Duende is a difficult to define phrase used in the Spanish arts, including performing arts. The artistic and especially musical term was derived from the original meaning of a fairy or goblin-like creature in Spanish and Latin American mythology.

The meaning of duende  has to do with emotion, expression and authenticity. In fact, duende can be loosely translated as “having soul”. It is the spirit of evocation. It comes from inside as a physical and emotional response to music. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.

Folk music in general, especially flamenco, tends to embody an authenticity that comes from a people whose culture is enriched by diaspora and hardship; vox populi, the human condition of joys and sorrows. It is thus as universal in its meaning as it is immensely personal and culturally contextual by its nature.

To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca’s words, “a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience… the very dearest thing that life can offer the intellectual.”

The Asch experiments were a series of studies published in the 1950s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. Experiments led by Solomon Asch asked groups of students to participate in a “vision test.” In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the others’ behavior.

The participants, the real subjects and the confederates, were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of questions about lines printed on cards, such as how long is line A compared to the an everyday object, which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc. The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud.

The confederates always provided their answers before the study participant, and always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses.

Asch hypothesized that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong. However, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions. Seventy-five percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.

Variations of the basic paradigm tested how many confederates were necessary to induce conformity, examining the influence of just 1 confederate and as many as 15 confederates. Results indicate that 1 confederate has virtually no influence and 2 confederates have only a small influence. When 3 or more confederates are present, the tendency to conform is relatively stable.

A triskelion is a symbol consisting of three interlocked spirals or or any similar symbol with three protrusions and a threefold rotational symmetry. It appears in many early cultures as a heraldic emblem on shields depicted on Greek pottery. The triple spiral motif is a Neolithic symbol in Western Europe. It is carved into the rock of a stone lozenge near the main entrance of the prehistoric Newgrange monument in County Meath, Ireland.

The triskelion is used by some polytheistic reconstructionist and neopagan groups. As a Celtic symbol, it is found primarily amongst groups with a Celtic cultural orientation and, less frequently, can also be found in use by some Germanic neopagan groups and eclectic or syncretic traditions such as Wicca.

In the north of Spain, the triskelion is used as a symbol of Galizan and Asturian nationalists. The triskele was used by Galician nationalists as early as 1930, although its use as a contemporary fashion icon only started during the Celtic revival of the 1970s. Currently, the Department of Agriculture of the devolved government of Galicia uses a triskele as its corporate logo.

A triskelion pattern forms part of the United States Department of Transportation seal. The three comma shapes represent air, land, and sea transportation. The seal was adopted on February 1, 1967. A triskelion is the basis for the roundel of the Irish Air Corps. It is loosely based on the Flag of Ireland and traditional Celtic designs. 

A triskelion shape was used in the design of a common plastic adapter for vinyl records, which allowed larger center holed 45 rpm records to spin on players designed for smaller center-holed 33 1/3 rpm records.

Strong optimism, is the overarching mental state wherein people believe that things are more likely to go well for them than go badly. Compare this with the valence effect of prediction, a tendency for people to overestimate the likelihood of good things happening rather than bad things. It is the demonstrated systematic tendency for people to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions.

Personal optimism correlates strongly with self-esteem, with psychological well-being and with physical and mental health. Optimism has been shown to be correlated with better immune systems in healthy people who have been subjected to stress. Martin Seligman, in researching this area, criticizes academics for focusing too much on causes for pessimism and not enough on optimism. He states that in the last three decades of the 20th century journals published 46,000 psychological papers on depression and only 400 on joy.

Popular culture has reflected the link between optimism and well-being with works like the fable “The Moth and the Star”, and Barack Obama’s speech and book, The Audacity of Hope.

A number of scholars have suggested that although optimism and pessimism might seem like opposites, in psychological terms they do not function in this way. Having more of one does not mean you have less of the other. The factors that reduce one do not necessarily increase the other. On many occasions in life we need both in equal supply. 

Hope can become a force for social change when it combines optimism and pessimism in healthy proportions. John Braithwaite, an academic at the Australian National University, suggests that in modern society we undervalue hope because we wrongly think of it as a choice between hopefulness and naiveness as opposed to scepticism and realism.

A vagabond is an itinerant person. Such people may be called drifters, tramps, rogues, or hobos. A vagabond is characterised by almost continuous travelling, lacking a fixed home, temporary abode, or permanent residence. Vagabonds are not bums, as bums are not known for travelling, preferring to stay in one location.

Historically, vagabond was a British legal term similar to vagrant, deriving from the Latin for “purposeless wandering”. Following the Peasants’ Revolt, British constables were authorised under a 1383 statute to collar vagabonds and force them to show their means of support. If they could not, they were jailed. Under a 1495 statute, vagabonds could be sentenced to the stocks for three days and nights. In 1530, whipping was added. The assumption was that vagabonds were unlicensed beggars.

By the 19th century the vagabond was associated more closely with Bohemianism. The critic Arthur Compton-Rickett compiled a review of the type, in which he defined it as men “with a vagrant strain in the blood, and a natural inquisitiveness about the world beyond their doors.” Examples included Henry David Thoreau, Michael John Arthur Bujold, Walt Whitman, Leo Tolstoy, William Hazlitt, and Thomas de Quincey. A notable 20th century vagabond was the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos.

Mythopoeia is a narrative genre in modern literature and film where a fictional mythology is created by the writer of prose or other fiction. This meaning of the word mythopoeia follows its use by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s. The authors in this genre integrate traditional mythological themes and archetypes into fiction.

Mythopoeia is also the act of making and creating mythologies. Notable mythopoeic authors include Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, William Blake and H. P. Lovecraft. While many literary works carry mythic themes, only a few approach the dense self-referentiality and purpose of mythopoeia. It is invented mythology that, rather than arising out of centuries of oral tradition, are penned over a short period of time by a single author or small group of collaborators.

Tolkien’s now famous work of mythopoeia includes the The Lord of the Rings. His Middle-earth is perhaps the best-known of contemporary invented mythology. In his fictional works, Tolkien invented not only origin myths, creation myths and an epic poetry cycle, but also fictive linguistics, geology and geography.

Works of mythopoeia are often categorized as fantasy or science fiction but fill a niche for mythology in the modern world, according to Joseph Campbell, a famous student of world mythology. He claimed that new myths must be created, but he believed that present culture is changing too rapidly for society to be completely described by any such mythological framework until a later age. Without relevant mythology, Campbell claimed, society cannot function.

Dragons are legendary creatures that feature in the myths of worldwide cultures, typically with serpentine or otherwise reptilian traits. They are usually shown in modern times with a body like a huge lizard, or a snake with two pairs of lizard-type legs, and able to emit fire from their mouths. The European dragon has bat-type wings growing from its back. A dragon-like creature with no front legs is known as a wyvern. 

Dragons are often held to have major spiritual significance in various religions and cultures around the world. In many Asian cultures dragons were, and in some cultures still are, revered as representative of the primal forces of nature, religion and the universe. They are associated with wisdom, often said to be wiser than humans, and longevity. They are commonly said to possess some form of magic or other supernatural power, and are often associated with wells, rain, and rivers. In some cultures, they are also said to be capable of human speech.

Although dragons occur in many legends around the world, different cultures have varying stories about monsters that have been grouped together under the dragon label. Some dragons are said to breathe fire or to be poisonous. They are commonly portrayed as serpentine or reptilian, hatching from eggs and possessing typically scaly or feathered bodies. They are sometimes portrayed as having especially large eyes or watching treasure very diligently, a feature that is the origin of the word dragon, from the Greek drakein meaning “to see clearly”).

Some myths portray them with a row of dorsal spines. European dragons are more often winged, while Oriental versions of the dragon resemble large snakes. Dragons can have a variable number of legs: none, two, four, or more when it comes to early European literature. Also, some dragons in Greek literature were known to have millions of legs at a time. Modern depictions of dragons tend to be larger than their original representations, which were often smaller than humans, but grew in the myths and tales of man over the years. Following discovery of how pterosaurs walked on the ground, some modern dragons have been portrayed without front legs and using the wings as front legs pterosaur-fashion when on the ground.

Human Givens is a school or model of psychology described as a bio-psycho-social approach to psychotherapy. It attempts to find and address innate needs common to all humans, called givens.

According to the Human Givens approach, if someone cannot get their needs met in healthy ways, they will try to get them met in unhealthy ways. For example, someone might seek to satisfy the need for connection to the wider community by joining a street gang if no better means of community connection is available. It is the way those needs are met, and the way we use the resources that nature has given us, that determine the physical, mental and moral health of an individual.

Human Givens theorises that it is by meeting our physical and emotional needs that we survive and develop as individuals and a species. As animals we are born into a material world where we need air to breathe, water, nutritious food and sleep. These are the paramount physical needs. Without them, we die.

It theorises that we also need the freedom to stimulate our senses and exercise our muscles. In addition, we instinctively seek sufficient and secure shelter where we can grow and reproduce ourselves and bring up our young. These physical needs are intimately bound up with our emotional needs which are the main focus of human givens psychotherapy in practice. They are considered inbuilt patterns that continually interact with one another and seek their natural fulfillment in ways that allow us to survive, flourish and live together as many-faceted individuals in a great variety of social groupings.

The basic assumption is that humans have evolved innate emotional needs that they seek to match to their environment, and that mental distress results when these needs are not met in a balanced way. The focus of the therapy is the discovery and rectification of any blocks to these needs being met. Blocks may take such forms as a sick environment, misuse of imagination through excessive worrying, or damage to their internal guidance system by psychological trauma or a developmental disorder.

These needs are seen as part of the human condition independent of culture. The approach describes resources as having evolved in response to these needs, including memory, imagination, and self awareness, and that their exercise determines physical, mental and moral health. Misuse of these resources or failure to meet these needs leads to development of disorders such as addictions or depression.