Artistic expression is arguably an essential aspect of the human communicative experience. Alongside spoken and written language, body language, and gesture, art allows us to transmit complex ideas, especially when the reach of language seems to fall short.
Though there is debate about the exact timeline, some of the first known visual artistic representations made by humans date back to tens of thousands of years before our common era. Each phase of human existence has ushered in a new frontier of artistic style with advancements in technique and medium. Today, the art market is worth billions of dollars, and we protect some of the most highly-regarded pieces of visual art in heavily guarded museums.
The multi-faceted value of art for culture and communication is obvious, but what is the emotional experience of art actually like? What’s going on when we are nearly brought to tears by oil on canvas or feel the pang of nostalgia as we flip through a graphic novel?
A highly-dimensional emotional experience
New research by University of Amsterdam professor Eftychia Stamkou and colleagues shows that aesthetic experiences span a highly-dimensional collection of various feeling states.
Preexisting empirical ideas regarding the emotional experience of art suggest that visual renderings evoke a relatively small and narrow assortment of feelings, mostly related to pleasure and preference. In contrast, this new line of studies shows that people conceptualize the experience of viewing visual art in nuanced terms, often blending emotions and perceptions across various dimensions.
The research team used an assortment of more than 1400 pieces of visual art from the Google Arts & Culture digital corpus, spanning diverse artistic eras and styles. Participants in the studies viewed different subsets of these artworks and shared how the pieces made them feel and how they would describe each one. They also rated how much they liked each piece.
Among many findings, analyses of participants’ responses revealed that there were at least 25 distinct dimensions of emotion that were used to differentiate among the various pieces of art. For example, aesthetic experiences could include common everyday emotions like happiness or sadness in conjunction with profound feelings like awe and imaginative qualities such as mysterious or psychedelic.
The results from this work show that these aesthetic experiences often involve overlapping emotional attributes, suggesting that the feelings evoked by visual art exist along gradients. This idea challenges preexisting empirical models that reduce aesthetic experiences to fewer or limited dimensions. Further, the findings suggest that visual art elicits a broad range of profound and imaginative experiences beyond simple pleasure or enjoyment.
Art can profoundly move us beyond the garden-variety emotions of our everyday lives. We can find artwork almost everywhere but we may sometimes overlook the emotional value that drives people to create and preserve their creative expressions. Perhaps this new research can shape the way we interact with visual art such that we take closer note of the intrinsic emotional nuance of our aesthetic experiences.