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0:09
so we'll start today with with pinko who will take us through her presentation okay so the first thing I'd like to do is to talk about what are the innate social-emotional benefits of the arts so creative expression is an extension of self it evokes unconscious and conscious information that reflects what's inside like a window to the soul the arts can enhance positive emotions social psychologists Barbara Fredrickson has reported that while meditation for example is great at reducing negative
0:46
emotions the arts are uniquely capable of enhancing positive emotions her work is also shown that resilient people use positive emotions to rebound physiologically from negative events moreover active participation in the arts engages a large part of the brain which can also bring mindful presence and focus by crowding out stressful thinking with their strong nonverbal component and universal appeal the arts also enable participation by persons of all cultures and abilities furthermore
1:22
shared creative experiences deepen possibilities for reflection and dialogue which brings meaning self-awareness empathy and connection for example we trained an entire division of counselors from the Los Angeles Unified School District in how to use our curriculum called beat the odds which is a an integrated group drumming and group counseling program and one school counselor intentionally put kids together who didn't get along ordinarily she introduced one single
1:51
small frame drum into the group and had the kids share while they played a little something as they shared and the group and they grew to enjoy this activity so much that they formed a group identity and they stopped fighting with each other on the playground because you don't beat up a member of your group so participants in our expressive writing programs will often shed tears when reading aloud what they've written or when hearing what someone else has written they may report
2:22
a trauma that they've never share with anyone before only to discover that other people in the room have had the same experience and in the space of an hour a group of strangers can become each other's closest confidants so the arts allow difficult issues to be expressed in ways that feel organic and safe which is very important for people who've experienced trauma or who have a difficult time in expressing intense feelings when we look at well-designed studies of the arts in healing context
2:52
we see consistent biological evidence of stress reduction including reductions in the use of sedatives or analgesics reductions in pain appraisal and increases in pain tolerance and we know from the field of psychoneuroimmunology that's stress reducing and support building practices can improve health and resistance to disease so in addition the use of creative expression to facilitate social emotional well-being can meet needs when access to mental health services is limited and/or when
3:24
financial legal or cultural concerns inhibit the use of mental health care the use of the arts of the therapeutic process also expands possibilities for healthcare because they can be done in groups and can be done in a variety of settings educational recreational and health care and moreover the arts do not bear the stigma of therapy and they have virtually no side effects so we're going to do a little art experiential activity to illustrate some of the key points and
3:57
each one of you had a white piece of paper at your chair so if you can find that now here is the instruction and just remember there is no wrong way to do this okay do you all have the piece of paper if not you can pill for one from us an empty seat with or you can take one of paper that you have on yourself that's okay with lines images or by manipulating your paper show stress with lines images are by manipulating your paper shows stress okay some people are very
4:36
definitive and other people really get into it and they keep going so if you're done expressing your stress think for a moment about how your art response reflects the way that you deal with stress so think about how it reflects how you deal with stress and also look around you how similar was your expression to others around you or how different so I'm going to invite somebody brave from the audience to share to show us what you did and share how it reflects how you deal with stress
5:12
does anybody want to volunteer I see a hand back there please stand up and use a big voice Thank You anyone else one is here same thing okay anyone else a couple more I see a hand back there stand up with big voice thank you and one more perhaps yes please stand up
5:51
thank you for sharing that did you see the variety and also the similarity that came up okay so I was going to actually I thought that I was going to pair you up but that was great I'm going to actually take you through one other little thing to do
6:39
[Applause]
7:32
okay so now we're going to debrief for a minute what the heck did we just do okay so there are some key therapeutic elements that we use to enhance the innate benefits of the arts one of them is process / product when we focus on process / product without expectations of performance or mastery we encourage self expression the language of non judgment is really important to this process so we use I see and I notice to invite reflection for example I see a lot of colors in this corner tell me
8:09
about it versus that's pretty which is actually positive but it's a judgement and or instead of trying to interpret what we see like that looks like a tick and hacking catching from an egg or what's that so we use language also that minimizes power struggles like the simple use of the word and instead of but which validates the experience of the other person the language of non judgment removes the fear of making mistakes and supports a growth mindset which is defined by Stanford
8:44
psychologist Carol Dweck this growth mindset embraces mistakes as part of the learning process which in turn enables positive risk-taking so in our evaluation of our program called beat the odds the drumming program we have noticed that classroom teachers reports that shy children start participating more in class music teachers report that students are more willing to try solos in front of their peers and special education teachers reports that their students become more willing to
9:17
participate in their music classes when they were previously disengaged the next therapeutic element is aesthetic distance this means that what I have created feels like it's separate from me it gives us permission to disclose things about ourselves because non threatening and this is important especially when cultural standards inhibit self-disclosure so youth in particular tend to write autobiographically this is an example from a collage based program where
9:47
poetry is written from the voice of any object in the collage even an inanimate one and the bird is talking in this poem I'll just read the middle section in the interest of time I pretend I'm playing with my friends I feel my mom's broken wing I touch my mom I worry that she's not going to make it I cry if my mom is going to die I'm a little birdy
10:15
the third key therapeutic element is reflection and self disclosure so I forgot to ask you after we did our drumming for you to reflect and notice how you felt after we did those two interactive activities compared to how you felt when you walked in the room so you might take a moment to think about that as creative expression is a metaphor for life reflection and self disclosure is essential to processing the experience in order to derive its maximal possible meaning so buried
10:48
bitman and colleagues evaluated six different drumming protocols varying amounts of drumming and types of drumming and the only condition that led to neuro endocrine and immune changes at a probability level indicative of stress reduction with the last one it was drumming facilitated by a music therapist with reflection and self disclosure later a meta-analytic study by Joann Fredo Rowley analyzed the outcomes of 146 randomized studies of self-disclosure through writing and
11:20
found it to be effective in improving psychological health immune function reported health and general functioning whoops in skip melody and finally synchrony synchrony is another key element when we mirror someone's behavior or build on another person's ideas as is done in the theatre world we are sharing a moment of synchrony sometimes mirroring is literal like we're playing the same rhythm or we're doing the same movements or singing the same notes or even making eye contact
11:53
synchrony is an affirmation of what's been expressed it's akin to having a voice in being heard it's a form of empathy so a fascinating study of synchrony by Coquelin colleagues gave both a subject and an experimenter a little rhythm clicker to play and then they put the subject into an fMRI machine when the experimenter played in sync with the subject compared to playing out of sync they observed increased activity in the caudate which was the same area of the brain in these
12:23
subjects that responded to a monetary reward also the subjects demonstrated more helpful behavior afterwards when the experimenters dropped a bunch of pencils they could literally count the number of pencils of the person helped to pick up we also experienced synchrony when we listen to music or hear poetry that we like when you connect with a piece of music a song or a poem it's like finding empathy for yourself the composer or writer gets how you feel so correspondingly listening to music or
12:57
hearing poetry that elicits chills or a measurable physiological response is associated with blood flow patterns in the brain similar to those elicited by drugs of abuse sex and chocolate we are hard-wired for synchrony and possibly for empathy through mirror neurons which helped us learn by enabling us to replicate what we see in here so if you think about it for imagined behavior registers in the brain as if it's real then we can see how the arts can facilitate the learning of new behavior
13:32
not only through enactment but also through observation and the use of imagination in creative expression so what are creative art therapists they are mental health professionals who receive dual training in the arts they emphasize process over product and use their art forms to achieve social emotional physical and cognitive goals these therapies the creative arts therapies emerged as professional disciplines at demmick in the 20th century they're well-suited to addressing a broad array
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of problems that are difficult to identify and/or treat such as trauma I am deliberately overwhelming you with examples of populations and disorders for which the creative arts therapies can be effective in 2013 the Journal of the American Medical Association internal medicine published an analysis of 27 rigorous studies involving a total of 1576 cancer patients that were randomly assigned to a creative arts therapy or control condition and the creative arts therapies included art
14:39
dance music and writing the study concluded that creative arts therapies significantly reduce anxiety depression and pain and significantly increased quality of life at UCLA arson healing we offer a sustainable strategy for meeting the overwhelming needs of under-resourced communities we offer professional development training in some supportive practices that are used by creative arts therapists without crossing the boundary of therapy and we define therapy as identifying and
15:09
treating disorders we work more preventively what a key to our sustainable strategy is we offer scripted curriculum materials that anyone can use and we also offer a social-emotional arts certificate program where we train people to design and deliver their own effective programs in using the arts therapeutically so an example of a program that we've developed recently is their medical social-emotional arts program that supports the well-being of hospital patients and care providers through art
15:41
movement music and writing integrated with mental health practices they're intended to help create rapport and connection evoke positive emotions and resilience manage stress pain and the environment facilitate both verbal and nonverbal communication it's also aimed at helping strengthen a patient's sense of being a creative person instead of someone who is ill and it helps with managing grief and loss the curriculum was designed by a team of creative arts therapists and informed by an array of
16:11
UCLA departments including Alzheimer's dementia child psychiatry integrative oncology nursing education and spiritual care we wanted to discern and address both patients and staff needs our medical student trainees who are actually shown in this picture here have been successfully delivering these activities with patients with neurological disorders at UCLA Medical Center the arts activities are scripted for easy facilitations they're designed in modules to accommodate short or
16:41
longer periods of time with patients they're designed on the assumption that there are no materials or no instruments available in a hospital room they include instructions for adaptation to different age groups disabilities and families and they include guidelines on how to continue the activities on one's own as the further example of how our approach to the arts can meet broad public health needs we're also developing a program of integrative rhythm and movement for older adults
17:07
with memory or mobility issues and on the other end of the life spectrum we are also developing programs for parents of infants pre-kindergarten age and elementary age children these practices are capable of alleviating trauma preventing bullying bridging diversity reducing stress giving voice to special needs and more neuroscience has a real opportunity here to make a difference the world of the Arts and healing is looking to the world of neuroscience to validate the amazing ways in which the
17:40
arts can be used to address intractable problems I recently heard a brain scientist state that after a couple years of measuring outcomes of a music education program that she had yet to find any changes in social-emotional outcomes or indicators rather than measuring the byproducts of an existing arts program which may or may not be strong enough to lead to a significant social-emotional or other outcome of interest it's best to study a program that has been specifically designed to
18:11
achieve these outcomes when we did this with our beat the odds program of group drumming integrated with group counseling activities here's what we found significant reductions in a broad spectrum of behavior in fifth grade students this finding us potentially tremendous public health value given the broad number of ways in which children express their stress and we have preliminarily found in a subsequent study that is yet to be published that positive behavior and
18:43
this is a study with special education students positive behavior also increases significantly and that these benefits endure over a period of two months so for more inspiration we're support sponsoring an inaugural conference in creativity in the arts and healing in los angeles in 2017 which will offer leading-edge experiencial training opportunities in multiple art forms we invite you all to participate I have brochures outside with information along the little slips if
19:13
you want to be notified which you can just leave on the table so I'm going to end this just for fun this is an example of how we facilitate insight through the use of the arts as a metaphor for life so we were teaching communication in this activity where people were sitting back to back they had the same art materials and one person was to create something and the other person was to replicate it but they couldn't look at each other so this requires complete
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communication so you can see that this team did pretty well and this team not so well and now I need to tell you that this is a husband-wife team need i say more so I'll leave you with two quotes that say it all I have no idea what the timer is going up instead of down oh it's job and I've run over I'm so sorry okay okay so these are the two quotes they'll leave you with and thank you so much [Applause]
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