Art can have a positive effect on our mood. But does this also work when we look at paintings on a screen? An international research team involving the University of Vienna, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main decided to investigate this question. The study was funded by the EU Horizon ART*IS project. The results have now been published as an open access article in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
240 study participants viewed an interactive Monet Water Lily art exhibit from Google Arts and Culture. By completing a questionnaire, they provided information about their mood, how much pleasure they felt looking at the images, and how meaningful they found the experience to be. The results showed significant improvements in mood and anxiety after just a few minutes of viewing.
“Online art viewing is an untapped source of wellness support that can be consumed as little snippets of meaning and pleasure,” says MacKenzie Trupp, first author from the University of Vienna.
The study also found that some participants were more receptive to art than others and could benefit more from it. This advantage could be predicted using a metric called “aesthetic responsiveness.”
“Aesthetic responsiveness describes how people react to various aesthetic stimuli, such as art and nature. The results showed that people with high levels of artistic and aesthetic sensibility benefit more from viewing art online because have more pleasurable and meaningful art experiences,” explains MPIEA’s Edward A. Vessel, developer of the Aesthetic Response Assessment (AReA).
The findings of this study are particularly interesting for people who cannot visit museums in person, such as those with health problems. Furthermore, the results suggest that interactive art exhibitions and similar online experiences should be designed with individual differences in aesthetic responsiveness in mind. Therefore, the study broadens the understanding of the benefits and limitations of art in digital media and points the way to increasing the well-being potential of art online.
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