CHAPTER 21
Katie Wright-Bevans and Alexandra Lamont
Abstract
This chapter explores the specific role of the arts and humanities in developing well-being through community and social support. The authors review research evidence from the arts (music, drama, dance, art, crafts) and humanities (history, literature, and poetry) and provide links between these and overarching theories of well-being. The review highlights not only the role of arts and humanities interventions in facilitating well-being but also the social and psychological mechanisms underpinning these various activities. The chapter draws on international examples of arts and humanities interventions to demonstrate the need for such interventions to embrace the sociopolitical environment within which they occur. Finally, the authors draw attention to the many avenues of further exploration regarding the role various interventions may play in supporting individual and community well-being.
Key Words: arts, collective singing, arts intervention, participation, social support, collective storytelling
Many of the key theories of well-being, such as Seligman’s (2018) PERMA approach, emphasize the importance of other people in engendering and supporting well-being. In PERMA, the key social dimensions are relationships, which reflect direct interactions with others and networks, and meaning, which reflects a broader connection to community, culture, or spirituality (see Lamont, Chapter 24 in this volume). In this chapter, we explore the specific role of the arts and humanities in developing well-being through community and social support. We review research evidence from the arts (music, drama, dance, art, crafts) and humanities (history, literature, and poetry) and provide links between these and overarching theories of well-being, where well-being is defined in a broad sense to include mental and physical health and happiness (Burton, Boyle, Harris & Kagan, 2007). We highlight areas of consensus and conflict and in doing so critically appraise the existing literature and highlight directions for future research.
Eastern traditions of thought place community at the center of humanity, and many collectivist societies around the world place responsibility for collective happiness on all their members. Blessi, Grossi, Sacco, Pieretti, and Ferilli (2014) found that cultural participation tends to have greater well-being outcomes when it is more social in nature. Collective music-making, and especially singing, has been found to be extremely powerful for a range of well-being outcomes. These can be physical, such as reductions in self-reported tension and enhancements in secretory immunoglobulin (Kreutz, Bongard, Rohrmann, Hodapp, & Grebe, 2004; Johnson, Louhivuori, & Siljander, 2017; Valentine & Evans, 2001); psychological, such as enhanced quality of life, emotional well-being, personal growth, and mood (Clift, Nicol, Raisbeck, Whitmore, & Morrison, 2010); and social, such as group support and identity (Bailey & Davidson, 2002; Dingle, Brander, Ballantyne, & Baker, 2013; Lamont, Murray, Hale & Wright-Bevans, 2018). Group singing can also be beneficial for a range of physical health conditions such as Parkinson’s disease (Abell, Baird, & Chalmers, 2016; Di Benedetto et al., 2009; Stegemöller, Radig, Hibbing, Wingate, & Sapienza, 2017), irritable bowel syndrome (Grape, Wikström, Ekman, Hasson, & Theorell, 2010), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (Morrison et al., 2013), and general levels of pain (Hopper, Curtis, Hodge, & Simm, 2016). As well as measuring behavior, biological changes result: singing releases higher levels of oxytocin (Grape et al., 2010) and beta-endorphins (Machin & Dunbar, 2011).
What is it that makes group singing in particular so effective? Many of the reported benefits hinge around the formation of a group identity through the activity, in addition to the positive physical and psychological outcomes. Dunbar (2012) suggested that singing and dancing could be evolutionary adaptations whose purpose is to promote group cohesion. Following this line of enquiry, Pearce, Launay, and Dunbar (2015) found that singing initially facilitated more rapid social bonding than creative writing. Their participants enrolled in adult education classes in singing, crafts, or creative writing over seven months. Singers showed much closer bonding in the early stages (tested after one and three months), whereas the non-singers caught up over time. Pearce et al. suggest an evolutionary mechanism in that singing enhances positive affect, which encourages willingness to coordinate with others, with further evidence from a different study (Pearce et al., 2016) finding that even in competitive situations, such as singing in competition with other groups, social bonding was enhanced by the act of singing together.
Drama provides similar opportunities for group work, requiring the input of others both on stage and behind the scenes, and creative participation has been found to have mild but persistent effects on a range of health and well-being outcomes for children and young people (Bungay & Vella-Burrows, 2013). Community arts can provide a catalyst for the development of mutual understanding, shared identities, and friendship. Craft activities such as hand-knitting and visual art have been shown to have powerful positive benefits in terms of dealing with stress, illness, and invasive forms of treatment such as chemotherapy (Reynolds & Prior, 2006). The community element of this seems to be important; for instance, older adults engaging in group art and craft activities were able to regain their occupational identity and their sense of pleasure and purpose (Howie, Coulter, & Feldman, 2004; Liddle, Parkinson, & Sibbritt, 2013).
Humanities-inspired community activities such as poetry reading and local history projects have also been found to improve collective well-being. Seymour and Murray (2016) used poetry to engage lonely and isolated older adults within residential settings in group discussions. In as few as six sessions, the older adults reported higher levels of life satisfaction and well-being. The residential care staff were also interviewed pre- and post-intervention and discussed witnessing improvements to mood, memory, attention, and energy among the older adults. Community gardening and community heritage conservation have provided two key avenues to well-being through engagement with the local area and local history. For example, Power and Smyth (2016) interviewed people who had been involved in community heritage work, to examine the effects of this work on participants’ well-being. Heritage work was found to increase well-being, personal enrichment, and social learning. The social aspect was fundamental to participants’ accounts of the benefits of the work.
One explanation for the positive benefits of group artistic activity relates to coordination and synchrony. Bonding through, for instance, dancing or moving in time with others can promote social closeness and positive social behavior to those others, whether they are adults or infants. For instance, Wiltermuth and Heath (2009) asked people to walk or engage in a music-directed game which involved them to be either in synchrony or out of synchrony with their partner(s). In all cases, synchronizing led to higher levels of subsequent cooperation. Cirelli, Einarson, and Trainor (2014) found that bouncing infants aged one year old in synchrony with an experimenter standing opposite them led to more likelihood that the infant would help the experimenter afterward (the frame of helping is much more limited in these studies to acts such as picking up dropped objects).
The very nature of community provides some suggestions as to how it may interrelate to well-being. Communities can be defined in several ways (Burton et al, 2007; Howarth, 2001). They may arise from a shared sense of place (e.g., a neighborhood), shared heritage (e.g., ethnicity or culture), interest (e.g., passion, value, or hobby), or identity (e.g., identity that is either self-selected or imposed or assumed by others). Places and spaces occupied by communities can provide favorable conditions for enhanced well-being through collective meaning-making (Howarth, 2001). Collectively, through action, shared language, and communication, individuals make sense of who they are and who they are not, promoting feelings of belonging and social inclusion.
Most mainstream developmental, health, and social theorists recognize that community plays a role in supporting individual well-being, even if the extent of that role is subject to debate. Bronfrenbrenner’s (1994) classic ecological systems model outlines the role of various environmental factors in supporting a child’s holistic development, including the family, school, and community. Bronfrenbrenner’s core argument, that support and nurturing in each of these “systems” is crucial for a child to flourish, is supported by much evidence and practice. Bronfrenbrenner’s model has indeed been used to justify and inform arts provision in schools, homes, and communities (Mansour, Martin, Anderson, Gibson, Liem, & Sudmalis, 2016).
One sub-discipline that has contributed substantially to knowledge on the interplay between community and individual well-being is critical community psychology. Critical approaches to community well-being similarly reject the notion that well-being can be addressed solely at an intrapersonal, interpersonal, or even community level (Kagan, Burton, Duckett, Lawthom, & Siddiquee, 2019). Critical community approaches instead attempt to identify wider social, political, and cultural barriers to well-being. Those barriers may be tangible, such as space, materials, or expert support. Alternatively, wider barriers to well-being may be more symbolic, such as stereotypes, stigma, and ideologies. Activities designed to elicit and challenge these symbolic barriers are more likely to improve well-being. Wright-Bevans and Murray (2018) demonstrated how negative stereotypes of aging can hinder the development of appropriate creative community activities for older adults due to assumptions about older adults’ skills and abilities, or lack thereof.
Critical community psychologists advocate that poor mental health has little or no neuropsychological basis and is instead a result of a lack of economic, social, cultural, and creative opportunities to thrive (Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2009). As a consequence of this approach, empirical research in this area is less interested in clinical populations and formal or professional diagnoses and more interested in the promotion of well-being in a holistic and collective way. More specifically, critical community psychologists are interested in ways and means of enhancing this and identifying the mechanisms at play. Arts and humanities pursuits align well with the intrinsic goals of critical community psychology and in many instances have provided the catalyst for personal and collective growth and development, whether through poetry reading (Seymour & Murray, 2016), mural-making (Murray & Crummett, 2010), or theatre (Bicknell, 2014). Matarasso (1997) presented a now well-recognized, comprehensive account of the social impact of participation in the arts in which he argued that arts are both use and ornament. Through an extensive study of arts initiatives in the United Kingdom, he concluded that participation in the arts can lead to personal growth, enhanced confidence, skill-building, educational developments, social cohesion, and positive social change.
Not all community arts and humanities activities, however, have had the desired effect on well-being. Many projects fail to engage individuals or end prematurely (Newman, Curtis, & Stephens, 2003). In order for community arts programs to be successful, resources both physical and symbolic are required. For example, adequate accessible space, time, equipment, and staffing are physical resources that if not present, could not only lead to the failure of a program but could negatively impact community cohesion, morale, and individual motivation. In an evaluation of community arts for health among British Asian communities in Bradford, United Kingdom, South (2006) warned scholars of the dangers of underestimating the resources required to establish and implement successful community arts interventions. Symbolic resources such as community will, engagement, interest, and trust in program staff can also determine the success or failure of an arts program. Thompson, Hall and Russell (2006) encountered many of these symbolic (i.e. psychological) barriers in a writing and arts project to promote skills development and well-being in primary school children. A conflict of opinion between the writer employed to facilitate the project and the teachers in the school resulted in the children’s project being censored and modified to better fit what the school believed to be an appropriate outcome. Such censorship is fundamentally opposed to the goals of most community arts, which seek to empower and instill ownership, as it is these very mechanisms that are thought to be one source of improved well-being. Furthermore, there is much evidence to suggest that where community members have greater involvement in the development and maintenance of a project, it is more likely to succeed and reap sustained benefits (Murray & Wright-Bevans, 2017; Alcock, Camic, Barker, Haridi, & Raven, 2011).
The power of specific creative community strategies to promote well-being and flourishing have been examined by scholars. For many who adopt a critical approach to the study of well-being, strategies to improve well-being naturally use arts and humanities activities such as storytelling as a catalyst for positive social and individual change. Storytelling has been shown to improve well-being even in highly conflict-ridden situations and circumstances. An example of the power of storytelling can be found in the work of Maoz (2012) who examined four strategies for the promotion of Israeli-Palestinian harmony. Three strategies involved contact of sorts between groups but only to a superficial degree, where each engaged in creative activities either individually or collectively. These strategies mirrored many of those employed in community arts programs, whereby the presence of ‘other’ is established but communication is not facilitated. Maoz (2012) demonstrated how a fourth, narrative storytelling strategy using creative activities could explicitly address the impact that the surrounding conflict had upon individual and community lives. Within this strategy, participants shared personal stories of the conflict and its impact. It was this fourth strategy that was shown to be most successful in enhancing personal and collective well-being. The mechanisms of success were attributed to the way in which the storytelling embraced, rather than dismissed, the wider sociopolitical context and the group members’ lives and roles in this. Too often, community arts strategies are employed to promote community cohesiveness and, in their attempts to promote harmony, individual, community, and sociopolitical differences are quelled. Evidence suggests that the opposite is more effective, where arts embrace the surrounding context, rather than operating in an apolitical vacuum.
Crucially, that is not to suggest that all arts and community projects require sociopolitical goals or motivations in order to be successful. Guerlain and Campbell (2016) used participant photography to explore how community gardening impacted the psycho-social well-being of an urban marginalized community in East London. The participants self-reported goals and motivations for participation centered on a love and enjoyment of gardening. In turn, this community participation was seen to address their personal adversities, but this was a secondary added benefit from the participants’ perspective. Such interventions demonstrate the need for community arts and humanities interventions to embrace the sociopolitical environment within which they occur, rather than attempt to operate in a vacuum. Such an embrace may or may not result in an intervention or program holding explicit sociopolitical goals or the participants expressing sociopolitical motivations.
Certain kinds of arts and humanities–based community activities appear to be more successful than others in enhancing well-being. For instance, Pearce et al. (2016) and Hallam and Creech (2016) suggest that music groups are more effective at social bonding and well-being than other creative activities such as creative writing or craft. Their music programs, however, were very enriched and provide much more potential for interactions and also for performance, so there may be specific mechanisms at play that remain underexplored. Community projects that are embedded in and acknowledging of the sociopolitical condition that contribute to well-being (i.e., Guerlain & Campbell, 2016; Maoz, 2012) have been shown to be particularly successful. It is not clear, however, if or how participants differentiate between individual goals of enjoyment and collective goals of social justice. Research therefore needs to work to identify additional and more precise mechanisms of change so that there is some understanding of not only which collective arts and humanities activities work best to enhance well-being, but also how they do so. Scholars working to understand the relationship between arts, humanities, and flourishing need to address questions such as the following: How can symbolic community intervention resources (such as aligned goals and values) be implemented, communicated, and sustained to ensure a project has the best chance of success? Does the way in which community is defined (by place, heritage, identity, or interest) play a role in determining the success of a community arts project aimed at improving well-being? And how can community arts practitioners ensure that projects are socially and politically situated and explicitly address sociopolitical differences within groups if participants own motivations are based on individual and collective enjoyment rather than social justice? In many ways, this final question brings us back to Matarasso’s (1997) discussion of community arts as use or ornament and suggests that intervention participants themselves may be best placed to answer this question.
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