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Art is intrinsically connected to human emotions, serving as a powerful medium for both creation and consumption worldwide. The ability of art to evoke emotions is evident in various artworks, ranging from Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” to Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.” Emotions, vital for survival and decision-making, influence physiological and behavioral patterns across diverse contexts. Evolutionary models suggest a set of basic emotions supporting specialized survival functions.
While emotions are traditionally linked to survival challenges, art can elicit intense emotions even in the absence of such threats. The origins of emotions evoked by art are currently debated, with some proposing a connection to bodily changes resulting from viewing art. Human bodies, depicted in visual art, play a central role, triggering bodily sensations that contribute to emotional experiences.
Somatosensation and interoception, crucial for emotional processes, form a categorical and culturally universal basis for distinct emotions. The aesthetic evaluation of art is associated with the activation of brain regions involved in interoceptive processing, suggesting a connection between aesthetic experiences and subjective bodily feelings.
The study explores embodied emotions evoked by art, particularly in artworks containing human figures. The subjective feeling space of art-evoked emotions and the corresponding bodily fingerprints are mapped. The research investigates the relationship between emotions, bodily feelings, and preferences for art pieces, considering the mixed and ambiguous emotions often evoked by art.
Using a diverse set of visual art pieces, the study analyzes the association between the presence of humans in artworks, emotions, bodily sensations, and subjective preferences. Interest annotations and eye movements are recorded, providing insights into the emotional and aesthetic aspects of art appreciation. Statistical analyses are conducted using Matlab R2020b and R statistical software.
Experiencing visual art generates diverse emotional responses categorized into five main clusters: aesthetic dimensions, positive and negative emotions, touching feelings, and surprise/effort. These emotions significantly influence individual preferences and perceptions of art. Bodily sensations associated with empathy, anger, fear, and elegance are widespread, while liking, beauty, amazement, and effort are primarily felt in the head. Manual interest annotations and eye-gaze maps confirm that human faces and bodies consistently captivate viewers as the most interesting features in paintings.
The emotional responses triggered by art appear consistent among observers, with aesthetic emotions like appreciation for art, balance, beauty, and elegance being most prominent. Positive emotions such as liking, empathy, and joy followed, while negative emotions were rare despite artworks containing themes of death and grief. Sadness was consistently associated with being moved by artworks, suggesting a complex emotional experience. The study found a mixture of positive and negative emotions during aesthetic encounters, challenging simplistic models of emotional response. Beauty and touching significantly influenced the liking of art pieces, while negative emotions were negatively linked to art appreciation. Interestingly, elegance was an exception, being negatively associated with liking, indicating a preference for more natural and complex artworks. The study suggests that negative emotions may not necessarily enhance art enjoyment, and effort in understanding art may reduce its appeal. The layperson’s concept of art is linked to specific evaluative dimensions, emphasizing the importance of beauty, balance, and emotional relatability. The findings call for further exploration of affective-evaluative patterns across different art forms and their predictive power in determining viewer interest and engagement. However, the results may be influenced by the intercorrelation of independent variables, highlighting the need for cautious interpretation.
The study found that emotions triggered by art are accompanied by bodily sensations, suggesting that art perception involves interoceptive processes. In contrast to survival-salient episodes in movies, where bodily feelings are categorical and discrete, aesthetic emotions in art reveal a continuum from whole-body experiences to more head-centric experiences of beauty, amazement, and effort, possibly tied to cognitive processing. While self-report techniques may not reveal underlying brain activation patterns, bodily signatures of aesthetic emotions align with the unspecific patterns observed in brain activation. Unlike biologically salient events, decoding music-evoked aesthetic emotions doesn’t extend beyond sensory and motor cortices. Art-evoked emotions may engage low-level pleasure/displeasure and arousal dimensions, even if the subjective experience is vivid and complex. Unlike photographs or videos, art pieces like paintings may fail a “reality check,” influencing the less discrete bodily responses to art compared to more naturalistic stimuli. The strength of art-evoked bodily sensations correlates with the strength of subjective emotional feelings, particularly for touching, empathy, and moving, while amazement and effort show a negative correlation. These bodily sensations may be integral to the subjective evaluation of art, potentially influencing affective and semantic judgments, although the study design doesn’t separate these contributions. Affect and cognition likely interact at various levels, contributing to the resulting phenomenological and bodily feeling states during art perception.
The study emphasizes the significance of other individuals as a crucial aspect of our environment, with the human brain being finely attuned to process social information automatically. Human faces, being a central focus, consistently captured attention in visual arts. Interest annotations indicated a preference for faces, aligning with eye-tracking research on photographs and artworks. Despite the complex visual structure of the artworks, annotations displayed consistency. Pupil dilation correlated positively with negative emotions evoked by paintings, revealing emotional arousal. Aesthetic experiences were linked to longer fixations, indicating heightened attentional engagement. Saccade durations varied, especially between portrait and landscape paintings, suggesting differences in focal versus ambient processing. Limitations included a lack of control over subjects’ familiarity with artworks and a reliance on self-reported emotions rather than psychophysiological recordings. The study acknowledges challenges in mapping reported aesthetic experiences to physiological or neural emotional states. Additionally, the use of digitized images on a computer screen may limit the generalizability of findings to real paintings. The study suggests potential future investigations into gaze patterns with actual paintings considering perceptual differences.
Encountering visual arts involves deeply embodied aesthetic and emotional experiences, extending beyond basic emotions, with the intensity of these feelings often tied to the bodily sensations evoked by the art pieces. The appeal of visual arts may derive from their ability to engage the viewer’s body in a manner reminiscent of the physical responses associated with survival-related emotions.
Source:
Lauri Nummenmaa & Riitta Hari (2023) Bodily feelings and aesthetic experience of art, Cognition and Emotion, 37:3, 515-528, DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2023.2183180