Page 138 - ART FORM AND MENTAL HEALTH - Ingrid Pénzes

operationalize these formal elements of art products. In art therapy literature, we recognized a number of art therapy assessment instruments that operationalized formal elements. These instruments were seriously criticized regarding their reliability and validity. Therefore, we wanted to clinically define relevant formal elements that could be reliably operationalized and analyzed and to test their relationship with mental health in Chapter 5. For this, we went back to basics – the art theories that originally developed the ‘formal analysis’ of art products that analyzed the formal elements instead of symbolic content. These formal elements were operationalized on five-point Likert scales and tested for inter- rater reliability based on 137 art products from 80 clients. The inter-rater reliability varied between moderate and substantial for all items except ‘texture’, which had poor inter-rater reliability.
We compared these reliable formal elements with the formal elements that wereconceptualizedas‘primary’formalelementsbasedonthearttherapists inclinicalpracticeandfoundsimilaritiesin‘movement’,‘dynamic’and‘contour’.
According to the art therapists in Chapter 4, the combination of these formal elements mainly construed the ‘structure’ and ‘variation’ of the art product. Therefore, we tested their interrelatedness. These formal elements appeared to be interrelated in line with the combinations found in Chapter 4, i.e. the presence of ‘contour’ in combination with the absence of ‘movement’ and ‘dynamic’ resulted in high structure, and the presence of ‘movement’ and ‘dynamic’ in combination with the absence of ‘contour’ resulted in low structure.
In Chapter 4, art therapists found that very high and low structured – very organized or very chaotic – art products had less variation and that structure and variation indicated ‘imbalance’ and ‘adaptability’. This would indicate that clients that made very high or low structured art products were more imbalanced and less adaptive. Therefore, we tested whether the scores of the combination of these formal elements were related to scores on psychological complaints, resiliency and experiential acceptance. Findings showed that even though ‘dynamic’ and ‘movement’ significantly related to psychological complaints, the combination of ‘movement’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘contour’ was not significant. The combination of the formal elements ‘movement, ‘dynamic’ and ‘contour’ significantly related to clients’ resiliency and experiential acceptance with the strongest relationship being with experiential acceptance. Based on these results the formal elements ‘movement’ and ‘dynamic’ indicated adult mental health more
136 | Chapter 6