THE HUMANITIES AND HUMAN FLOURISHING: FROM IMMERSION TO TRANSFORMATION

 

The Humanities and Human Flourishing Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, is collaborating with the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab on Arts, Health, and Social/Emotional Well-Being.

 
 

For millennia, humankind has turned to the arts and humanities to foster well-being, both for individual and community benefits. In recent years, governmental and organizational initiatives have emerged which endeavor to harness the eudaimonic power of the arts and humanities in sustained and methodical ways. For example, doctors in Canada can now prescribe visits to the art museum to improve increasingly prevalent mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and chronic stress. How, precisely, this practice and others like it can promote well-being is still largely unknown.

Having conducted foundational, interdisciplinary research since 2014, the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project will build on our prior work, and will, specifically, explore and illuminate the mechanisms by which engaging in the arts and humanities brings well-being to individuals. As part of our conceptual model, we have identified five mechanisms as being especially salient as pathways through which arts and humanities engagement affects human flourishing (i.e. the RAISE mechanisms): Reflection, Acquisition, Immersion, Socialization, and Expression.

  • Reflection is an intentional, cognitive-emotional process for developing, reinforcing, or discarding one’s habits, character, values, or worldview.

  • Acquisition is the set of socio-cognitive psychological processes – such as experiences of mastery, vicarious experiences, direct encouragement, and positive physiological responses – that underlie the development of particular perspectives, habits, or skills, including self-efficacy, self-regulation, and integrative complexity, among others.

  • Immersion is the immediacy that often attends engagement with the arts and humanities. One’s attention is captured, resulting in the experiencing of various levels of sensory and emotional states and first-order cognitions, often leading to a feeling of being carried away and disconnected from the worries of everyday life.

  • Socialization is the degree to which individuals take on various roles and identities within communities and cultures.

  • Expression is a process of externalizing one’s thoughts and feelings in a way that may, but need not, involve others.

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With this NEA Research Lab, our research focus is to understand the conditions of immersion when engaging with visual art, how it can be assessed and enhanced, how it can lead to immediate effects, and how these, in turn, can lead to transformative outcomes. Broadly, our research seeks to answer several questions aligned with the Arts Endowments’ research agenda, including, but not limited to:

  • What are the social, emotional, physical, and/or physiological health benefits of the arts for individuals, groups, or societies?

  • What physiological or psychological mechanisms or group dynamics are at work in achieving social, emotional, physical, and/or physiological health benefits of the arts or related outcomes?

  • What kinds of art forms are invoked in these relationships, and at what levels of participation?

Specifically, building on our previous work, “The Humanities and Human Flourishing: From Immersion to Transformation” seeks to empirically establish and test the potential transformative effects of immersion within the arts, by asking such question as:

  • Can we find evidence for immersion in the everyday experiences related to the arts?

  • Is immersion the primary mechanism by which transformative experiences are enacted?

  • How does immersion relate to transformative experiences over time?

  • Can we enhance immersion to increase transformative experiences ?

 

The opinions expressed in materials on this website are those of the author(s) and do not represent the views of the National Endowment for the Arts Office of Research & Analysis or the National Endowment for the Arts. The Arts Endowment does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information included in these materials and is not responsible for any consequences of its use. This NEA Research Lab is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts (Award #: 1862782-38-C-20).