joy, joy of art, and we've also looked at traditional
narratives of joy as being something that we should aim to achieve at the end of a
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:destination.
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:And I'm saying you can choose joy at every part of your journey.
