There’s no doubt that emotion and art are intrinsically linked, whether it’s the viewer’s experience or the artist’s subjects. Yet little has been revealed about how art-evoked emotions stem from the subjectively felt bodily changes resulting from viewing art.
Human appreciation for visual art may stem from art’s capability to engage the viewer’s body in a manner resembling the bodily signatures of survival-salient emotions, a Finnish study suggests.
Emotional salience is a relevance cue used by our memory system to prioritize information, which we remember more effectively than neutral information.
The aesthetic emotional experiences associated with encountering visual art “are strongly embodied and that visual arts can elicit a broad range of emotional feelings that go significantly beyond the canonical ‘basic’ emotions. The strength of these emotions is, in general, linked with the strength of bodily sensations the art pieces evoke,” according to Lauri Nummenmaa, a professor who leads the Human Emotion Systems laboratory at Turku PET Centre, a Finnish National Research Institute for the use of short-lived positron emitting isotopes in the field of medical research, and Riitta Hari, a neuroscientist, physician, and professor emerita at Aalto University, a new multidisciplinary science and art community exploring science, business, and art and design.
The scholars sought to better characterize the mechanisms underlying art-evoked feelings. Using a large database of visual artworks, Nummenmaa and Hari conducted four experiments, seeking to demonstrate how embodiment contributes to emotions evoked by the artworks. Mapping the subjective feeling space of art-evoked emotions, they quantified “bodily fingerprints” of the emotions and recorded the subjects’ interest annotations and eye movements while viewing the art.
“We show that art evokes a wide spectrum of feelings, and that the bodily fingerprints triggered by art are central to these feelings, especially in artworks where human figures are salient. Altogether these results support the model that bodily sensations are central to the aesthetic experience,” Nummenmaa and Hari wrote in a research article titled “Bodily feelings and aesthetic experience of art.”
The study involved 134 women and 172 men with a mean age of 26.35, who viewed paintings on a computer or tablet screen one at time and were asked to color the most “interesting” areas from the painting. The term “interesting” was undefined and the subjects were asked to act based on their intuition and gut feelings. The image batch was divided into half, and each subject annotated 30 paintings, therefore every painting was annotated by 153 subjects.
“Emotional experiences evoked by art were consistent across observers. Aesthetic emotions (art, balance, beauty, and elegance) were most prominent, followed by positive emotions (liking, empathizing and joy) and empathy. Feelings linked with 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 were commonly experienced with the aesthetic, non-basic emotions. Sadness was consistently associated with the experience of being touched and moved by the artworks, although these emotions were also consistently associated with joy.”