LoosenUP

The goal of this working group is to create opportunities for our community to slow down and restore our minds, spirits, and bodies by bringing the power of the arts to health and wellness. We wanted to draw on interdisciplinary work in art therapy and the health humanities to not only provide reflective experiences to the community, but also to measure the effects of those experiences to create a body of evidence for why health and wellness and the arts should go hand in hand.

To that end, we designed a study to investigate the relationship between exposure to the arts and their specific effects on mental health. Participants attended a 45-minute session where they were exposed to live and recorded performances of music, live readings of poems, and images of peaceful visual art. During this program, participants were invited to relax and reflect on these pieces of art. A survey administered prior to, immediately after, and one week after the event asks the participants to report their mental and emotional state including positive and negative affect (PANAS-SF; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). Using a quasi-experimental design, we collected data from experimental participants who participated in LoosenUP sessions. We simultaneously administered the survey to a control group of individuals who did not participate in the session. While our results showed that the experimental group (the group exposed to LoosenUP) had no significant differences in positive feelings, there was a significant and immediate same-day drop in negative affect (meaning the result was immediate relief but not long lasting). The control group (the group not exposed to LoosenUP), on the other hand, had no significant differences in negative affect. So, in conclusion we found that LoosenUP was a great way to quickly de-stress--a meaningful finding in our high-stress era.

Student Fellows Reflect on their Experience

"Interdisciplinary research is challenging in a lot of ways, but it opens up a lot of doors. Music is my passion, but I’m also invested in discussions about mental health and holistic wellness. To better understand the effect the arts can have (to have quite literally done the research) brings a new perspective to my studies as a musician. The psychology behind both creating and listening to music plays a key role in my work as a performer and conductor."

—Junior Lauren Cline

"I have always been interested in music and the arts, but haven't pursued these avenues much in college as a psychology major, so it was a great experience to learn more about disciplines I am not as familiar with...This experience exposed me to a completely different world within the College of Arts and Sciences that I was not aware of prior to this year. It involved lots of teamwork with faculty and peers and I learned how to utilize skills like assertive communication, boundary setting, and collaboration, especially when things didn't go as planned. Being involved in a research experiment meant that we had to adapt to curveballs and work together to overcome challenges, which was an experience that taught me skills that I will draw on as I continue my education.

—Junior Kendall Minteer

"My experience with LoosenUP was significant because I was able to learn about psychology and see how it and music were connected. I didn't have much experience with research until doing this project, so it was great to be able to gain that knowledge as well as conduct research in a field in which I am majoring in."

—Sophomore Tyler Lawrence