Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Bauer, Gordon

Keywords

Mandalas, Art Therapy, State Trait Anxiety Inventory, Anxiety

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

Art therapy utilizes the making of mandalas, or circular geometric designs, along with many other creative techniques to incorporate art into therapy as a form of nonverbal expression. This study examined whether higher levels of creative freedom allowed by different mandala tasks advanced the decreases in state and trait anxiety that the participants experienced over time. 31 participants were assigned to either the free-form mandala group, which free drew inside a blank circle (most creative freedom), the predesigned mandala group, which colored in geometric patterns inside a circle (midlevel creative freedom), or or the control group, which took objective notes on images of historic religious mandalas (least creative freedom). The participants took the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) (Spielberger, Gorsuch, & Lushene, 1970) as a pretest, did their respective mandala task for twenty minutes, and finally took the State Anxiety Inventory of the STAI as a posttest. Each group met with the researcher separately and completed this procedure once a week for three weeks. One month after the third session, each group met with the researcher separately again to take the Trait Anxiety Inventory of the STAI and measure for lasting changes. The hypotheses surrounding creative freedom were not supported, but state anxiety did decrease significantly within each session from pretest to posttest for all mandala groups, as well as decreased significantly from session two to session three. All groups also experienced a significant decrease in trait anxiety from session one to two, three to four, and one to four. These effects may have occurred because of specific anxiety-reducing qualities of mandalas or increased comfort with the procedure from week to week.

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