For actors, the imaginative psychological process of realizing the life of a character is fundamental. Given this ability, we asked the question, do actors demonstrate increased psychological self-other awareness, including more resolution for past mourning, as compared with a control group?
Health/Medical
Active music classes in infancy enhance musical, communicative and social development
We found that random assignment to 6 months of active participatory musical experience beginning at 6 months of age accelerates acquisition of culture-specific knowledge of Western tonality in comparison to a similar amount of passive exposure to music. Furthermore, infants assigned to the active musical experience showed superior development of pre-linguistic communicative gestures and social behavior compared to infants assigned to the passive musical experience. These results indicate that (1) infants can engage in meaningful musical training when appropriate pedagogical approaches are used, (2) active musical participation in infancy enhances culture-specific musical acquisition, and (3) active musical participation in infancy impacts social and communication development.
Music and Health Care
This paper explores a core premise: that music can have a transformative impact on people’s lives. With respect to health care, music can be an effective intervention with patients of every age. The impact of music on various diseases and conditions in adults and children, the formation of the brain in musicians, and the value of music therapy was studied.
Weaving Traditional Arts Into the Fabric of Community Health
Aware of mounting evidence that community-based arts may positively impact health and well-being, ACTA commissioned studies by UC Davis’s Center for Reducing Health Disparities and the Asian American Center on Disparities Research to formally investigate health effects and other outcomes experienced by participants in two representative programs. ACTA’s Living Cultures Grants Program funds nonprofit organizations to support exemplary projects in traditional arts in California; the Apprenticeship Program encourages the continuation of the state’s traditional arts and cultures by contracting master artists to offer intensive, one-on-one training to qualified apprentices. Weaving Traditional Arts into the Fabric of Community Health presents the UC Davis findings with an overview of selected research in the emerging field of arts-for-health, as well as scholarly references and a selection of global resources in the fields of traditional and folk arts and arts-for-health.
Different mental rotation performance in students of music, sport and education
In this study the effect of long-term physical and musical activity on spatial cognitive performance, measured by mental rotation performance, is investigated in detail. Mental rotation performance is the ability to rotate a three-dimensional object using the imagination. Three groups, each consisting of 40 students, and divided by the subjects, music, sports, and education, solved a psycho-metrical mental rotation task with three-dimensional block figures. According to Adrian, The results showed a better mental rotation performance for music and sports students compared to the education students. Furthermore, the well-known gender difference favoring males was found for both sports and education student,s but not for music students.
…cultural activities and their association with perceived health, anxiety, depression and satisfaction with life …
Patterns of Receptive and Creative Cultural Activities and their Association with Perceived Health, Anxiety, Depression and Aatisfaction with Life among Adults (the HUNT study, Norway)
Cultural participation has been used both in governmental health policies and as medical therapy, based on the assumption that cultural activities will improve health. Previous population studies and a human intervention study have shown that religious, social and cultural activities predict increased survival rate. The aim of this study was to analyze the association between cultural activity and perceived health, anxiety, depression and satisfaction with life in both genders.
