Art therapy

[aviebrar]

Art therapy is a form of expressive therapy that uses art materials, such as paints, chalk and markers. Art therapy combines traditional psychotherapeutic theories and techniques with an understanding of the psychological aspects of the creative process, especially the affective properties of the different art materials.

[AmericanWoman]

Interesting, thank you for sharing this.  My future sister in law has a degree in art therapy, and I've been wondering what exactly it meant!

[liza123]

Art therapy is a form of expressive therapy that uses art materials, such as paints, chalk and markers. Art therapy combines traditional psychotherapeutic theories and techniques with an understanding of the psychological aspects of the creative process, especially the affective properties of the different art materials.

very interesting..maybe parents can use this form of therapy with their children when they refuse to talk about their problem(and it is burning inside!)

[anaklio]

It's a pretty controversial thing. A new study by Gotze et al. (2009) provides some evidence for its effectiveness. These researchers showed that art therapy was effective in lowering the anxiety of cancer patients.

[voodoo scientist]

Psychotherapy has a strong bias towards the cognitive aspects of the brain, because science is a cognitive profession. Art therapy and similar disciplines appear to be "translations" of psychology from, for instance, cognitive to visual, presumably to create more effective treatments for people who are not predominantly cognitive.

Conceptually, I think it's a viable idea in that there's no reason the brain couldn't be given the visual equivalent of psychology education by cognition, but remain skeptical on its current implementation. Our cognitive understanding of psychology is currently insufficiently advanced to begin making "translations" into other brain aspects.