Flourishing Through Art: Cultivating Perspective-Taking and Social Connection Skills via Visual Art Engagement

• In Event: Arts Learning Across the Lifespan: Social-Emotional, Cognitive, and Physiological Benefits

Abstract

The arts have often been thought of as one pathway to cultivating flourishing and flourishing-related skills; however, there has been relatively little research addressing this potential. In this study, we aimed to impact two flourishing-related outcomes—social connectedness and perspective-taking skills—using visual art-based psychoeducational materials and skill-building exercises. Although visual art engagement has been speculated to improve perspective-taking, and art museum educators frequently use perspective-taking exercises with visitors, this work provides a more robust test of the effects of such exercises. Further, correlational work has connected art museum visitation with feelings of social connection, but little experimental work has sought to examine the conditions under which this is cultivated.

To address this aim, we recruited 600 US adults using Prolific. Participants first completed baseline measures of perspective-taking (Interpersonal Reactivity Index subscale), social connectedness (Watts Social Connectedness Scale), and thriving (Brief Inventory of Thriving) and then across four weeks completed four experimental sessions that included an educational video based on experimental condition and an art viewing activity; following the art viewing, participants completed the measure battery. In the fifth week, participants completed the baseline measures for a final time.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions:
(1) Perspective-Taking: Participants received psychoeducational videos focusing on the importance of this skill and how to approach doing so for different perspectives (e.g., people they are familiar with, people with different identities). They were asked to focus on taking different perspectives while viewing the art in the virtual art museum and consider the similarities or differences from their own perspective.
(2) Social Connection: Participants received psychoeducational videos focusing on differing levels of connection (e.g., with close others, their community) and were asked to focus on how the art in the virtual art museum relates to those relationships.
(3) Control: Participants received educational videos focusing on concepts from art and art history (e.g., line, color) and were asked to focus on these elements when viewing art in the virtual art museum.

Multilevel models were used to examine differences between the three conditions on our outcomes of interest—reported thriving, social connectedness, and perspective-taking. The preliminary analyses indicate that, relative to baseline, participants in all conditions showed improvements to thriving following the individual virtual art museum visits. Further, relative to the control group the two experimental groups showed improvements in their respective flourishing outcome.

This work makes important connections between the cultivation of flourishing and flourishing-relevant skills via engagement with visual art. Given that art is already being used to further a variety of skills and positive outcomes, this research provides vital evidence that such approaches may be effective and additional work is necessary to understand the ways in which to optimize the impacts such engagement and exercises have in a variety of settings and for different populations. Finally, this work suggests that virtual art environments can be well-suited for cultivating flourishing in a diverse adult population.

Authors

• Katherine Cotter, University of Pennsylvania

• Christa Mahlobo, University of Pennsylvania

• James O. Pawelski, University of Pennsylvania