At TXST’s CREATE Research Lab, Hip Hop is a vehicle for reducing stress and aiding positive development

As World Mental Health Day on Oct. 10 focuses attention on mental health, one Texas State University professor is harnessing the power of Hip Hop culture (capitalized as recognized in the culture) to support students’ academic development and reduce stress, depression, and anxiety.

Raphael Travis Jr., DrPH, LCSW, professor and interim director of the School of Social Work at TXST, leads the CREATE Research Lab (Collaborative Research for Education, Art, and Therapeutic Engagement) which, in 2018, added the Sound Lab/Music Studio in Encino Hall.

Since 2018, the lab has hosted researchers, educators, community-based organizations, students, and artists to explore the mental health benefits of creating music.

“How can we promote confidence and civic engagement while building community and social emotional outcomes?” Travis said. “Art, in general, is a pathway to that positive development, and I focus on Hip Hop culture as a main vehicle. The CREATE Lab gives us the opportunity to do the research and to test out new ideas to further pursue.”

The lab prioritizes partnerships, including TXST TRIO, which is a set of 10 federal programs designed to identify and provide services for high school and college students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Several workshops and programs have been hosted through the lab for grade school, high school, and TXST students, including the Science of Hip Hop, Academic Saturdays, Mixtape Camp, and most recently the STEM-BEATS Camp in June.

Travis focuses his research on emphasizing healthy development, resilience, and civic engagement. When it comes to Hip Hop music, aside from promoting use of music technology, he examines songs from across generations to find common themes of empowerment. The genre’s sound has changed over time, Travis noted, but the concepts are often the same, and how people relate to them through their own lived experience hasn’t changed.

At the camps, Travis and his colleagues incorporate Hip Hop culture in different ways to encourage students to participate in music experiences, and then they study the impacts.

During this year’s STEM-BEATS Camp, for example, Travis and his team piloted an experiment using a haptic vest with sensors so participants can feel the music rather than just hearing it as another pathway to well-being.

“Research with haptic vests is primarily done within the deaf community so they can experience music,” Travis said. “In our camp, we had participants listen to a meaningful song with just headphones and then with just the vest so we could note the differences in feelings they experienced.”

All participants identified how it was a much better experience listening to an already meaningful song with the vest compared to headphones alone. Students also described how they could imagine using the vest to help them relax and to feel calmer when anxious.

For one of the Mixtape Camps, Travis and Ian Levy, Ed.D., assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University, aimed to integrate their own respective research models into the activities to see if, together, they would achieve positive outcomes.

During the camp, the 18 students were split into three groups to create a song. The first followed a strict structure to make a song, the second had structure but with some built-in choice of making a song or video, and the third had very limited structure and complete autonomy to create whatever they wanted.

“The assumption was that this would promote mental health for all the reasons that our models theorize, but we wanted to test some things out as well,” Travis said. “Each day of the camp, we focused on one of the dimensions of my work that we filtered all the activities through — esteem on Monday, resilience on Tuesday, and growth, community, and change throughout the rest of the week. These values of empowerment are embedded throughout the history of Hip Hop culture.”