IT’S ALL IN THE MIND: The
Social and Psycohological
impact of Arts
Tuula Tamminen
Professor of Child Psychiatry FINLAND
President of WAIMH
Are there dark clouds in tomorrow’s
dawn?
 Growing
world-wide concern about
children’s mental well-being
 The majority of children are growing-up in
sub-optimal circumstances (poverty)
 An alarming sign is that children in wealthy
countries are suffering more and more
mental problems
Challenges in a globalizing world
 Mental
adaptation capacities of individuals
are heavily challenged in this continuously
rapidly changing, multicultural,
technological information era
 Eg. WHO/EU have estimated that the
biggest threaths for welfare in Europe until
2015 will be the increasing mental health
problems
Minding the Mind
 How
are we supporting our children to
grow-up in the modern, globalizing world?
 How well do we take care of the mental
development of children and adolescents?
 Are we able to promote healthy, balanced
psychosocial development during school
years?
 What are the real goals of our education?
Arts and arts education
could and should have a
unique role in answering all
these questions
There are several arguments for
this statement, the best is that it
supports maturation of the mind
Supporting creativeness

Two basic mechanisms/patterns of how the mind
develops during childhood:
1. Identifying with someone/something, modelling,
imitating, learning to be coherent and logical
2. Creating something new, through problem
solving, finding something unique and new,
learning to be creative
 How many experiences and possibilities do we
offer eg. in schools for promoting both ways of
learning?
Arts education and creativity
 Enough
arts education? Frequency,
continuity, diversity?
 Multimodal learning: by doing, by
experiencing, by sharing, by learning to
know, by enjoying etc
 Non-abstract ways are important for
children
Important role of the Emotions

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Important bridge between body and mind
Important role in functions of the brain and mind
(eg motivation, understanding)
Important role in human interactions
Important bond between human individuals
Important tie between individual and society (eg
values, attitudes)
Do we teach our children how to deal with
emotions?
Arts education does!
 Arts
education is also exercising selfexpression, training to notice (sensitivity,
empathy) and practising to understand
emotions (self/other-understanding)
 Arts and arts education enable
experiencing and sharing emotions (selfunderstanding, empathy)
 Arts education offers support for emotional
maturation (self-esteem)
Development of empathy
Ability to enter into someone else’s emotions
(attunement)
 Ability to step out of someone else’s feelings
 Ability to recognize what kind of emotions this
attunement evokes in oneself
 Ability to react and behave according to
attunement and own feelings


Arts and arts education facilitate the practice of
all these four steps
Conclusions
 Arts
and arts education is a very much
needed way of promoting balanced mental
development in today’s knowledge based
world
 Arts education improves social (empathy)
and interactional (emotional) skills of
individuals
 Arts education is a wonderful, enjoyable
way of preventing mental health problems
Conclusions
 The
arts are extremely important in
globalization
 The arts increase trans-, cross- and multicultural understanding
 The
arts education is a way of teaching
children to become global citizens (peace
education)
Arts education should be
the right of every child
The human mind was born with
the first cave painting. Let’s keep
our mind alive!