Aging performing artists, whose diverse work includes acting, directing, choreography, and music performance and spans over seven decades, share with RCAC how they are “Still Kicking.”
Health/Medical
Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain
Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain, the culmination of a summit sponsored by The Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Neuro-Education Initiative, focuses on the convergence of neuroscientific research and teaching and learning, with an emphasis on the arts. This free publication features a prolegomenon by the late Dana Chairman William Safire and full text of the keynote address given by Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., Harvard University, at the Hopkins summit. Highlights of the symposium are featured in an executive summary, edited transcripts of panel presentations, and a synthesis of roundtable discussions. You may e-mail your request to: bjeffries@dana.org.
Classical Music an Effective Antidepressant (article)
A newly published study from Mexico reports repeated listening to certain classical works helps ease the debilitating symptoms of clinical depression. “Music offers a simple and elegant way to treat anhedonia, the loss of pleasures in daily activities,” the research team, led by Miguel-Angel Mayoral-Chavez of the University of Oaxaca, reports in the journal The Arts in Psychotherapy. (This summary is based on the article published by Tom Jacobs on the journalism website Miller-McCune. The article contains links to various sources, including a site to download the initial study findings from The Arts in Psychotherapy.)
Research Brief: How Arts Training Improves Attention and Cognition
Does education in the arts transfer to seemingly unrelated cognitive abilities? Researchers are finding evidence that it does. Michael Posner argues that when children find an art form that sustains their interest, the subsequent strengthening of their brains’ attention networks can improve cognition more broadly.
Issue Brief: Healthcare and the Arts
As Congress works toward a major reform of the national health care system, Americans for the Arts, the Society for Arts in Healthcare, and 19 other national associations have crafted a legislative request to strengthen the role of the arts in health care. The group hopes to provide creative arts therapists, artists, and arts organizations that do work in health care settings, either as volunteers or professionals, greater opportunity in this legislation.
An investigation of the effects of music and art on pain perception
The authors examined the effects of preferred music, visual distraction, and silence on pain perception. Preferred music was found to significantly increase tolerance and perceived control over the painful stimulus and to decrease anxiety compared with both the visual distraction and silence conditions. Pain intensity rating was decreased by music listening when compared with silence. Some cost for download PDF.
