Can Expressive Arts Serve as an Appropriate Intervention to Improve Wellbeing from Childhood to Adulthood?

Economics of Wellbeing

This work evaluates whether expressive arts function as an effective early-life intervention for improving wellbeing across the lifespan through a structured review of interdisciplinary literature. Drawing on the life course model, the analysis assesses evidence across three distal domains of child development: emotional health, behavior, and intellectual performance, using findings from empirical studies, policy reports, and neuroscience research. Results indicate strong short-term benefits for emotional regulation, social behavior, and cognitive development, while highlighting persistent gaps in longitudinal evidence, statistical rigor, and scalable policy implementation.