Start making sense: Art informing health psychology

Abstract

Growing evidence suggests that the arts may be useful in health care and in the training of health care professionals. Four art genres – novels, films, paintings and music – are examined for their potential contribution to enhancing patient health and/or making better health care providers. Based on a narrative literature review, we examine the effects of passive (e.g. reading, watching, viewing and listening) and active (e.g. writing, producing, painting and performing) exposure to the four art genres, by both patients and health care providers. Overall, an emerging body of empirical evidence indicates positive effects on psychological and physiological outcome measures in patients and some benefits to medical training. Expressive writing/emotional disclosure, psychoneuroimmunology, Theory of Mind and the Common Sense Model of Self-Regulation are considered as possible theoretical frameworks to help incorporate art genres as sources of inspiration for the further development of health psychology research and clinical applications.

A systematic review on the effects of group singing on persistent pain in people with long‐term health conditions

“…However, the comparator groups in these studies involved interventions have known positive effects, e.g., exercise (Kenny & Faunce, 2004, or were creative arts interventions likely to activate similar psycho-social processes as singing, e.g., painting (Pongan et al, 2017). Moreover, there are number of general processes in both active comparative conditions and art making conditions, such as leadership, a focus on meaningful activity and social support from the group (Archer, Buxton, & Sheffield, 2015;Kaptein, Hughes, Murray, & Smyth, 2018).…”

Portraying a grim illness: lung cancer in novels, poems, films, music, and paintings

“…This is one of the factors that encouraged the current authors to examine the potential contribution of studying novels and other art genres to the subject of how people make sense of an illness (e.g. [ 43 ]). Also, a recent work on drawings in illness attempts to extend the CSM: it studied whether patients’ drawings of their illness contribute to the CSM by identifying illness perceptions that may be underrepresented in the model and its assessment approaches [ 12 ].…”

“…Huge individual differences exist in the way people make sense of illness. Review papers give some impression of these variations—and communalities (e.g., [ 8 , 42 , 43 ]). Future research might explore these issues by using a range of methods in studying how persons with lung cancer give meaning to their grim disease.…”

Illness Experience Sharing on Personal Blogs: A Case Study of Malaysian Breast Cancer Survivors

“…Expressing emotions or traumatic experiences verbally or in written form have been shown to have therapeutic benefits for the individual (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999, Frank, 1995Sandelowski, 1991;Kleinman, 1988). Health and illness related expressive writing has been well-researched in the past decade (e.g Kaptein, Hughes, Murray & Smyth 2018;Mugerwa & Holden, 2012). With the advent of the Internet, and notably with social media platforms, a wider reach has been initiated which transcends educational achievement, race and ethnicity, and level of health care access (Giustini, Ali, Fraser & Kamel Boulos 2018;Welch et al, 2016;Chou et al, 2011).…”