I have strong beliefs that amazement is a highly social emotion. While it can be experienced alone, when experienced in a group setting (like with your friends and family), the emotion multiples. I suspect one of the reasons this happens is because of Social Referencing. This is a theory used to describe how children would use their parents as a reference to their behavior. For instance, when a young child sees a hot kettle, but is unable to appraise its danger, it would reference his/her parent’s expression of emotion to infer if he/she should approach it or withdraw from the hot kettle.

So in magic, many a times, the effect of social referencing allows for the positive feelings of emotions to multiple, of course assuming that the magic is indeed amazing to begin with.

One of the reasons why I brought this up is because I noticed when I do my Close Up Theatre show, which is catered for intimate and private settings, I always find that the audience tend to react faster than in a setting in which the audience are of a dispersed demographic. But of course, even in a crowd of dispersed demographics, it is possible to get them to react in unison. (Check out the ending of The Street Theatre Video and you can see that despite coming from different walks of life, the audience react and respond in unison at the end of the show)

This is interesting to someone who studied psychology, like myself. It seems to me that magic has the ability to foster closer relations (something that I wrote about here), and thereafter the reactions and social referencing tend to be more pronounced and quicker. I think there is something special about watching a magic performance together, it’s like watching a movie together. 

So academics aside, I am very pleased to have been invited to perform for good friends and relatives.

Preparing for the mini show! (Picture Credits: Eileen)

Magic in the hands!

Picture Credits: Yong Yun

I had a lot of fun performing for them, and it really does bring a smile to my face that my magic brought a smile to theirs. (Social Referencing in action, kinda ;p )

I am pretty happy that I already have bookings for this show for a couple of Chinese New Year gathering.

Cheers!

Alexander ; )