(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON – Teens who participate in after-school arts activities such as music, drama and painting are more likely to report feeling depressed or sad than students who are not involved in these programs, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
This is the first study to find that young people's casual involvement in the arts could be linked to depressive symptoms, according to the researchers. The article was published online in APA's journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
"This is not to say that depression is a necessary condition for either a teen or an adult to become an artist, nor are we showing that participating in the arts leads to mental illness," said lead author Laura N. Young, MA, of Boston College. "However, previous research has revealed higher rates of mental illness symptoms in adult artists. We were interested in whether this association is present earlier in development."
While girls were more likely to take part in the arts after school and reported somewhat higher rates of depression than boys, the study found that both boys and girls involved in arts reported more depressive symptoms than those who were not involved in extracurricular arts activities.
Teens involved exclusively in sports were the least likely to report depressive symptoms. However, there was no difference in depressive symptoms between teens involved in the arts who also did sports and teens involved in the arts who did not also participate in sports. This suggests that arts participation rather than a lack of sports participation was associated with depression, the authors said.
The researchers looked at American teenagers' involvement in extracurricular activities in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010 using data from the U.S. Longitudinal Survey of Youth collected from 2,482 students 15 to 16 years old. Of the sample, 1,238 were female, 27 percent were black, 19 percent were Hispanic and 54 percent were non-Hispanic whites.
The students responded to survey questions asking how often they participated in "lessons in music, art or drama, or practice of music, singing, drama, drawing/painting" and "going to sports lessons, playing sports or practicing any physical activity" after school. Answers could range from "often" to "almost never," the study said.
To determine rates of depressive symptoms, the survey asked teens how often they experienced various moods or problems associated with depression, such as poor appetite, difficulty concentrating, downcast mood, lack of energy or motivation, restless sleep and sadness. Their answers could range from "none of the time" to "all of the time."
As for why there appears to be a link between the arts and symptoms of mental illness, one theory the authors presented is that people drawn to the arts may have certain cognitive traits, such as taking in a higher than average level of information from their surroundings. While dealing with excessive stimuli could lead to general distress and depression, a heightened awareness of self and surroundings could lead to greater creativity and artistic expression, the authors said. Personality traits such as introversion, which has been linked to depression, could also lead to preferences for more solitary activities that are more likely to be associated with practice of the arts than with sports, they said.
"When positive behaviors such as being involved in the arts are associated with symptoms of mental illness, it's essential that we understand why," said Young. "Further research can address the question of whether potential psychological vulnerabilities can be transformed into strengths through the practice of the arts."
###
Article: "Heightened Incidence of Depressive Symptoms in Adolescents Involved in the Arts;" Laura N. Young, MA ; Ellen Winner, PhD; and Sara Cordes, PhD; Boston College; Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, online Nov. 12, 2012.
Full text of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office and at
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/aca-ofp-young.pdf
Contact: Laura Young at younglz@bc.edu or 617-852-6911.
The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists. APA's membership includes more than 137,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.
www.apa.org
If you do not want to receive APA news releases, please let us know at public.affairs@apa.org or 202-336-5700.
END
ESA's Planck space telescope has made the first conclusive detection of a bridge of hot gas connecting a pair of galaxy clusters across 10 million light-years of intergalactic space.
Planck's primary task is to capture the most ancient light of the cosmos, the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. As this faint light traverses the Universe, it encounters different types of structure including galaxies and galaxy clusters – assemblies of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity.
If the CMB light interacts with the hot gas permeating these huge cosmic ...
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Nov. 20, 2012 – If you are among the 50 percent of Americans who suffer from insomnia, then you have probably tried everything – from warm milk to melatonin pills or prescription medications to induce sleep – with varying degrees of success and side effects. But what if sleep could be achieved not by a substance, but through 'balancing' brain activity?
Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have conducted a pilot clinical study to determine whether a non-invasive approach, that uses musical tones to balance brain activity, can 'reset' ...
Millbrook, N.Y. -- In the northern hardwood forest, climate change is poised to reduce the viability of the maple syrup industry, spread wildlife diseases and tree pests, and change timber resources. And, according to a new BioScience paper just released by twenty-one scientists, without long-term studies at the local scale—we will be ill-prepared to predict and manage these effects.
Following an exhaustive review of more than fifty years of long term data on environmental conditions at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, ...
Do birds change their tune in response to urban noise? It depends on the bird species, according to Dr. Alejandro Ariel Ríos-Chelén from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and colleagues. Their work shows that while some birds do adapt their songs in noisy conditions by means of frequency changes, others like the vermilion flycatchers adapt their song by means of changes in song lengths. The work is published online in Springer's journal, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.
Birds use their songs during social interactions to attract females and repel intruders. ...
UNIQUE research conducted by a University of Huddersfield professor confirms just how successfully the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics were designed, organised and delivered. His findings will reveal to planners of the 2016 Games in Brazil just what they must do to meet or exceed the standards set by London.
Professor David Bamford, an expert in the theory of operations management and how it can be applied to the sports arena, was granted full access to the Paralympics village in London and with his team of researchers he quizzed hundreds of athletes, seeking their views ...
NEW YORK, November 20, 2012 – Researchers at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) have published findings that further illuminate the emerging field of ethorobotics — the study of bioinspired robots interacting with live animal counterparts.
Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU-Poly, doctoral candidates Vladislav Kopman and Jeffrey Laut and research scholar Giovanni Polverino studied the role of real-time feedback in attracting or repelling live zebrafish in the presence of a robotic fish.
Their ...
Mobile telephone operators should verify the age of children and youngsters when they access multimedia services by having a record of users' dates of birth. This is one of the recommendations in a report by researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), that also suggest content classifications for mobiles by age, like in the case of video games.
"Verification of age upon access to mobile phone services is not effective because the child can also falsify their age by checking a different box," as explained to SINC by María de Miguel Molina, lecturer ...
New York, NY -- (November 20, 2012) – Wolters Kluwer Health and the International Association of Forensic Nurses (IAFN) are pleased to announce an agreement to publish Journal of Forensic Nursing, the official journal of IAFN. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), part of Wolters Kluwer Health, will become the publisher for Journal of Forensic Nursing, beginning with the first Quarter 2013 issue.
The only journal dedicated exclusively to this emerging nursing specialty, the Journal of Forensic Nursing will continue on its quarterly publication schedule. In addition to ...
Scientists at Imperial College London have developed a system to quickly detect trace amounts of chemicals like pollutants, explosives or illegal drugs.
The new system can pick out a single target molecule from 10 000 trillion water molecules within milliseconds, by trapping it on a self-assembling single layer of gold nanoparticles.
The team of scientists, all from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial, say this technology opens the way to develop devices that are compact, reusable and easy to assemble, and could have a range of uses including detecting illegal drugs, ...
HEIDELBERG, 20 November 2012 – Scientists have engineered bacteria that are capable of sacrificing themselves for the good of the bacterial population. These altruistically inclined bacteria, which are described online in the journal Molecular Systems Biology, can be used to demonstrate the conditions where programmed cell death becomes a distinct advantage for the survival of the bacterial population.
"We have used a synthetic biology approach to explicitly measure and test the adaptive advantage of programmed bacterial cell death in Escherichia coli," said Lingchong ...
