Arts in Psychotherapy最新文献

Mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety, are becoming increasingly prominent among college students, which negatively affects academic achievement and physical and mental health. To address this issue, this study introduced dance movement therapy (DMT) to a group of Chinese university students - a group never addressed in DMT research. Addressing the gap, this randomized controlled trial evaluates DMT's effectiveness in reducing depressive and anxious symptoms in thirty-six students. Over a concise three-day program, participants engaged in 18 h of structured DMT, exploring twelve themes, while counterparts in the control group awaited treatment. Outcomes were promising:students undergoing DMT showed marked improvements in mental health measures immediately following therapy, and these benefits for intervention group were maintained after three months. Significantly, the treatment's positive effects were consistent across genders, showcasing DMT's broad potential. This initial investigation suggests DMT is a promising avenue for mental health management in Chinese undergraduates, calling for further trials with larger cohorts and longer observation to confirm and extend these findings.

This qualitative case study was conducted to explore experiences and meanings of a child with ADHD in digital art therapy utilizing the metaverse platform. The study participant was an 11-year-old boy living in S city of South Korea who was diagnosed with ADHD. The child participated in a digital art therapy program based on the metaverse platform once a week for 12 sessions from July to October 2022. Through continuous comparative analysis, the following five major themes were identified from collected data: ‘enjoyable and self-directed art activities through gamification of metaverse’, ‘enhanced presence and communication in the virtual environment’, ‘expanded experience and immersion through convergence of virtuality and reality in metaverse’, ‘emotional expression and emotional release through multisensory experiences in metaverse’, and 'personal growth and development through digital art therapy using metaverse’. By utilizing the metaverse platform as a space and tool for digital art therapy, this study’s findings support that factors such as gamification, presence, interactivity, scalability, and multisensory stimulation provided participant with an enhanced therapeutic experience. These findings reveal the potential of the metaverse as an art therapy environment and medium suitable for the digital age. They also provide important implications for the development of art therapy.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a common disorder characterized by psychological and neurophysiological impairments. Previous studies show that Jungian Sandplay Therapy (SPT) effectively improves anxiety symptoms in individuals with GAD. This study explores whether clinical symptom improvement from using SPT also involves changes in brain functioning. The study focused on the brain regions implicated in GAD, including the hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus, and prefrontal cortex (PFC). Magnetic resonance spectroscopy was used to target these brain regions to measure metabolite changes, specifically in the N-Acetylaspartate to creatine (NAA/Cr) ratio—a measure of neuronal viability. A within-subject pre-post design was utilized with adult females from Indonesia diagnosed with GAD (n = 6, ages 21 to 40). Thirty sessions of SPT were provided weekly. Results from both clinical measures of anxiety (HAM-A and GAD-7) indicated mean pretest scores in the clinical range, with average posttest scores below the clinical range for GAD. Likewise, the NAA/Cr ratio mean scores for the hippocampus, amygdala, and PFC were outside the healthy range before and trended toward or into the healthy range after treatment. The NAA/Cr ratio mean scores in the thalamus were in the healthy range before treatment and remained in the healthy range after treatment. This study concludes that SPT effectively improves clinical anxiety symptoms in individuals with GAD and may also improve metabolic brain functioning in the limbic system and PFC. Limitations, implications, and further research are discussed.

In recent years, the North American Drama Therapy Association (NADTA) has been working to establish and disseminate research to the drama therapy and wider creative arts therapies communities. Much of the research has focused on empirical studies within drama therapy. The NADTA Research Chair formed a subcommittee aimed at identifying, investigating, categorizing, and disseminating theoretical research articles in an effort to continue to grow the profession of drama therapy as well as to explore the question: what theories are present in current peer reviewed drama therapy scholarship? As there is already an NADTA empirical spreadsheet established, and following the research trajectory logic that theoretical scholarship precedes empirical research, an eventual aim of this research initiative is also to connect the theory publications to the empirical publications, leading toward a fuller understanding of the drama therapy field. The research study reported here is the initial step of this path. In this initiative, theoretical scholarship was defined and inclusion and exclusion criteria were established. After locating and investigating articles from the years 2000–2022, 121 articles were included. An analysis of year of publication, author, journal, and category were conducted. The categories identified were: 1) established and emerging theories and 2) integrated theories, with 24 identified subcategories within these two main categories. A discussion of the patterns is presented.

As a cultural force, Whiteness is insidious in dance/movement therapy (DMT) education. In the process of learning, East Asian international students and educators may aspire to White, middle-class, able-bodied, heteropatriarchal norms of what constitutes healthy movement and relational styles while excluding others, particularly within a group dynamic that privileges modern dance technique and overt emotional and verbal expression. The reach of educational neocolonialism in East Asian countries further perpetuates this force. As the foundational form of the discipline of DMT, “modern dance” is the standard of the expressive practice. And although “other” dance forms are starting to be welcomed, there is still a gap regarding how these are included into DMT education and applied in practice. This co-created critical autoethnography emerged from an embodied reflexive dialogue between two East Asian former international students on their experience of Whiteness in DMT education. Through counternarratives, we illustrate ways towards a decolonizing praxis of DMT that is situated within the educational environment and with the students with whom we work as educators and supervisors.

There are currently no systematic reviews that evaluate art therapy as a treatment for trauma in adult refugees. With over 32.5 million refugees worldwide as of mid-2022, many of them facing trauma, it’s crucial that access to proper therapeutic support be available. Art therapy de-emphasizes verbal communication, which may help refugees facing language barriers and difficulties talking about their experiences. Most of the research on this topic is qualitative, so a qualitative meta-analysis as outlined by Timulak (2009) was attempted. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were made based on date, publication type, sample size, data collection method, participant information, type of therapeutic intervention, and data analysis method. Out of 594 articles located, selection resulted in only N = 4 studies. Timulak recommends 8–16 articles for meta-analysis. Therefore, studies were instead summarized in a box score table. Results revealed that art therapy shows potential, but no reliable conclusions can be drawn because, despite a large body of literature, there are very few empirical studies in this field. Considering this, further primary empirical research must be done. Results suggest that building culturally significant art forms into therapy may be a particularly helpful avenue of exploration.

The distress experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic can add to the already stressful experience of migration for children and their family, having serious short-term and long-term impact on their mental health and meaning-making processes. Since creativity acts as a protective buffer for children and support their adjustment, the implementation of school arts-based interventions can help support the recovery of children and promote their coping and adaptive strategies. Through the case study of a 7-year-old Syrian refugee, this article presents how a young girl invested the Art & Storytelling school-based creative expression program to regain a sense of agency and control in a (post-)crisis context. Based on the images she created during the workshops as well as on the individual and group observational field notes recorded by workshop facilitators, the case study highlights the child’s creative process and its relationship to the creation of meaning and her developing sense of agency. It focuses especially on how the girl integrated puppets into her own creative process to regain a sense of agency and control over her life.

This qualitative study explored the impact of an eight session group art therapy programme on the lived experiences of adults in the post-acute treatment phase of cancer care. The longitudinal design involved data collection at three time points: pre, mid and post programme over a span of three months. In-depth individual art-based interviews, informed by Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), were held with eight participants over the three time periods to explore their experiences of and reflections on the art therapy programme and its role in their post-cancer recovery. Thematic analysis of the interviews using the IPA method revealed five overarching themes: the dynamic function of visual metaphor in the image; how the process of art making and experiences with different art materials leads to personal insight and the re-invention of identity; how confrontation with uncertainty supports the development of a new version of the self; the role of the group in promoting personal change; and the role of the art therapist in supporting experiences of safety and the development of group rapport. These outcomes also extend how group art therapy in the post-acute cancer treatment phase may be able to contribute to post-traumatic growth in adult survivors of cancer.

The purpose of this study is to provide direction and highlight implications for human rights education for creative arts therapists by exploring their experiences of human rights education designed to promote human rights sensitivity. Six creative arts therapists were recruited to participate in focus group interviews conducted online between August and September 2022. Additional interview data were collected until February 2023, and the data were transcribed afterward. This paper presents the qualitative part of a descriptive sequential mixed design. Qualitative analysis was performed to analyze the content, and a total of 5 main and 15 subthemes were identified. Taking the improvement in human rights sensitivity via education as the central phenomenon, we identified a pathway from expressing human rights sensitivity to directing human rights education for creative arts therapists. This pathway involved a factor that inhibited human rights sensitivity and a deficiency in human rights education. The results underscore the importance of supporting creative arts therapists in their occupational competencies by improving their sensitivity toward human rights and delivering human rights education that is aligned with their professional characteristics.

Art therapy (AT) has demonstrated potential for improving the well-being of breast cancer (BC) survivors, but limited research exists on emotion processing (EP) of Arab women in this context. Thus, this study delves into the relationship between EP and the art-making of Arab BC survivors in an AT group intervention to provide an in-depth understanding of their unique experience. We hypothesized that openly expressing emotions in the face of life-threatening events, such as BC, might be difficult for individuals from collective cultures with a strong emphasis on social harmony. We conducted a mixed-methods exploratory study (N = 62) with a visual analysis of 22 drawings and a textual analysis of reports from five art therapists. Positive correlations were observed between conservation values, acceptance of emotions, values, and artistic elements. Acceptance of emotions correlated negatively with space in drawing. Textual analysis of therapist reports revealed two themes—coping strategies and mixed emotions—corresponding to phenomena observed in the drawings. The women reported that art-making in a group facilitated access to their inner emotions, reinforced personal boundaries, and provided a safe space for addressing complex experiences. The AT group also offered socialization with women in similar circumstances. We conclude that AT provided these Arab BC survivors a culturally sensitive means of safely processing emotions through creative visual expression. Further research is needed to examine if AT is also helpful to BC survivors from other collectivist ethno-cultures.