If you’re heading out to the Walker or the Weisman art museum this weekend, you may want to first watch “Psycho” or “Halloween.”
For, as science writer Tom Jacobs reports in the online magazine Miller-McCune this month, a new study has found that people react to abstract paintings with more emotion and interest after they’ve just had a good scare.
That's right. Terror apparently makes us appreciate abstract art more.
The study, which was posted online earlier this month in the journal Emotion, was led by Loyola University psychologist Kendall Eskine, who is interested in embodied cognition, an intriguing area of psychology that explores how the physical embodiment of our everyday experiences shapes the way we think.
Eskine’s inspiration for this study came from the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke. In his treatise on aesthetics, “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” Burke proposed that “terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.”
Burke would have been pleased with the study’s results.
Here’s Jacobs’ description of how Eskine and his colleagues devised and conducted their experiment, which involved 85 Brooklyn College students:
Participants were randomly assigned to one of five conditions: fear (which was evoked by viewing a brief frightening video); happiness (evoked by a watching a brief pleasing video); high physical arousal (they performed 30 jumping jacks); low physical arousal (15 jumping jacks); or a control group.
All then viewed images of four paintings, described as “simple geometric abstract pieces from the artist El Lissitsky.” [This Russian’s work was chosen because he is relatively unknown, and thus the students’ reaction to his art would be less likely to reflect any pre-existing art biases.] During the 30 seconds each painting was visible on their computer screen, participants rated (on a scale of 1 to 5) whether their reaction to it matched a series of descriptive words, including “inspiring,” “stimulating,” and “imposing” [words that “convey components of sublime experiences, as conceptualized by Burke,” according to the study’s authors.]
The students’ ratings of the paintings were then combined into a single “sublime score.”
Once the ratings were compiled and analyzed, the researchers discovered that only fear enhanced the participants’ reaction to Lissitsky’s work.
"Art’s allure may ... be a byproduct of one’s tendency to be alarmed by such environmental features as novelty, ambiguity, and the fantastic," Eskine and his colleagues concluded.
You can read Jacobs’ full report on the study on the Miller-McCune website.