Arts, mental distress, mental health functioning & life satisfaction: fixed-effects analyses of a nationally-representative panel study

Abstract

Background Arts engagement within communities is ubiquitous across cultures globally and previous research has suggested its benefits for mental health and wellbeing. However, it remains unclear whether these benefits are driven by arts engagement itself or by important confounders such as socio-economic status (SES), childhood arts engagement, previous mental health, personality, or self-selection bias. The aim of this study is to use fixed effects models that account for unidentified time-constant confounding measures to examine the longitudinal association between arts (frequency of both arts participation and cultural attendance), mental distress, mental health functioning and life satisfaction. Methods Data from 23,660 individuals (with a mean age of 47 years) included in the UK Understanding Society wave 2 (2010–2012) and wave 5 (2013–2015) were analyzed. Aside from controlling for all time-constant variables using fixed-effects models, we additionally adjusted for time-varying demographic factors (e.g. age and marital status), health behaviors and social support variables. Results After controlling for all time-constant variables and identified time-varying confounders, frequent arts participation and cultural attendance were associated with lower levels of mental distress and higher levels of life satisfaction, with arts participation additionally associated with better mental health functioning. Health-related and social time-varying factors were shown partly but not wholly to explain the observed associations. Conclusion Arts engagement amongst the population as a whole may help enhance positive mental health and life satisfaction, and protect against mental distress. These results are independent of a wide range of time-constant confounding factors.

Social Capital and Psychological Well-Being of Chinese Immigrants in Japan

“…International migration has strongly manifested itself to historic highs. Many studies regarding international migration have been conducted from different perspectives [32,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. Among the discussions, there is an increased interest in the issues of social capital and network resources in migration and integration research [8][9][10][11].…”

Associations between community cultural engagement and life satisfaction, mental distress and mental health functioning using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS): are associations moderated by area deprivation?

“…This is one of the first large population-based study to investigate whether the association between CCE (attending cultural events or visiting museums and heritages sites) Open access Open access show that engagement in cultural assets was consistently and positively associated with subsequent life satisfaction and mental health functioning and negatively associated with mental distress. 3 Importantly, this paper found that such associations were independent of individuals' demographic background, socioeconomic characteristics and regional locations. In particular, our models show that every one SD increase in CCE is associated with higher life satisfaction and mental health functioning (by 0.06-0.13 SD) and lower mental distress (by 0.05-0.09 SD).…”

“…Despite this, a number of previous studies have already confirmed that CCE can be causally linked to well-being through randomised interventions, 1 2 and the generalisability of such findings has been suggested through causal inference analyses of longitudinal data in other papers. 3 As another limitation, the Index of Multiple Deprivation is composed of various components (eg, living environment, income and employment deprivation) as a proxy of neighbourhood effect. However, it will be important to understand from future studies how other neighbourhood characteristics (eg, demographic structure and population density) may also influence the engagement level.…”

Can a brief interaction with online, digital art improve wellbeing?: A comparative study of the impact of online art and culture presentations on mood, state-anxiety, subjective wellbeing, and loneliness

“…Among the many possible receptive or creative interventions (attending performances, making or viewing visual art or music, etc), visually engaging artwork or visiting museums and galleries have increasingly been employed in partnership with public health initiatives, and healthcare providers in several countries have started to prescribe such activities as psychological health interventions (Camic & Chatterjee, 2013;Chatterjee & Noble, 2017;Packer & Bond, 2010;Thomson et al, 2018;Todd et al, 2017). Among the various effects, empirical evidence has shown that on-site art interactions have been particularly associated with decreased loneliness (Todd et al, 2017;Tymoszuk et al, 2019Tymoszuk et al, , 2020, improved mental health (symptoms of anxiety and depression; Clayton & Potter, 2017;Hansen et al, 2015;Roberts et al, 2011), and increased mood and subjective wellbeing (Bennington et al, 2016;Binnie, 2010;Davies et al, 2016;Hansen et al, 2015;Ho et al, 2015;Karnik et al, 2014;Roberts et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2020). For example, similar to the interventions that will be explored in this paper, Clow and Fredhoi (2006) asked individuals to take a 35-minute visit to an art gallery on their lunch break and found that even short exposures lead to significantly lower self-reported stress (~2.4 points on a pre-/post-visit 10-point scale)…”