A newsletter from the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project about advancing the understanding, assessment, and cultivation of well-being by means of a deep and sustained collaboration between the arts, humanities, and the social sciences.
December 2022: Social Connection and the Arts: Improving Well-Being and Public Health
Recent research explores how engagement in the arts advances feelings of social connection by creating opportunities to meet people with common interests, learn from others, and share a collective experience.
November 2022: Empathy: Feeling through the Arts and Humanities
Empathy is our ability to feel and imagine the thoughts and emotions of other people. This explains why empathy may drive our emotional response to art in general.
October 2022: The art(s and humanities) of meaning-making
While there is a robust psychology of meaning, science in many ways cannot fully capture the things that are meaningful to us. Instead, these profound sources of meaning are best captured by poets, musicians, painters, and mystics.
September 2022: What is human flourishing? And why are the arts and humanities integral to it?
There are many factors that impact our flourishing, and a wide array of research studies suggest that integrating the arts and humanities into our lives is vital for flourishing.
Project Director’s Welcome
Visual art, music, movies, literature, theater, history, religion, philosophy, and other cultural forms play a central role in human flourishing across the lifespan and around the world. The mission of HHF is to understand, assess, and advance the well-being benefits of engagement in these cultural pursuits.