The Effects of Dance and Music Based Interventions in the Office Space on mindfulness and Creativity

Abstract

Currently, there is an increasing interest in creativity and stress relief in the office space. This study tests the hypothesis whether dance and music can increase mindfulness and creativity. Eleven people were distributed in two groups, one in a "club" like event in a company, the treatment group, and a regular work day where they listened to classical music , the control group. The results are insignificant due to the very small sample size. Further study is advised.

Full text

The Effects of Dance and Music Based
Interventions in the Office Space on mindfulness
and Creativity
Harald De Bondt
August 19, 2020
Abstract
Currently, there is an increasing interest in creativity and stress relief
in the office space. This study tests the hypothesis whether dance and
music can increase mindfulness and creativity . Eleven People distributed
in two groups, one in a ”club” like event in a company and a regular
work day where they listened to classical music is the control group. The
results are insignificant due to the very small sample size. Further study
is advised.
1 Introduction and Related Work
According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) of Great Brittain 57.3 per
cent of work days is lost due to anxiety, depression or stress. The General secre-
tary of the Trades Union Congress Frances O’Grady said ”Work-related stress
is a growing epidemic, it’s time employers and the Government took it more
seriously.” Causes for these include bullying and low workplace morale (Health
& of Great Britain, 2018). Mindfulness is a state of intentional, nonjudgmental
focus on the present moment. It has been shown to clearly reduce anxiety and
stress within the first hour(Daily, n.d.). In an office space a lot of activities are
mental and repetitive, which can lead to disengagement. In a company daily
responsibilities are complex and under time pressure, full-filling these demands
requires a strong resilience to uncertainty. Research has shown that creativity is
positively connected with decision-making under uncertainty. We believe that
in addition to regulation of stress, nurturing creativity should be taught and
practiced to cope and thrive in the corporate environment of today. Dance and
movement therapy, a creative therapy, has been shown to increase social inter-
action (Emrath, 2016), motivation and promote healthy leadership (Driesmans,
2017) in the office space of companies. Our hypothesis is that a dance and music
intervention can improve mindfulness and increase creativity.
1

2 Method
To elaborate on our method we report the statistics of our sample population
as well as the procedure, materials and instruments used.
2.1 Sample Populations
Table 1 contains the mean and standard deviation (SD) for the age and gender
of our intervention- and control group.
Intervention Group Control Group
Age (Mean, SD) 34.8, 11.79 31.6, 5.24
Gender Two women, three men Five men, one woman
Table 1: The sample population variables
2.2 Procedure
The compnay SAP organizes monthly a dance and music ”club” like event, called
Lunch Beat. Colleagues are invited to dance together and interact leisurely for
one or two hours during work. We wanted to research the effects of this event
on the participating employees. As an initial study we participated in the third
year anniversary of the event and surveyed five individuals, before and after
the event, through questionnaires. In our control group we chose to have the
participants listen to classical music during a break for 45 minutes. This, in
order to compare an active dance and music intervention with a passive music
intervention. We surveyed the six participants before and after the session in
the same way as the intervention group.
2.3 Materials and instruments
The only experiment design choice that had to be made for the intervention
was the music for our control group. We chose a playlist ”Best of Ludovico
Einaudi” from Youtube because it is well known, to suit the taste of all partici-
pants, and relaxing. Both groups were given the same questionnaire before and
after the intervention. The content of our questionnaire had one part oriented
towards creativity (Karwowski, Lebuda, & Wisniewska, 2018), the second part
questioned mindfulness (Ruth A. Baer, 2006). The data was collected on a scale
of 1 to 5.
2.4 Statistical Analysis
In our statistical analysis we used statistical libraries within the programming
language Python, to compute the F and p value of our data.
2

Figure 1: A bar chart depicting the increase, post- minus pre-test, of mindfulness
and creativity scores
3 Results
The results include descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. The qual-
itative analysis is omitted due to the lack of relevant qualitative data. The
statistics are calculated on the difference between the post- and pre-test results
to clearly visualise the increase of any values. For completeness I included the
separate group statistics in the appendix 2.
3.1 Descriptive statistics
In the table 2 and figure 1 we can see that creativity increased for the interven-
tion group and decreased for our control group after the respective intervention.
The mindfulness levels stayed almost the same in the intervention group and
increased for the control group.
Intervention Group Control Group
Increase in mindfulness (Mean,SD) 0.02, 0.25 0.2, 0.22
Increase in creativity (Mean,SD) 0.15, 0.24 -0.09, 0.23
Table 2: Increasing, post- minus pre-test, in mean and SD of mindfulness and
creativity in the intervention and control group
3

3.2 Inferential stats
Our inferential statistics, calculated on the data described in table 2, include
F-values and p-values. For increase in creativity we we have F-value 2.27 and p
value = 0.17. The p-value is above 0.05 and therefore the results are insignif-
icant. For mindfulness we have F-value 1.35 and p value = 0.28 which is also
above 0.05. We also calculated a full ANOVA test on the original data. The
ANOVA table is shown in the appendix 3 and not further discussed due to the
statistical insignificance of both the creativity and mindfulness scores.
4 Discussion
The results have been found insignificant due to the high p-value in both cre-
ativity and stress. The insignificance might be due to the small sample size.
The data does however partially support our hypothesis, the intervention group
had higher creativity values. The lowered creative values in the control group,
albeit marginal, might be because the relaxing music induced a more passive
state which does not foster immediate creative action. The higher mindfulness
values of the control group could be explained by the fact they had spend 45
minutes just listening by themselves, which allows an individual to become more
aware of his/her own experience, opposed to participating in a social event with
a lot of external stimuli.
In both cases we only measured the effect after a single intervention which
makes the data limited in it’s empirical reliability. We recommend to do future
studies on this event as it occurs every month and offers a good opportunity to
study long term effects of dance and music in an office space. Both creativity
and mindfulness are measured through self reflection of the participant, which
is limited in it’s validity. A more valid approach would be to measure how the
creativity and mindfulness gained after the session effects the daily life activities.
When working with a big company like SAP, evidently, there are a lot more
parties involved. Which makes the organization of the experiment more com-
plex and therefor requires adequate planning. Concretely, in our experiment we
assumed people would be open to the idea of filling out a short questionnaire
before and after the session, however people were not serious about it, resulting
in less reliable data. Also, this event is still not really dance and movement
therapy. In order to effectively target mindfulness and creativity, a generic se-
ries of session will not suffice. Every company has their own needs, culture and
history. If this information is integrated in the interventions’ design process,
the sessions are likely to be more effective.
4

5 General Conclusion
Previous research and our results illustrate that employees clearly benefit from
a break during work hours. The exact design and how each component ef-
fects the participants still needs further study. One contemporary question I
find particularly relevant to pursue is how dance, movement and music therapy
based interventions can differentiate themselves from the many other supportive
activities for employees such as team-buildings and workshops.
Loosening the thoughts
I solved a problem through dancing
It was close, eminent, not far
Now it’s gone
Test test
Harald De Bondt 2017
References
Daily, S. (n.d.). Even a single mindfulness meditation ses-
sion can reduce anxiety: People with anxiety show re-
duced stress on the arteries after 1-hour introductory session.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180423135048.htm. (Ac-
cessed: 2019-09-03)
Driesmans, A. (2017). Dans- en bewegingstherapie toepassen bij organ-
isatorische veranderingen binnen bedrijven.
Emrath, J. (2016). Wirkung und akzeptanz eines tanz- und bewegungsthera-
peutischen angebots zur f¨orderung von wohlbefinden am arbeitsplatz: eine
explorative studie.
Health, & of Great Britain, S. E. (2018). Health and safety at work.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overall/hssh1718.pdf/.
Karwowski, M., Lebuda, I., & Wisniewska, E. (2018, 05). Measuring creative
self-efficacy and creative personal identity. The Journal of Creativity and
Problem Solving,28 , 45-57.
Ruth A. Baer, J. H. J. K. L. T., Gregory T. Smith. (2006). Using selfreport
assessment methods to explore facets of mindfulness.
6 Appendix
5

Questionnaire - Creativity & Mindfulness
Name Initials (3 if possible)___________ Date __________ Age _______ Gender_________
This questionnaire is to be filled out before the interventions start, and after each
subsequent intervention. We ask that you wait to fill out the questionnaire until a few
hours after each intervention is performed. !
Dieser Fragebogen ist vor Beginn der Interventionen und nach jeder weiteren Intervention
auszufüllen. Wir bitten Sie, den Fragebogen erst einige Stunden nach jeder Intervention
auszufüllen.
Below you will find several sentences used by people to describe
themselves. Please decide to what extent each of these statements describes
you. There are no right or wrong answers. !
Nachfolgend finden Sie einige Sätze, mit denen sich Menschen beschreiben.
Bitte entscheiden Sie, inwieweit jede dieser Aussagen Sie beschreibt. Es gibt
keine richtigen oder falschen Antworten.!
!
Please circle one number on the right that corresponds to the answers below:!
Bitte kreisen Sie eine Zahl rechts ein, die den Antworten unten entspricht
1 = Definitely Not 2 = Somewhat Not 3 = Neither Yes or No 4 = Somewhat Yes 5 = Definitely Yes!
1 = Definitiv nicht 2 = Etwas nicht 3 = Weder Ja noch Nein 4 = Etwas Ja 5 = Definitiv Ja!
!
1 - I think I am a creative person!
1 - Ich denke, ich bin eine kreative Person
2 - My creativity is important for who I am!
2 -Meine Kreativität ist wichtig für mich
3 - I know I can efficiently solve even complicated problems!
3 - Ich weiß, dass ich auch komplizierte Probleme effizient lösen kann
4 - I trust my creative abilities!
4 - Ich vertraue meinen kreativen Fähigkeiten
5 - My imagination and ingenuity distinguishes me from my friends!
5 - Meine Vorstellungskraft und mein Einfallsreichtum unterscheiden mich von
meinen Freunden
6 - Many times I have proved that I can cope with difficult situations!
6 - Ich habe oft bewiesen, dass ich mit schwierigen Situationen umgehen kann
7 - Being a creative person is important to me!
7 - Eine kreative Person zu sein, ist mir wichtig
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5!

Questionnaire - Creativity & Mindfulness
8 - I am sure I can deal with problems requiring creative thinking!
8 - Ich bin mir sicher, dass ich Probleme bewältigen kann, die kreatives Denken
erfordern
9 - I am good at proposing original solutions to problems!
9 - Ich bin gut darin, originelle Lösungen für Probleme vorzuschlage
10 - Creativity is an important part of myself!
10 - Kreativität ist ein wichtiger Teil von mir
11 - Ingenuity is a characteristic that is important to me!
11 - Einfallsreichtum ist eine Eigenschaft, die mir wichtig ist!
!
Please circle one number on the right that corresponds to the answers below:!
Bitte kreisen Sie eine Zahl rechts ein, die den Antworten unten entspricht:!
!
1 = Never 2 = Almost Never 3 = Sometimes 4 = Fairly Often 5 = Frequently!
1 = Niemals 2 = Fast Niemals 3 = Manchmal 4 = Ziemlich Oft 5 = Häufig
12 - When I’m walking, I deliberately notice the sensations of my body
moving.!
12 - Beim Gehen bemerke ich absichtlich, wie sich mein Körper bewegt.
13 - I’m good at finding words to describe my feelings.!
13 - Ich kann gut Worte finden, um meine Gefühle zu beschreiben.
14 - I criticize myself for having irrational or inappropriate emotions. !
14 - Ich kritisiere mich für irrationale oder unangemessene Gefühle.
15 - I perceive my feelings and emotions without having to react to them.!
15 - Ich nehme meine Gefühle und Emotionen wahr, ohne darauf reagieren zu
müssen.
16 - When I do things, my mind wanders off and I’m easily distracted. !
16 - Wenn ich Dinge tue, schweift mein Verstand ab und ich bin leicht
abgelenkt.
17 - When I take a shower or bath, I stay alert to the sensations of water on
my body.!
17 - Wenn ich dusche oder bade, ist mir das Gefühl von Wasser in meinem
Körper bewusst.
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 !
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Questionnaire - Creativity & Mindfulness
18 - I can easily put my beliefs, opinions, and expectations into words. !
18 - Ich kann meine Überzeugungen, Meinungen und Erwartungen leicht in
Worte fassen.
19 - I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing because I’m daydreaming,
worrying, or otherwise distracted.!
19 - Ich achte nicht darauf, was ich tue, weil ich träume, mich Sorgen mache
oder auf andere Weise abgelenkt bin.
20 - I watch my feelings without getting lost in them. !
20 - Ich beobachte meine Gefühle, ohne mich in ihnen zu verlieren.
21 - I tell myself I shouldn’t be feeling the way I’m feeling.!
21 - Ich sage mir, ich sollte mich nicht so fühlen, wie ich mich fühle.
!
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
!
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
!
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Figure 2: A table showing the statistics for each group of our sample population.
Figure 3: A table showing the results of the ANOVA test on our sample popu-
lation.
9