Empirical Studies of the Arts

Subjects carried out a paired comparison experiment in which they were asked to make a preference judgement between a computer facsimile of an original Mondrian painting, and a modified version of the same picture in which the proportional relations of the compositional lines had been modified by a relatively small amount. Subjects were significantly better than chance expectations in their preference for the original Mondrians, suggesting that these paintings may encapsulate some universal principle of compositional order which can be detected by subjects.

Nine emotional themes were presented in dance expressions by a group of three professional dance students. In a first experiment these dance expressions were presented to children in the age groups of five-, eight-, ten-, and twelve-year-olds. Children's free response interpretations were analyzed for adequacy, conceptual level, and complexity of response. Clear age trends emerged, especially differentiating the five-year-olds from the other groups. In a second experiment a multiple choice response format was used. The same age trends were found. In a third experiment children with and without dance experience were compared. Experienced children used more emotional labels in interpreting the dance items. In the discussion it is suggested that, in the medium of dance, emotional interpretations gradually emerge from a preceding stage in which movements are imbued with action tendencies.

The old-age style is well-known among art historians, but has rarely been recognized by psychologists despite its bearing on late-life creativity. Untrained subjects' ability to perceive an old-age style, and indirectly, the identification of its artists, were investigated in five separate studies. One hundred subjects judged twenty-four pairs of young-old art on five aspects of the old-age style. Fifteen pairs (63%) differed from one another across the tasks, and suggested that the following historical artists have an old-age style: Bellows, Cole, Eakins, Goya, Guardi, Innes, Kirchner, Klee, Mondrian, Monet, Picasso, Pissaro, Reynolds, Sargent, and Tobey. In contrast, young-old pairs by nine artists did not sufficiently differ, suggesting they did not have an old-age style: Copley, Corinth, Hoffman, Kline, Leger, Manet, Marin, Stuart, and Tiepolo. Several other measures on which young-old art were compared, except for canvas size, did not differentiate the pairs. The applicability of the old-age style to non-artists, whether creative or not, and to late-life cognitive development in general, were discussed.

This study examined the proposition that the hedonic context within which paintings are viewed interacts with the hedonic quality of paintings to determine aesthetic evaluation. Hedonic context was manipulated using twelve positive and twelve negative odor cues in three different formats (odor alone, odor + name, name alone). The hedonic quality of paintings was manipulated using six positive, six negative and twelve neutral emotionally toned paintings. Twenty-four males and twenty-four females viewed each painting in the context of a different cue with half of the emotional cue-painting trials being hedonically congruent (e.g., pos-pos) and half hedonically incongruent (e.g., neg-pos). Following each cue-painting trial subjects provided their evaluations of the paintings along artistic (e.g., artistic quality, visual complexity) and subjective-emotional (e.g., personal meaningfulness, pleasantness, tense-relaxed) dimensions. As predicted, all aesthetic evaluations were intensified when the cue and painting were hedonically congruent. Moreover, evaluations of the most emotionally potent painting group (negative paintings) were least influenced by context, and women were more sensitive to congruency and emotional context in general than were men. The results were interpreted in accordance with prior research and principles in experimental psychology and aesthetics.

The empirical study of appreciators' psychological processes includes the examination of self-generated aesthetic schemas and meanings. If the individual voice and vision of the artist has often been missing from much of the previous literature and discussion of aesthetic response, non-empirical art critics may have promoted their own voices and positions instead by using the recondite and all but impenetrable metalanguage of criticism. As a counterexample from numerical phenomenological methodology, Kelly's psychology of personal constructs and its Repertory grid technique [1] are shown helping an artist-spectator to recover and to reflect on his own responses to one of his exhibitions. Shaw's interactive and multivariate FOCUS technique enables the grid to serve these ideographic purposes [2].

A revised version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published in 1987 by Ladybird press with simplified text and alteration of the illustrations of the 1902 original. Revisions of two other of the Beatrix Potter stories were subsequently published. By applying a computer system that detects words with connotative meaning scores and applying mathematical models to the stories it was possible to make an objective comparison of the emotional tone patterns in the original and the revised versions. As would be expected, the initial editions of the three stories were quite different from each other. The emotional tone pattern of Peter Rabbit and one of the other stories was shown to have been altered considerably by the simplification of text, which lends objective support to the outcry in the popular press against these changes.