This month Professor Pat Thomson, CLA’s Senior Evidence Associate, reports on a valuable art-focused UK study on the impact of arts and cultural engagement on adolescent mental health. It has important findings about the benefits of the arts as regular, ordinary and sustained provision distinct from targeted interventions, and about the power of making. There is also an interesting gender-specific finding which suggests the need for further investigation.
Hugh-Jones, S and Munford, L (2025) The effects of engagement in arts and cultural activities on adolescent mental health: Results from a large UK panel study Social Science & Medicine 385, 118343
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118343
Sam Hugh-Jones and Luke Munford, both health economists, set out to find whether regular engagement with arts and cultural activities improves mental health in adolescents aged 11–15, and if so, what kinds of engagement matter most.
They knew that studies had already suggested a positive link between arts and young people’s mental health, but most of that research had methodological weaknesses. The main problem is what is called reverse causation: young people with better mental health may be more likely to engage with arts in the first place, which makes it hard to tell whether arts is causing the improvement or simply reflecting it. Most studies were also focused on short intervention programmes for ‘at-risk’ groups, rather than everyday arts engagement across the whole population. Hugh-Jones and Munford wanted to address both problems.
The data
The researchers used the UK Household Longitudinal Study (‘Understanding Society’), a large nationally representative panel survey that tracks the same people over time. The youth questionnaire covers 10–15-year-olds and includes questions about free-time activities, along with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), a well-established mental health measure. The SDQ captures overall difficulties, internalising symptoms (anxiety, depression, withdrawal), and externalising symptoms (aggression, delinquent behaviour). The study used data from 2009 to 2020, giving nearly 10,000 observations across almost 7,000 young people. Data from March 2020 onwards was excluded because the pandemic directly restricted arts participation and also damaged adolescent mental health.
The research has two important caveats:
- What counts as arts engagement
The survey’s arts questions are limited, which the authors acknowledge. Active engagement in this study means painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, or using a computer to create original artworks. Passive engagement means going to the theatre, a library, a museum or gallery, or a historic site. Music, dance, and drama are not captured at all. This is a significant constraint, and it shapes what the results can and cannot tell us. - The causation problem
Because the same young people were tracked across multiple survey waves, the researchers could use statistical methods that control for stable individual characteristics, such as personality traits, family background, and so on, that might drive both arts engagement and mental health independently. They also used what are technically known as lagged variables: arts engagement from one survey wave predicts mental health outcomes in a later wave. This helps rule out reverse causation. Their model combined both approaches. The result is more rigorous than a standard correlation study, and the authors are careful about the language of causation.
What the results show
The clearest finding is that more frequent arts engagement is associated with fewer externalising mental health symptoms (less aggression, delinquent behaviour). This is a modest effect, but it is consistent across the different statistical models the authors tested, which gives it credibility. There were also suggestions of improvement in overall difficulties and life satisfaction, though these were less consistent.
Internalising symptoms (anxiety, depression, withdrawal) did not show the same improvement. More active arts engagement was associated with slightly worse internalising symptoms, particularly for girls. The authors suggest this may reflect the specific activities captured in the data: painting and computer art are solitary, indoor activities. Arts activities involving movement, social connection, or performance tend to show stronger mental health benefits in other research, and this dataset does not measure them.
However, the difference between active and passive engagement matters. Active engagement means making or creating something, in this dataset, painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, or using a computer to produce original artwork. You are the one generating the art. Passive engagement means consuming or experiencing art made by others e.g., going to the theatre, a library, a museum or gallery, or a historic site. You are the audience or visitor. Active engagement showed stronger and more consistent benefits for externalising symptoms and life satisfaction than passive engagement.
Girls engaged with arts more than boys across all measures in this sample, and they also showed stronger mental health benefits from that engagement. The effect for boys was smaller and not statistically significant. The authors think this reflects a differential response to arts rather than a difference in the type of engagement, since boys and girls in the sample did not differ much in their mix of active versus passive activity.
Frequency matters
One of the clearer implications of the study concerns ‘dose’. Almost none of the young people in the sample never engaged in arts or culture at all (only about 4%) so the study could not say much about the difference between zero engagement and any engagement. It could show that more frequent engagement produces better outcomes. The implication is that occasional arts participation is probably not enough; regularity and sustained involvement appear to drive the mental health benefit.
What this means for arts educators
The study’s most direct message is that everyday arts engagement, built into the normal rhythms of young people’s lives, has measurable mental health effects. This is different from an intensive intervention for struggling young people: the case here is for arts as part of ordinary provision for everyone. Active making, rather than visiting cultural institutions, shows the stronger effect, though the study’s active category is narrowly defined and probably underestimates the benefits of music, drama, and dance. Girls appear to gain more, though the authors are clear this needs further investigation.
The study thus suggests that the policy question is not simply whether arts happens in schools, but how often, and whether it is sustained across a young person’s secondary years.
