Chinese music therapy to treat depression in children and adolescents: The BARIT-Model

Depression is broadly considered a global epidemic. In China it ranks among the most prevalent mental disorders and is seriously affecting the younger generation (prevalence between 4% and 41%), hence the necessity to foster health education and sustainable resilience. Meta-synthetic construction resulted in a music-based model of educational therapy comprising five principles, beauty, activation, responsiveness, immersion and transformation, hence the name ‘BARIT-model’: (i) referring to anthropological, psychological and neuroscientific aesthetics, the approach benefits from the healing power of aesthetic experience, (ii) behavioural activation is widely regarded as an efficient approach to treat depression. Different from conventional cognitive behavioural therapy, the BARIT-model involves artistic activities such as music improvisation, sound scene improvisation, vocal experiments or creative variations of Chinese martial arts, (iii) responsiveness concerns the qualitative similarity of emotion and music, alongside the patients’ feeling of being ‘understood’ by what they are listening to, (iv) while depressive mood tends to occupy the whole person, music immersion can help to escape that ‘pathological cage’, (v) finally, traumatic roots of depression need therapeutic processing, such as artistic symbolisation, intermodal transformation and relabelling of traumata as potential source of creative performance. The BARIT-model is part of a comprehensive project to improve mental health in Chinese children and adolescents through arts-based methods for classroom education, which encompasses ‒ in addition to depression ‒ attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, oppositional defiant disorders, anxiety disorders, stress-related disorders and burnout syndromes, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa or binge eating, as well as disorders related to the COVID-19 pandemic, e.g. developmental syndromes caused by lockdown and social distancing.

Pengembangan Model Layanan Pendidikan Creative Art Play Therapy bagi Anak Berkebutuhan Khusus

This study aims to design a model of creative art play therapy education services to overcome various basic problems in providing friendly services for children with special needs (ABK) at Azura Sejati Inklusif PAUD Lhokseumawe. This study uses the Research and Development Borg and Gall method. The subjects in this study were teachers at the Azura Sejati Inklusif PAUD Lhokseumawe. The data used are qualitative and quantitative data, with data collection techniques through observation, interviews, documentation, questionnaires, and Focus Group Discussions (FGD). The data analysis technique used descriptive statistical analysis and inferential statistics. The results showed that the creative art play therapy educational service model was effectively used to provide friendly services for children with special needs (ABK) in dealing with social problems and self-control. All creative art play processes (1) creative visualization can stimulate children's understanding and thought processes; (2) storytelling activities can develop moral and spiritual; (3) drama can improve social relations, hand puppets and masks have been used to protect themselves; (4) art to develop creativity and aesthetic experience; (5) music to communicate; (6) dance and movement to develop physical motor skills.

What Happens in Your Brain When You Walk Down the Street? Implications of Architectural Proportions, Biophilia, and Fractal Geometry for Urban Science

This article reviews current research in visual urban perception. The temporal sequence of the first few milliseconds of visual stimulus processing sheds light on the historically ambiguous topic of aesthetic experience. Automatic fractal processing triggers initial attraction/avoidance evaluations of an environment’s salubriousness, and its potentially positive or negative impacts upon an individual. As repeated cycles of visual perception occur, the attractiveness of urban form affects the user experience much more than had been previously suspected. These perceptual mechanisms promote walkability and intuitive navigation, and so they support the urban and civic interactions for which we establish communities and cities in the first place. Therefore, the use of multiple fractals needs to reintegrate with biophilic and traditional architecture in urban design for their proven positive effects on health and well-being. Such benefits include striking reductions in observers’ stress and mental fatigue. Due to their costs to individual well-being, urban performance, environmental quality, and climatic adaptation, this paper recommends that nontraditional styles should be hereafter applied judiciously to the built environment.

On the Neuronal Dynamics of Aesthetic Experience: Evidence from Electroencephalographic Oscillatory Dynamics

Aesthetic experiences have an influence on many aspects of life. Interest in the neural basis of aesthetic experiences has grown rapidly in the past decade, and fMRI studies have identified several brain systems supporting aesthetic experiences. Work on the rapid neuronal dynamics of aesthetic experience, however, is relatively scarce. This study adds to this field by investigating the experience of being aesthetically moved by means of ERP and time–frequency analysis. Participants' electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded while they viewed a diverse set of artworks and evaluated the extent to which these artworks moved them. Results show that being aesthetically moved is associated with a sustained increase in gamma activity over centroparietal regions. In addition, alpha power over right frontocentral regions was reduced in high- and low-moving images, compared to artworks given intermediate ratings. We interpret the gamma effect as an indication for sustained savoring processes for aesthetically moving artworks compared to aesthetically less-moving artworks. The alpha effect is interpreted as an indication of increased attention for aesthetically salient images. In contrast to previous works, we observed no significant effects in any of the established ERP components, but we did observe effects at latencies longer than 1 sec. We conclude that EEG time–frequency analysis provides useful information on the neuronal dynamics of aesthetic experience.

Sensing the Poetic Habitat – A Study of Middle School Chinese Teaching from the Perspectives of Life Aesthetics

The concept of life aesthetics reflects an individual’s cry for life and pursuit of beauty, inspiring individuals to discover their spiritual home, sense their poetic habitat, and enjoy the beauty of life flowing from their fingertips. Chinese education, viewed through the lens of life aesthetics, is founded on the natural characteristics of life, stimulating the aesthetic sense of individual life through the allure of language, and teaching students to view life through the aesthetic lens as well as from an understanding of life’s essence. Teachers and students are required to take an aesthetic view of life as theoretical guidance, based on core Chinese literacy, with textbook contents serving as carriers and classroom instruction as the position, closely connected to students’ actual lives, in order to help stimulate aesthetic experience among students, improve their aesthetic ability through aesthetic activities, and thus establish a correct view of life.

Diderot, Reid e l’esperienza percettiva. Compensazioni sinestetiche, linguistiche ed estetiche

Sensible qualities, not presumed abstract or pure aesthetic properties, are the main source for the Diderot’s and Reid’s aesthetic theories. Both authors work on the perceptual activity in normal situations and in blind people’s cognitive experience.This essay is aimed at emphasizing both the connections between perceptual activity and aesthetic experience and the role of aesthetic devices in the cognitive life. In Diderot sensible qualities are connected to emotions; in Reid they are the natural signs of emotions and mental properties. This kind of relationship is the key to interpreting how cognitive activity is configured as an aesthetic experience because of the sensible qualities’ role.

The Existential Relevance of Art for Human Life

What is the relevance of art for human life? This question can be answered if life is understood from life-performance and art from artworks. From this perspective, the human being – understood as a being in a self-researching process – and the work of art – conceived as an experience-figure – show a structural correspondence: a constitutive unfathomability. Both, human being and art, can only be adequately understood as open processes of their respective self- realization. Because of this correlation and, at the same time, considering their fundamental difference, the aesthetic experience enables the human being to objectify the process of self-research. Thus, the existential relevance of art to life becomes concrete in that the aesthetic experience that makes the artwork the unique unfathomability that it is, reveals itself as an excellent path to the process of self-research, which makes human beings the unique unfathomability that he or she is.

Memorial Urban Art as an Aesthetic Experience in the City - An Aesthetical Reading of War Murals in Tehran’s Urban Landscape

In the city of Tehran, a series of war-themed murals, often focused on strengthening the audience’s historical memory, stand out among all types of urban art. These works of art, which are generated by the government’s order and created by different state institutions, all carry political and ideological dimensions. They are considered a source of environmental qualitative assessment and recognised as a kind of ‘urban aestheticisation’; in other words, it is a process leading to the production of value according to the ‘John Dewey’ theory. Knowing that the war artworks contain a major political dimension and are mainly created by the order of the ruling governments to ‘strengthen the audience’s historical memory’, an added quality is inevitably integrated, which in the aesthetic domain is commonly known as kitsch: taking advantage of people’s standard associations and confirming them by employing proven stereotypes and clichés, as Ortlieb and Carbon (2019b) wrote. The urban landscape as an exhibition platform is therefore important as it is the context of social events and daily life that affects the audience’s perception. John Dewey defines this perception as an aesthetic experience which takes place in the field of empirical aesthetics and begins by explaining why specific objects give pleasure or displeasure. These explanations will later be integrated into a set of principles which, in turn, will join a global system of analysis, such as Fechner’s aesthetic valuations. The aesthetic experience of war urban artworks is analysed from the observation that in the creation of these works in Tehran, the government, as the sponsor, focuses on the use of the aesthetic qualities of the kitsch. The article then presents the reading of this aesthetic experience through the analysis of a selection of works, based on evaluation criteria and indicators. The interpretation of this experience is to discover the ‘quiddity’ of the evolutions which have occurred in these works from the beginning of the war until today. The following statement highlights one of the most notable results of the research: the weakening of the art position, from a promotional state that improves the urban landscape quality, into a way of showing government’s positioning concerning the paradigms of the country.

Audiodescription des arts plastiques. Autoportrait de Dora Maar

The article addresses the problem of intersemiotic translation: translating images into words. The first part deals with the issue of image hermeneutics. Following this, eye tracking research is briefly described and museum audio description for the blind and visually impaired is introduced. A case study of Self-portrait of Dora Maar is carried out, highlighting the importance of sight in the artist’s work. The text tries to answer the following questions: Who and using which techniques and strategies should translate images into words for recipients with visual disabilities, so that the translation is satisfactory and adapted to their perception? How to provide a visually impaired person with an aesthetic experience without imposing our own perception of the image on them?