Art has a powerful effect on people’s bodies and emotions: Study

There is no doubt that emotion and art are inextricably linked, whether it is the viewer’s experience or the artist’s objects. Yet little has been revealed about how art-evoked emotions arise from subjectively felt bodily changes as a result of viewing art.

Human appreciation of visual art may stem from art’s ability to engage the viewer’s body in a way that resembles bodily signatures of survival-related emotions, a Finnish study suggests.

Emotional salience is a relevance cue used by our memory system to prioritize information that we remember more effectively than neutral information.

The aesthetic emotional experiences associated with encountering visual art “are highly embodied, and that visual arts can evoke a wide range of emotional feelings that go well beyond canonical ‘basic’ emotions. The strength of these emotions is generally related to the strength of the bodily sensations that the works of art evoke,” according to Lauri Numenmaaa professor who heads the Human Emotional Systems Laboratory at the Turku PET Center, a Finnish national research institute for the use of short-lived positron-emitting isotopes in medical research, and Riita Harineuroscientist, physician and professor emeritus at Aalto University, a new multidisciplinary science and art community exploring science, business, art and design.

Scientists are seeking to better characterize the mechanisms underlying art-induced feelings. Using a large database of visual artworks, Nummenmaa and Hari conducted four experiments trying to show how embodiment contributes to the emotions evoked by artworks. By mapping the subjective feeling of emotions evoked by the art, they quantified the “bodily fingerprints” of the emotions and recorded annotations of the subjects’ interests and eye movements while viewing the art.

“We show that art evokes a wide range of feelings and that the bodily fingerprints evoked by art are central to those feelings, particularly in artworks where human figures are prominent.” Overall, these results support the model that bodily sensations are central to aesthetic experience,” Numenmaa and Harry wrote in a research paper titled “Bodily Sensations and the Aesthetic Experience of Art.”

The study involved 134 women and 172 men, with an average age of 26.35, who viewed pictures on a computer or tablet screen one at a time and were asked to color the most “interesting” areas of the picture. The term “interesting” was not defined and subjects were asked to act on their gut and intuition. The image batch was split in half and each subject annotated 30 pictures, therefore each picture was annotated by 153 subjects.

“The emotional experiences evoked by the art were consistent among observers. Aesthetic emotions (art, balance, beauty, and elegance) are most prominent, followed by positive emotions (liking, empathy, and joy) and empathy. Feelings related to surprise and effort were moderately common,” Nummenmaa and Hari wrote. “Negative emotions were rare despite numerous paintings containing unpleasant themes such as death and grief. Some negative emotions are usually experienced with the aesthetic, non-core emotions. Sadness is consistently associated with the experience of being touched and moved by artwork, although these emotions are also consistently associated with joy.