Art and Psychological Well-Being : Linking the Brain to the Aesthetic Emotion

By Léa Lomprez and Zaccaria Marongiu

The paper by Mastandrea, Fagioli & Biasi in 2019 focuses a literature review about how aesthetic appreciation affects our cognitive and emotional states to promote physical and psychological health. In a first part the authors exhibit several studies supporting that art in museums and art in healthcare education have a beneficial effect on well-being. Indeed, according to empirical studies, art would have a positive impact on cognitive, learning, psychological and social inclusion in individuals. In the second part, the authors approach several  neuroimaging studies related to aesthetic experience and emotional processing. The neuroimaging studies have shown neural activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, regions strongly associated with the experience of reward and emotion processing. The various studies have led the authors to explore various hypotheses for understand how the art experience promotes well-being. In a different way, studies have shown that aesthetic assessment can have different implications for the strategic use of art as a tool to promote well-being and health. Lastly, the authors suggest new research about aesthetic experience and psychophysiological measures of stress to promote the art as a tool for enhancing the quality of life of individuals, the health and education.
In the article by Mastandrea, Fagioli & Biasi (2019), we observed a lack of information on the clinical interest of these numerous researches. This led us to ask two questions. How can we use art as a therapeutic and clinical means ? What kind of population can it be for and how ?

In clinical practice the arts are used via the arts therapies which are composed of four types of therapy: music therapy, plastic arts therapies, drama therapy and dance therapy (Lecourt & Lubart, 2017). They have developed in recent years, and have been the subject of several studies to show the benefits of this practice for patients. The researchers showed that arts therapies can be used in all developmental periods ranging from the child to the elderly with several benefits. Indeed, arts therapies improve quality of life, well-being, mood, self-image and reduce depressive states, behavioral disorders and anxiety (Gold et al., 2004; Koch, Kunz, Lykou, & Cruz, 2014). Finally, this article is interesting because it sheds light on the underlying functioning of artistic appreciation and the role it can play in the study of human behavior. Its use can be extended in various fields, in particular for the treatment of psychological disorders from childhood to old age.