Psychoneuroimmunologist Daisy Fancourt on the impact of cultural life on our well-being, the correlation between reading fiction and a healthy lifestyle, and how art helps to cure chronic pain
For centuries, people have debated whether art has autonomous value. It was argued that art is created for the sake of art and exists solely for pleasure and aesthetic experiences. However, many studies are now beginning to conclude that it is beneficial to our health and well-being.
There are a number of challenges associated with research over the past decades on how art affects our well-being. One of them is that in the framework of many studies, special programs were considered, where people deliberately took part in some new creative activity in order to improve certain aspects of health. The results of these studies are astounding: they recorded impressive improvements in mental and physical health, as well as cognitive abilities. However, these are often small studies, the sample of which may not be representative of the entire population of the country. In addition, in such studies, human health is studied over a relatively short period of time.
So over the past few years, my team and I have researched publicly available data collected across the country to see if cultural life has a similar effect on our health. At the same time, we focused on those cases when we were engaged in creativity not purposefully to improve health, but simply for our own pleasure. Specifically, we have worked with data from cohort studies that collect information on thousands of participants, often followed from birth. Every few years, researchers recorded data on thousands of variables describing participants' mental and physical health, education, family circumstances, financial situation, hobbies, and so on. Many of these arrays were collected by University College London.and often they contain questions about the art and cultural life of the respondents. This means that we can form a representative sample of the entire population, study several decades of the lives of the people we select, and determine whether their involvement in the art world has had a long-term impact on their health.
Creativity and mental illness
Over the past few years, we have been able to identify several interesting patterns. First, we wanted to tackle the mental health of people, since there are so many projects about how creativity can help people with mental disorders recover, or at least learn how to deal with their symptoms. But beyond that, we wanted to understand whether creativity can prevent the development of mental illness. In other words, if you lead a rich cultural life, can this reduce your risk of developing mental illness in the future?
We conducted a series of studies, focusing in particular on people over the age of 50, and tested how engaging in the world of art and creativity reduces the likelihood of depression. As a result, we came to the conclusion that such a relationship really exists. Of course, one could argue that those who are already healthier and more prosperous than others are engaged in creativity, but we worked with a large-scale data set, where there are many variables describing various aspects of people's lives. This allowed us to include in our analysis all other factors that could affect the result. For example, if we consider the relationship between art and depression, we can include in our models the socioeconomic status of the respondent, his gender, educational level, availability of work, the presence of other diseases,the level of physical activity, how often he meets with friends, how involved in other social interactions. And we can see if the relationship between creativity and depression persists, whether it depends on all of these factors.
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Our analysis showed that it does not. We used a longitudinal approach to see when respondents develop depression. In addition, we conducted a number of other studies, when we found a person with depression and matched him with another who was almost completely identical to him in all factors, except that he did not have depression. This approach has also shown that art and creativity reduce the likelihood of developing depression.
Of course, you should also take into account the fact that people pay different amounts of attention to art and creativity at different points in time, so we expect that one year they will devote more time to it, and the next less, depending on what else is happening in their lives. We were able to analyze these changes and again found a clear relationship between creativity engagement and a reduced risk of depression.
In addition, we have recently begun to conduct interventional research simulations. This is especially interesting because therapies such as prescription creativity are difficult to research: large-scale randomized controlled trials are very expensive to conduct and data collection can take many years. Cohort studies allow us to simulate experiments. Of course, we cannot be absolutely sure that we would get similar data in real experiments, but this approach can give us some idea of the situation, and this will reduce the risks when developing new studies.
Among other things, we looked at people with depression who did not have special hobbies or hobbies. If they find a hobby, how will it affect depression? As part of this study, we simulated a situation where creativity is applied as directed by a doctor: if a person suffers from depression, he goes to a doctor, and the latter sends him to some local creative circle, and this, we hope, should help him in the fight with depression. We found that if a person finds a new hobby during depression, the likelihood of their cure is doubled. This is another aspect of the relationship between art and mental health.
The role of creativity in child development
In addition, we examined children's behavior. We found that those children who are creative in elementary school are more likely to have higher self-esteem in early adolescence - and self-esteem is closely related to children's mental health. We also noticed that if children are involved in creative activities with their parents, this further fuels their self-esteem. Thus, it is very important for parents to be creative with their children, in the family.
But we found that the effects of creativity are not limited to boosting self-esteem; it has other aspects as well. For example, those children who are involved in cultural life are less likely to have problems with socialization during adolescence: they are less likely to have problems with friends, problems with teachers and other adults, and they are more likely to successfully undergo social adaptation, then have demonstrate pro-social behavior. In addition, as in adults, these children are less likely to develop depression and also have a higher propensity for a healthy lifestyle. For example, we often see that young children read fiction almost every day, because they have time to read books: such children often have healthier habits. We discovered,that they are less likely to decide to try drugs or smoking in their teens, and more likely to eat fruits and vegetables every day.
Curiously, we found that creativity and skill do not seem to be that important: the creative activity itself is most important. The most important thing is to do it. Again, in all of these studies, the association found was independent of all other life factors. This shows us that art is not just a sign of high socio-economic status. The very involvement in the art world is very important.
Cognitive ability
We've talked a lot about mental health, but cognitive improvement has also been found, and this is another example of how interventional research can provide us with amazing data on how creativity improves our well-being. For example, if a person develops dementia, how can creativity help their mental health, behavior, memory, interaction with others?
We found that being involved in the art world can slow cognitive decline in old age. For example, a number of studies have shown that going to a museum, art gallery, theater, or concert is associated with a slower decline in cognitive abilities in old age, which again does not depend on all other life factors, as well as with a lower risk of developing dementia. These results are in good agreement with the concept of cognitive reserve, according to which there are a number of life factors that can help increase the brain's resistance to neurodegeneration. We have found that this cultural engagement encourages people to engage in cognitive-stimulating activities, as well as provide social support, new experiences, and an opportunity for emotional expression, self-development, and improved skills. All of these factors are part of the cognitive reserve and help to ensure the plasticity of the brain.
So we found that cultural involvement is associated with a lower risk of dementia. We also took it a step further and looked at the risk of dementia or death from dementia: cultural involvement protected people in all of these cases.
Impact of cultural life on physical health
Finally, we investigated the physical health of people. We know that many physical illnesses - especially those that develop in old age - can be caused by a combination of physical and psychological causes. So, we analyzed the occurrence of chronic pain. It has previously been shown that physical activity can prevent its onset in old age, but there is also a psychological component to it. We have found that people who are culturally active are less likely to experience chronic pain in old age. Perhaps the reason is that it reduces sedentary lifestyles: people need to get up and leave the house to do singing, dancing, or gardening. But this lifestyle also provides social stimulation, improves mental health and well-being.aids in the expression of emotions, reduces stress levels - all of which can protect against the development of chronic pain.
We conducted a similar analysis for senile asthenia, the development of which is influenced by many different factors, including how active a person is and whether he or she has mental health problems. Again, we see a similar picture here: being involved in the world of art and creativity protects against the onset of senile asthenia, and even if it has already developed, creativity can slow down cognitive decline.
All of these studies, conducted on representative samples, show that arts and cultural engagement at the population level are associated with improved mental and physical health, as well as cognitive abilities, both in terms of preventing the development of diseases and in terms of improving life trajectory. By themselves, these findings do not give us a complete picture, and, of course, we cannot be completely sure of causality when we use data from observational, cohort studies. But if we take into account all the data we have at our disposal - for example, randomized controlled trials, ethnographic or qualitative studies, biological laboratory studies - together with our results, we will see very similar patterns in all of them. This indicates that the data we obtained are not an artifact of the methodological approach we have chosen, but may turn out to be a real discovery: creativity and art protect people's health. So if we return to the idea that art is created for the sake of art, then it is certainly beautiful in itself, and we should turn to it for the sake of pure pleasure. But we should also be delighted and comforted by the fact that exactly what we enjoy, art, can also improve our health in the short and long term.certainly, in itself is beautiful, and we should turn to him for pure pleasure. But we should also be delighted and comforted by the fact that exactly what we enjoy, art, can also improve our health in the short and long term.certainly, in itself is beautiful, and we should turn to him for pure pleasure. But we should also be delighted and comforted by the fact that exactly what we enjoy, art, can also improve our health in the short and long term.