This article reviews the scientific literature on the enhancement of healthy aging in older adults through active participation in the arts. Methodologies and conclusions are described for studies of dance, expressive writing, music (singing and instrumental), theatre arts, and visual arts including documentation of mental/physical improvements in memory, creativity, problem solving, everyday competence, reaction time, balance/gait, and quality of life. In addition to these gains in measures of successful aging, the article also provides (in a Supplementary Appendix) some selected examples of arts engagement for remedial purposes. Finally, it offers suggestions for expanding inquiry into this underinvestigated corner of aging research.

A study was designed to assess whether positive affect may promote creativity and facilitate problem solving of children. The task used to measure creativity involved word generation. Subjects were presented a category name and asked to generate as many exemplars as possible. Duncker's (1945) candle task was used to assess problem-solving skills. Eighth grade students were randomly assigned to the Positive Affect or Neutral condition. A positive mood was induced in subjects in the Positive Affect condition by presenting compliments and gifts before the experimental session began. Subjects in the Neutral condition began the experiment without compliments or gifts. Subjects in the Positive Affect condition generated more exemplars for the categories and more unusual exemplars than did subjects in the Neutral condition. More subjects in the Positive Affect condition correctly solved the candle problem than did those in the Neutral condition. These results suggest that positive affect may promote creativity and facilitate problem solving by young adolescents.

The authors suggest reasons why various aspects of theater training appear to enhance healthy aging.

A theatrically-based intervention was given to 122 older adults who took acting lessons twice a week for 4 weeks. The training consisted of multi-modal activities (cognitive-affective-physiological) typically employed in college acting classes. Comparison groups consisted of no-treatment controls and participants instructed in a different performing art, singing. Assessment of effectiveness was performed using a battery of 11 cognitive/affective test measures that included word recall, prose comprehension/recall, word generation, digit-span ability, and problem-solving. It was found that the acting group improved significantly from pretest to posttest over both other groups. Digit-span was the only measure that failed to improve. No aspects of the intervention supplied specific training or practice on the test measures. Previous versions of the intervention with community-dwelling adults had produced similar findings but the current participants were older, less well-educated, and lived in subsidized, primarily low-income, retirement homes.The maturing of the baby boom generation has prompted increased research into strategies to promote healthy cognitive aging or ameliorate cognitive decline. Two strands of inquiry have been particularly prominent. The first consists of studies in which the participants are trained on a specific cognitive skill such as verbal episodic memory, reasoning, or speed of processing (e.g., Willis, Tennstedt, Marsiske, Ball, Elias, Koepke, et al., 2006). The second strand of research (using both prospective and retrospective paradigms) involves identifying activities that are associated with healthy cognitive aging (for a review, see Small, Hughes, Hultsch & Dixon, 2006; see also, Kramer, Bherer, Colcombe, Dong & Greenough, 2004).In terms of training studies, many of the early ones focused on mnemonic techniques. For example, using the method of loci, Robertson-Tchabo, Hausman and Arenberg (1976) demonstrated remarkable gains of 79% in list learning ability after five days of intensive training. However, such targeted techniques do not appear to generalize to other memory tasks. In a meta-analysis, Verhaeghen, Marcoen and Goossens (1992) examined an array of studies showing improvements in experimental groups after memory instruction compared to both control and placebo groups, but concluded that, " . . . the plasticity associated with mnemonic training appears to be largely specific to that training" (p. 249).Baltes, Willis, Schaie and their colleagues, (e.g., Baltes, Kliegl, & Dittmann-Kohli, 1988;Saczynski, Willis, & Schaie, 2002;Schaie & Willis, 1986a) focused primarily on fluid intelligence because crystallized intelligence has been shown to be less susceptible to aging effects (Schaie & Willis, 1986b Enrichment Project (ADEPT), Baltes and Willis (1982) found that by providing older adults with five one-hour training sessions in either one of these abilities, performance was improved. Furthermore, these improvements were maintained for up to 6 months. An advantage of this ...

The art of acting has been defined as the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances. Our many years of researching theatrical expertise have produced findings relevant to text comprehension, learning theory, cognitive aging, and expert memory. In this article, we first discuss how large amounts of dialogue, learned in a very short period, can be reproduced in real time with complete spontaneity. We then turn to abstracting the essence of acting and applying it to diverse undertakings, from discovering optimal learning strategies to promoting healthy cognitive aging. Finally, we address the implications of acting expertise on current theories of embodied cognition.