New Insights in the Health Benefits of Art

In 2019, the World Health Organization demonstrated with a scoping review that art-based activities, regardless of their characteristics, have promising health benefits. More specifically, practicing art-based activities was demonstrated to contribute to core determinants of health, to play a key role in health promotion and prevention—especially with regard to the onset of mental illness and age-related physical decline—and to assist in acute and end-of-life care. This report also underscored, first, a lack of robust data on art’s health benefits, meaning data obtained with gold-standard experimental study designs (i.e., randomized control trials) and second, that certain topics (e.g., social health) and populations (e.g., older community dwellers) have been underexamined. In addition, little is known about both the mechanisms of art’s health benefits and how to implement an art-based activity for health purposes in practice.

A better understanding of (1) the mechanisms of art’s health benefits, (2) their fields of application from health promotion to prevention, and (3) the criteria for successful implementation of art-based activities in daily practice. Addressing these ongoing questions will inform the development of health policies that take advantage of the potential of the arts for improving global health. Thus, the overall objective of the proposed research topic is to provide information about these three domains of research.

In this Research Topic, we offer researchers, clinicians and stakeholders of artistic and cultural domains the opportunity to share and co-develop new ideas and practices with the goal of contributing a better understanding of (1) the mechanisms behind art’s health benefits, (2) the fields of application from promotion to prevention, (3) the criteria for successful implementation of art-based activities in practice, and (4) emerging perspectives in the field. We will be accepting original research and review manuscripts.