"Art therapy, as well as other arts-based therapies and interventions, is used to
reduce pain, stress, depression, breathlessness and other symptoms in a wide
variety of serious and chronic diseases, such as cancer, Alzheimer and
schizophrenia. Arts-based approaches are also known to contribute to one’s
well-being and quality of life. However, much research is required, since the
mechanisms by which these non-pharmacological treatments exert their therapeutic
and psychosocial effects are not adequately understood. A typical clinical setting
utilizing the arts consists of the creation work itself, such as the artwork, as well
as the therapist and the patient, all of which constitute a rich and dynamic
environment of occurrences. The underlying complex, simultaneous and interwoven
processes of this setting are often considered intractable to human observers, and
as a consequence are usually interpreted subjectively and described verbally, which
affect their subsequent analyses and understanding. We introduce a computational
research method for elucidating and analyzing emergent expressive and social
behaviors, aiming to understand how arts-based approaches operate. Our
methodology, which centers on the visual language of Statecharts and tools for its
ution, enables rigorous qualitative and quantitative tracking, analysis and
documentation of the underlying creation and interaction processes. Also, it enables
one to carry out exploratory, hypotheses-generating and knowledge discovery
investigations, which are empirical-based. Furthermore, we illustrate our
method’s use in a proof-ofprinciple study, applying it to a real-world artwork
investigation with human participants. We explore individual and collective
emergent behaviors impacted by diverse drawing tasks, yielding significant gender
and age hypotheses, which may account for variation factors in response to art
use. We also discuss how to gear our research method to systematic and
mechanistic investigations, as we wish to provide a broad empirical evidence for
the uptake of arts-based approaches, also aiming to ameliorate their use in
clinical settings."
