Art & Perception 2 (2014) 99–118 brill.com/artp

Consistent Emotions Elicited by Low-Level VisualFeatures in Abstract Art

Jorien van Paasschen 1, Elisa Zamboni 1, Francesca Bacci 2 and David Melcher 1,∗

1 Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, Palazzo Fedrigotti,Corso Bettini 31, 38068 Rovereto, Italy

2 Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy

Received 12 April 2013; accepted 2 September 2013

AbstractIt is often assumed that works of art have the ability to elicit emotion in their observers. An emo-tional response to a visual stimulus can occur as early as 120 ms after stimulus onset, before objectcategorisation can take place. This implies that emotions elicited by an artwork may depend in parton bottom-up processing of its visual features (e.g., shape, colour, composition) and not just on ob-ject recognition or understanding of artistic style. We predicted that participants are able to judgethe emotion conveyed by an artwork in a manner that is consistent across observers. We tested thishypothesis using abstract paintings; these do not provide any reference to objects or narrative con-texts, so that any perceived emotion must stem from basic visual characteristics. Nineteen participantswith no background in art rated 340 abstract artworks from different artistic movements on valenceand arousal on a Likert scale. An intra-class correlation model showed a high consistency in ratingsacross observers. Importantly, observers used the whole range of the rating scale. Artworks with ahigh number of edges (complex) and dark colours were rated as more arousing and more negativecompared to paintings containing clear lines, bright colours and geometric shapes. These findingsprovide evidence that emotions can be captured in a meaningful way by the artist in a set of low-levelvisual characteristics, and that observers interpret this emotional message in a consistent, uniformmanner.

KeywordsAesthetic experience, perception, emotion, aesthetic viewing

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: david.melcher@unitn.it

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2014 DOI:10.1163/22134913-00002012

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1. Introduction

It is often assumed that works of art have the ability to elicit emotion intheir observers, and indeed, people often ascribe emotional valence to art-works (Csíkszentmihályi and Robinson, 1990). However, little is known asto whether artworks are able to induce similar, shared emotions in spectators(comparable to, for example, the response to an emotional face), or whetherobservers experience a divergent range of emotions when viewing the sameartwork (rendering the experience of the artwork purely subjective). A com-prehensive theory of emotion perception would need to take into account thisaffective response to visual art, music and other stimuli. Here, we start byinvestigating whether there are commonalities in emotional responses to ab-stract artworks or whether instead, there is truth in the old adage that “there’sno accounting for taste” when it comes to art.

We begin by discussing the neuropsychological basis underlying emotionaland aesthetic experiences. We then consider why it is plausible that at leastsome aspects of the experience of emotions conveyed by artworks may behomogenous across observers. Next we will present theories from artists andart historians regarding the ways in which art, in particular abstract paintings,might evoke emotion. Finally, we present our hypotheses regarding emotionalcues in abstract artworks and explain how we mean to test these empirically.

1.1. The Role of Emotion in Aesthetic Perception

Art has the power to “disturb us, agitate us, or make us weep” (Ellis, 1999,p. 163). But how is an artwork able to trigger such a response, and when inthe viewing process do these emotions occur? Inherent to it being a visualstimulus, it follows that visual art must initially be processed based on earlyvisual properties (e.g., shape, colour) in the primary visual areas within theoccipital cortex. An emotional response to a visual stimulus (e.g., a face) canoccur as early as 120 ms after stimulus onset (Pizzagalli et al., 1999, 2002),before object categorisation can take place. Barrett and Bar (2009) have sug-gested that before object recognition takes place, gist-level visual information(in the case of a visual artwork this could include low spatial frequency in-formation, colour and some aspects of composition) engages fronto-parietalattention circuits, which in turn relay affective information about the stimulusback to the dorsal stream as an initial estimate of its affective and motivationalvalue. Heightened attention to a given stimulus then modulates object recogni-tion within the ventral stream (e.g., Pessoa et al., 2003; Shulman et al., 1997)and allows for the stimulus to be experienced more vividly. Thus, this affectiveinformation guides our vision.

The notion that emotional responses already occur during the very firststages of vision implies that emotions elicited by an artwork may depend at

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least in part on bottom-up processing of its visual features such as shape andcolour, in addition to higher cognitive processes such as object recognition orunderstanding of artistic style (for review, see Melcher and Cavanagh, 2011).Abstract artworks provide an interesting case study for attempts to understandperception of emotion in artworks. Contrary to most artistic movements, ab-stract art is a category that defines paintings which do not intend to give afaithful imitation of visual reality. There are no recognizable objects or con-texts that could evoke emotion, in contrast to most of the existing studiesof emotion expression. In this sense, the emotional response to abstract art-works might be compared to that of music, where explicit reference to realobjects or scenes is rare (Blood and Zatorre, 2001; for review, see Koelsch,2010; Melcher and Zampini, 2011). Since most of what we know about visualemotion perception is based on studies of responses to stimuli like faces andphotographs, abstract artworks provide a unique and valuable stimulus set forstudying perception of emotion in visual stimuli.

Indeed, many artists have claimed that their abstract artworks are, in thewords of Jackson Pollock, “expressing . . . feelings rather than illustrating”(O’Connor, 1967, p. 79). Mark Rothko argued that his works expressed “ba-sic human emotions . . . tragedy, ecstasy, doom” (Baal-Teshuva, 2003, p. 56).As described below in more detail, artists have in many cases provided spe-cific, testable claims about how and why their works evoke these emotions.Implicit in most of these claims is the idea that there are commonalities in theemotional response of different viewers of abstract artworks. Thus, in additionto more narrative or top-down influences on emotion perception for artworks,visual properties such as colour and form, which are dominant in abstract artbut also important in representational art, may play a role in the emotionalresponse to some artworks.

Some evidence for agreement when it comes to the emotion expressed byabstract art comes from a study showing that children were able to correctlymatch one of two abstract paintings to a representational target painting interms of conveyed emotion (Blank et al., 1984). This indicates that even youngchildren have the ability to detect emotion in an artwork, despite probably nothaving a very developed concept of artistic style. A different study, also includ-ing (preschool) children, has shown that children as young as three are able todistinguish different artistic styles (Hasenfus et al., 1983), which suggests that“naïve observers tend to decode or understand works of art at a deeper levelthan might be assumed” (p. 861). A behavioural study comparing represen-tational and indeterminate art (paintings which contain strong suggestions ofnatural shapes, but no actual formal objects) found no difference in scores re-flecting how much the artworks affected participants emotionally (Ishai et al.,2007). The authors concluded that emotional and aesthetic judgments (whichwere comparable for representational and indeterminate artworks) appeared

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to be based on low and intermediate visual features, independent of semanticmeaning. A similar finding was observed by Takahashi (1995) in an intriguingstudy in which participants who had no specific background in art were askedto produce abstract line drawings reflecting a particular topic (e.g., anger, joy,femininity, illness). Next, the drawings were grouped according to topic and alarger group of different participants was asked to pick the five drawings thatbest expressed the topic. Takahashi found considerable agreement in the topfive drawings chosen for each category, with 35–55% of participants agree-ing on the most appropriate drawing for each topic. Takahashi concluded thatthere may be a “. . . shared intuition that contributes visually to one’s under-standing of the concept that a drawing means to express” (p. 675). Althoughboth the study design and results are intriguing, it remains unclear to what ex-tent participants truly agreed on the representative value of the drawings. Forexample, the drawings were already grouped according to theme when partic-ipants selected the most representative drawing for that theme. This is quitedifferent to asking people to pick the most representative drawing for a partic-ular theme out of all available drawings — there may have been considerablecrossing over of drawings and categories.

From a cognitive neuroscience perspective, neuroimaging studies suggestthat there are central, supramodal neural mechanisms that underlie emotionalevaluation and experience. The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, for example,has been implicated in the representation of emotions independent of modality(Adolphs, 2009; Peelen et al., 2010) and in people’s appraisal and experienceof emotions as well as the evaluation of emotional content of a stimulus, ir-respective of the nature of the emotion (Kober et al., 2008; Lee and Siegle,2012; Reiman et al., 1997). Taken together, these findings demonstrate thatthere are neural mechanisms in the brain that are involved in the cross-modalrepresentation of different emotion categories.

1.2. Artists and Art Theorists on Emotion Perception in Abstract Art

One important question, before starting any study of the perception of abstractartwork, is which works to choose for study. For the present study, we adopteda stylistic criterion in order to create two stimulus sets. As proposed by AlfredH. Barr on the occasion of the exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art” (1936),we can think of abstract paintings as falling in one of two broad categories:geometrical abstract art and non-geometrical abstract art (see Fig. 1).

Barr’s stylistic analysis outlines the presence of a scientific attitude that isfound in Geometrical Abstract Art: the analytical use of colour by the Pointil-lists, and the methodical breakdown of space into basic geometrical units byCubists and Constructivists. Geometrical Abstract Art is characterized by awell-planned design that is based on the use of uniform colours and geometri-cal elements such as lines and shapes. Non-Geometrical Abstract Art, instead,

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Figure 1. Depiction of the historical developments in art leading to two main tendencies inabstract art. From Albert H. Barr Jr’s exhibition catalogue for the MoMA show ‘Cubism andAbstract Art’ (1936). This figure is published in color in the online version.

uses elements chosen for their symbolic and subjective value. Gauguin and theFauve artists chose to represent reality through non-imitative colours, in orderto augment the symbolic content of their paintings. The Expressionists andFuturists exploited colours’ expressive potential, and the Dada and Surrealistartists incorporated chance effects of doodling marks, which were believedto stem from a person’s unconscious. Non-Geometrical abstract art can thusbe characterised by the presence of fluid curved lines and sweeping strokes,

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gestural spreading of colours in hasty marks or splashes and drippings and,generally speaking, an intense, almost sloppy execution, as if they were madebecause of an inner necessity of the artist rather than being the result of carefulplanning or theoretical reasoning.

In the current study we explored whether the emotional response to paint-ings from these two art movements shows a meaningful difference in arousalor valence traceable to the artwork’s intrinsic characteristics. We includedpaintings from Abstract Expressionism (AbEx) and Geometric Abstraction(Geom). Abstract Expressionism paintings are arguably non-geometric andare characterised by apparently random strokes and splashes of paint; thereis a complete absence of recognisable forms (examples are works by HansHartung and Antonio Corpora, see Fig. 2A). Geometric Abstraction paintings,instead, are characterised by distinct geometric shapes and clear lines (for ex-ample, works by Aldo Schmid and Luigi Senesi, see Fig. 2B).

1.3. Rationale for the Current Study

As discussed above, there might be general principles that help explain why artevokes an emotional response in viewers, and these principles have a neurolog-ical basis, hence are common to all observers. We predict that naïve observerswith no formal background in arts would be able to pick up the emotion con-veyed by an artwork, and that they would do so in a manner that is consistentacross observers. We tested this hypothesis using images of abstract paintings.One distinct advantage of this class of stimuli is that they do not provide anyreference to objects or narrative contexts as a site of emotional expression,so that any perceived emotion must stem from basic visual features such ascolour, shape, and composition. To ensure participants could not place the art-works in any semantic context, it was especially important to include onlynaïve subjects in the study. We compared ratings from naïve participants onvalence (happy/sad) and arousal (exciting/calm) dimensions for 170 AbstractExpressionism and 170 Geometric Abstraction paintings.

Unlike previous studies on this topic, we have included a much larger setof artworks (n = 340) to be rated. As a comparison, Takahashi (1995) used46 line drawings per emotional category, while Blank et al. (1984) used 16abstract artworks. In addition, participants in the current study had the optionto rate the artwork as ‘neutral’ if they felt the artwork was not particularlyemotional, as opposed to the ‘forced choice’ method employed by Takahashiand Blank and colleagues, where artworks had to be matched to emotionallabels or categories. Furthermore, our participants rated to what extent theyfelt an artwork corresponded to a particular emotional category. Using thisapproach, we were able to calculate reliability in scoring patterns betweenthe different raters for all artworks, instead of assessing whether a particularpainting was chosen to represent an emotional label above chance level.

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(A)

(B)

Figure 2. (A) Examples of Abstract Expressionism works (Hans Hartung — T 1963-H13, 1963;and Antonio Corpora — Notturno, 1952). (B) Examples of Geometric Abstraction works (AldoSchmid — No title (from the ‘Sequenze’ cycle), 1965–1966; and Luigi Senesi — Percorsocro-matico (verde-rosso), 1974).

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We predicted that ratings would be consistent across observers for paintingsfrom both art movements. We were also interested in whether artworks fromone movement may be experienced as more positive and/or more exciting thanthe other. Given that these artworks cannot differ on semantic content, subjectsmust base their evaluation on low-level perceptual features such as colour,composition, shape, and style. Our participants knew equally little about thebackgrounds of either art movement. Therefore, any differences in affectiveratings between the two art streams are unlikely to be the result of successfullymastering one style but not the other. Instead, such a result would support theidea that particular visual features that characterise one art movement but notthe other evoke emotions in their observers.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Participants

Nineteen participants (6 men, 13 women, mean age 23.5 ± 4.8 years, range19–38) took part in the study. Participants were students from the Universityof Trento or residents from the local community (Rovereto, Italy), recruitedthrough advertisements on the internet. All participants had normal or cor-rected to normal vision. Participants had no specific background or trainingin art or art history. Most participants visited a modern arts museum at leastonce a year (mean 1.9 ± 1.3). All were paid for their participation. All partic-ipants gave written informed consent prior to participation. The experimentalprocedures were in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the University ofTrento and Declaration of Helsinki.

2.2. Materials

Participants were asked to rate digital images of abstract artworks from twomajor abstract art movements (Abstract Expressionism and Geometric Ab-straction). We used digitalised images of paintings from the MART collec-tion (Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto), andfreely available images through the websites of the Guggenheim museum, theMoMA, the Whitney museum, and Tate Modern. Furthermore, artwork repro-ductions in books were scanned in by the researchers.

Out of this larger collection of digital images, FB, EZ and JVP selected 170paintings from each art movement for the rating experiment. The suitabilityof each artwork was discussed and artworks were selected only if all threeauthors reached consensus on the suitability of the painting for a particularcategory (AbEx or Geom). A further 12 paintings were selected for a practicerun. For Abstract Expressionism we included paintings that had no clear linesor forms. For Geometric Abstraction, we chose paintings that had clearly de-fined lines and recognisable shapes. Paintings were excluded if they were part

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of a composition of different paintings, if they depicted an actual figure or ob-ject, if there were any letters or numbers (or signs that appeared as such) on thepainting, if they displayed formal characteristics belonging to both categories,or if there was a three-dimensional object attached to the painting.

To obtain some uniformity in size of the stimuli without distorting the orig-inal proportions of the paintings, the largest dimension on each painting wasresized to 600 pixels; the smaller dimension was then resized in relation tothat. Paintings were shown on a Toshiba Satellite Pro L500-1VZ laptop usingNBS Presentation software (version 16.0, www.neurobs.com).

2.3. Measures

For the rating task, participants were required to rate each artwork on one oftwo dimensions: Arousal (ranging from calm to excited) and Valence (rangingfrom sad to happy), in a fashion similar to the instructions given to participantswho rated pictures for the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Langet al., 2008). There was one question per trial, so that each painting was viewedtwice in total (one viewing per question). The order of the questions (Arousalor Valence) and paintings was randomised.

Following the example of the IAPS, in the instructions provided at thestart of the experiment, the Arousal dimension was explained as the extentto which the painting made participants feel stimulated, excited, frenzied, jit-tery, wide-awake, aroused, or rather completely relaxed, calm, sluggish, dull,sleepy, unaroused. During the actual experiment, we only presented the labels‘calm’ and ‘excited’. The Arousal scale consisted of five figures taken fromthe Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM; Hodes et al., 1985) that depicted a lit-tle man ranging from eyes closed (calm) to exploding with eyes wide open(excited). The Valence dimension was explained as the extent to which eachpainting made subjects feel happy, pleased, satisfied, contented, hopeful, or onthe other end of the scale, completely unhappy, annoyed, unsatisfied, melan-cholic, despaired. Again, during the actual experiment we only presented thesimplified labels ‘sad’ and ‘happy’. The Valence scale consisted of five facesfrom the Wong–Baker faces pain scale (Wong and Baker, 1988). The faceswere similar to cartoon style ‘smiley faces’ and ranged from an inverted U-shape mouth and hanging eyebrows (sad) to a big smile with raised eyebrows(happy).

The rating scale was depicted on the screen, and pictures of each ratingoption were attached to buttons on the keyboard using five buttons to the rightof the ‘U’ key and five buttons to the right of the ‘J’ key. The position ofthe two rating scales (top row or bottom row of keys) was counterbalancedbetween participants.

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2.4. Procedure

All participants performed a practice run with a different subset of paintingsbefore engaging in the actual experiment. Each trial started with a fixationcross (500 ms) along with printed information on the dimension that the par-ticipant would be rating the painting on. For Arousal, it said ‘calm/excited’and for Valence it said ‘sad/happy’. A painting was then shown for 2000 ms.During this presentation no rating could be made. Immediately following pre-sentation, a screen appeared with the word ‘rating’ and the appropriate scale.Participants were instructed to make their response as fast as possible and notto think too long about their response. There was a 1000 ms blank screen be-fore the start of the next trial. The experiment was self-paced and lasted about50 min, depending on the speed with which participants gave their rating.

3. Results

3.1. Rating Consistency

Rating scores were first converted to standardised z-scores to correct for anybias in rating across subjects. In order to assess whether participants rated thepaintings in a consistent way, we analysed the standardised rating scores fromeach participant for each painting using a two-way random effects intra-classcorrelation (ICC) model to test consistency for each dimension separately.The ICC coefficient for Valence was very high (ICC = 0.845; 95% CI =0.82–0.87), suggesting a consistent pattern of valence ratings for differentpaintings across participants. Consistency in valence rating was slightly higherfor AbEx paintings (ICC = 0.844; 95% CI = 0.80–0.88) than for Geom paint-ings (ICC = 0.786; 95% CI = 0.73–0.83). The ICC coefficient for Arousalwas also high (ICC = 0.854; 95% CI = 0.83–0.88). In contrast to the valenceratings, ratings for arousal were more consistent for Geom paintings (ICC =0.866; 95% CI = 0.83–0.90) than for AbEx paintings (ICC = 0.757; 95%CI = 0.70–0.81).

To test whether the consistency in scores does not simply reflect a vastamount of neutral ratings, we calculated the frequency of the mean ratingawarded to each artwork. These results are summarised in Table 1. Frequencytables showed that about 50% of the AbEx and 30% of Geom artworks re-ceived a mean Valence rating that was either lower than 2.5 (‘sad’) or higherthan 3.5 (‘happy’). On the Arousal dimension, 38% of AbEx paintings and60% of Geom paintings received scores that clearly reflected ‘calm’ or ‘ex-cited’. This means that especially with regards to the Valence ratings for theGeom artworks, the majority of artworks was rated as neutral. To check thatthe consistency was not merely driven by these neutral ratings, we repeated theintraclass correlation but excluded the neutrally rated artworks from the anal-

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Table 1.Number of paintings with mean high, neutral, and low Arousal and Valence ratings. AbEx:Abstract Expressionism; Geom: Geometric Abstraction

Mean rating Valence Arousal

AbEx Geom AbEx Geom

Low (<2.5) 75 18 22 86Neutral (2.5–3.5) 85 120 105 69High (>3.5) 10 32 43 15

yses. Consistency in ratings remained high for both Valence (AbEx: ICC =0.749; 95% CI = 0.66–0.83; Geom: ICC = 0.895; 95% CI = 0.84–0.94) andArousal (AbEx: ICC = 0.871; 95% CI = 0.82–0.92; Geom: ICC = 0.910;95% CI = 0.88–0.94).

3.2. Differences Between the Two Art Types

To explore whether there were differences in ratings between AbEx and Geompaintings, standardised ratings were entered into a repeated measures anal-ysis of variance using Art Type (AbEx, Geom) as a between-group factorand Dimension (Arousal, Valence) as a within-group factor. There was a sig-nificant interaction between Art Type and Dimension (F(1,338) = 238.149,p < 0.001). No other effects were found. A follow-up independent samplest-test showed that AbEx paintings were rated as significantly more negative(mean raw score 2.69 ± 0.54; note that raw scores are used in the text formeaningfulness; for the analyses standardised z-scores were used) than Geompaintings (mean raw score 3.17 ± 0.44) (t (338) = 8.978, p < 0.001). Geompaintings were rated as significantly more calm (mean raw score 2.53 ± 0.64)(t (338) = 8.519, p < 0.001) than AbEx paintings (mean raw score 3.09 ±0.49). Figure 3 illustrates these results.

There was a highly significant positive relationship between standardisedratings for valence and arousal for Geom paintings (r = 0.547, p < 0.001), aswell as for AbEx paintings (r = 0.177, p = 0.021).

To see whether AbEx and Geom paintings differed significantly in termsof basic visual features, we compared saturation (vividness of colour, wherelower saturation colours contain more grey), brightness (luminance; or theblack/white quality), and complexity (as assessed by an index of the number ofedges detected in each artwork) in an independent samples t-test. Assumptionsfor equality of the variances were not met for all three features; hence the de-grees of freedom were adjusted. AbEx and Geom paintings did not differ sig-nificantly on saturation (t (316.565) = 1.914, p = 0.168 (Bonferroni correctedfor multiple comparisons); mean saturation AbEx: 31.18% ± 17.06; mean sat-

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Figure 3. Mean standardised ratings for Arousal and Valence for 340 paintings. AbEx: AbstractExpressionism; Geom: Geometric Abstraction. This figure is published in color in the onlineversion.

uration Geom: 35.31% ± 22.21). However, Geom paintings were significantlybrighter than AbEx artworks (t (323.348) = 5.217, p < 0.001 (Bonf.corr.);mean brightness AbEx: 53.49% ± 17.41; mean brightness Geom: 64.59% ±21.43), while works in the AbEx category were significantly more complexthan in the Geom group (t (317.550) = 4.618, p < 0.001 (Bonf.corr)).

We also sampled the mean hue (i.e., wavelength) in degrees for each art-work and calculated a mean hue for each art stream by converting the degreesto radians (mean hue AbEx: 30.71°; mean hue Geom: 11.32°). The coordinatesfor the vectors making up each radian were entered into a bootstrap procedurewith 10 000 iterations and a threshold of α = 0.05. The bootstrap procedureshowed that the set of AbEx and Geom artworks significantly differed in meanhue (p = 0.006). Overall the AbEx works tended to golden orange, while theGeom set leaned to more red.

Subsequently, we correlated ratings for valence and arousal with satura-tion, brightness and complexity indices (a meaningful correlation with huewas not possible since the values were either vectors or degrees). Valenceratings were positively correlated with arousal ratings for both art streams(AbEx: r = 0.177, p = 0.021; Geom: r = 0.547, p < 0.001). For AbEx art-works, valence ratings increased as paintings became more colourful, bright,and complex (saturation: r = 0.231, p = 0.003; brightness: r = 0.610, p <0.001; complexity: r = 0.233, p = 0.002). AbEx artworks were rated as

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more arousing the more complex (r = 0.330, p < 0.001) and dark they were(r = −0.183, p = 0.019), but we found no significant correlation betweenarousal ratings and saturation (r = 0.083, p = 0.288). Interestingly, a differ-ent pattern was found for Geom artworks: these were rated more positivelythe brighter they were (r = 0.503, p < 0.001), while there was no relationbetween valence ratings and saturation (r = 0.064, p = 0.406) or complex-ity (r = 0.145, p = 0.058). On the other hand, arousal ratings were higherfor more colourful and complex paintings (saturation: r = 0.204, p = 0.008;complexity: r = 0.230, p = 0.002) whereas no significant correlation existedbetween arousal ratings and brightness (r = −0.085, p = 0.268).

4. Discussion

The current study obtained valence and arousal ratings for a large set of ab-stract artworks. We hypothesised that observers who are naïve to art are able topick up emotion conveyed by abstract artworks in a consistent manner. Indeedwe found highly consistent ratings on both valence and arousal for artworksfrom Abstract Expressionism and Geometric Abstraction, suggesting that theartworks evoked common emotional processes across observers. Importantly,observers placed artworks consistently along either dimension, showing thatthe agreement in scoring is not simply due to all works being rated as ‘neutral’.We also explored whether there were differences in ratings between the twoart movements. Overall, ratings were more positive and calm for paintings be-longing to Geometric Abstraction compared to Abstract Expressionism, whichwere judged as sadder and more exciting.

Because our participants were naïve to art, they were not able to base theirvalence and arousal judgments on anything other than the basic visual featurespresented to them by an artwork. Given that the artworks bear no reference toreal-life objects, we pose that an emotional response to such stimuli is based toa large part on bottom-up visual features. Similar ideas have been proposed bysome of the artists producing art these artworks, and indeed affective reactionshave been reported previously for single visual stimuli such as simple geomet-ric shapes (e.g., Larson et al., 2007, 2011) and colours (e.g., Kaya and Epps,2004; Moller et al., 2009; Ou et al., 2004). However, to date there is little em-pirical evidence for consistent affective reactions across different observers inresponse to visual art. Many models of aesthetic viewing emphasise the in-dividuality of aesthetic experiences and affective reactions to art — these areregarded as the interplay between an observer and the situation (e.g., Jacobsenet al., 2006; Leder et al., 2004). Our findings complement studies of the roleof context and top-down factors by showing also the existence of a consistentinterpretation of emotion for abstract artworks by naïve participants.

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4.1. Bottom-up Emotion Cues

The idea that colour can trigger an emotional response is generally accepted,but the precise relationship between colour and affective reaction is com-plex and context-dependent (for review, see Elliot and Maier, 2007; Gage,1999). Colour includes hue, saturation, and brightness. The relationship be-tween colours may be as important as the colours themselves, and the findingthat many of the most positive images contained a combination of bright yel-low and blue is consistent with the long-standing idea that complementarycolours hold a special place in visual art (Gage, 1999).

When looking at the presence of specific colours, and ignoring the role ofthe interactions between colours, it is possible to compare the current findingsto previous studies using single colour patches. The AbEx and Geom artworksin the present study did not differ significantly on saturation, an indication ofthe intensity of colours used. Moreover, valence ratings for Geom artworksdid not correlate with saturation, suggesting that colour intensity does not ex-plain the higher proportion of ‘happy’ ratings for Geom artworks. The twosets of artworks in the current study differed on mean hue, with AbEx art-works overall containing more golden-orange and Geom works overall morered. As mentioned above, the previous literature on colour and emotion (orpreference) contains contradictory findings regarding specific hues. In onestudy investigating people’s emotional reaction to colours, a red-purple huewas among the most pleasant hues whereas a yellow hue was rated as leastpleasant (Valdez and Mehrabian, 1994). A red-purple hue was also rated asless dominant than a green-yellow hue. Similarly, a different study compar-ing 20 colours on a like–dislike scale found that purplish blue was the mostliked whereas muddy yellow was the most disliked (Ou et al., 2004), a findingcorroborated by a different study comparing male and female participants —although the men seemed to prefer blue-green to purplish blue (Hurlbert andLing, 2007). However, colours that are liked or disliked when seen on theirown may be combined in a particular artwork. Ou and colleagues (2004)pointed out that although there is a strong correlation between preference forindividual colours and perceived harmony of a colour pair, there are coloursfor which this does not hold. The relationship between colour preference andcombinations of more than one colour has not been properly investigated, butis presumably more complex.

One possibility is that the presence of certain colours in abstract artworkswould directly influence emotion ratings. Using computer vision techniques,Yanulevskaya and colleagues (2012) trained a classifier to recognise whichstatistical patterns in abstract paintings predict whether that painting was ratedas positive or negative by human observers. The algorithm was able to predicthuman emotion ratings based on colour (CIELAB) and form (SIFT: Lowe,

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2004) information. They also found that brighter yellow, blue and red wereassociated with positive emotions, while dark colours were related to negativeemotions. In the current study, the Geom artworks as a set were brighter thanthe AbEx artworks, which received more ‘sad’ ratings. This is in line with thestudy by Yanulevskaya and colleagues, who found that darker colours werepredictive of a negative rating.

Another possibility for the difference in ratings between the two art streamsis that the presence of clearly discernible shapes in the Geom artworks mayhave resulted in more well-defined uniform planes. As described above, a clas-sifier trained on form and texture features (SIFT) was able to predict whetherhuman judgments of the emotion of an abstract artwork were positive or neg-ative (Yanulevskaya et al., 2012). It has been previously demonstrated thatwhen using simple geometric shapes, people prefer stimuli with a high figure-ground contrast, presumably because this facilitates processing fluency (Reberet al., 2004). Reber and colleagues further argue that stimuli with less in-formation are more pleasing to the observer, again because this is easier toprocess. The finding that Geom artworks were on average brighter and lesscomplex than AbEx artworks may indicate that Geom paintings contain morelarge contrasting sections. Complexity was assessed using an index of edgedetection; AbEx paintings were found to contain more edges and were thusmore fragmented, containing more angles than Geom paintings. An earlierstudy demonstrated that people preferred large abstract geometrical shapes andcharacters over smaller versions of the same stimulus, supposedly because bi-ologically speaking larger specimens convey a sense of power, attractiveness,and physical strength (Silvera et al., 2002).

Bar and Neta (2006) showed that if given a choice, people prefer the rounderversion of neutral everyday objects (a sofa, a watch, and so on). They at-tributed this to a potential sense of threat that is conveyed by sharp angles.This sense of threat is even conveyed by simple geometric shapes such astriangles, a finding that was traced back to threatening facial features suchas downward pointing eyebrows in an angry face (Aronoff, 2006; Larson etal., 2007). A downward pointing triangle was perceived as particularly threat-ening, as expressed by heightened brain activity in the amygdala (Larson etal., 2009), a subcortical structure involved in basic emotional processing andthreat detection (e.g., LeDoux, 2000; Vuilleumier et al., 2003). Larson and col-leagues (2009) pointed out that circles, one of the control stimuli in their study,were not threatening but elicited greater activation in visual processing areascompared to other geometric shapes and thus can be regarded as more potentand salient visual stimuli. Similarly, statistical patterns in abstract paintingscorresponding to straight lines and smooth curves were associated with posi-tive emotions while chaotic patterns were associated with negative emotions,even if these arrays appeared in ‘positive’ colours (Yanulevskaya et al., 2012).

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However, there is a limit to the role of bottom-up features like shape, since top-down factors must play an important role in judging the emotional content ofan object or scene. For example, objects that were round but carried a negativevalence (e.g., a bomb, or a snake) were not preferred over negative sharp ob-jects (Leder et al., 2011). Round objects were only preferred over sharp anglesif their valence was neutral or positive, showing that object associations alsoplay an important role in emotion perception. Similarly, it is unlikely that theratings of the IAPS pictures is determined largely by bottom-up visual cues,but instead depends on recognition of specific objects and situations.

Overall, the idea that visual characteristics such as brightness, low visualcomplexity, and round shape tend to be regarded as more positive may help toexplain why participants in our study were so consistent in their higher ‘hap-py’ and ‘calm’ ratings for the Geom artworks compared to AbEx artworks.As shown in the study by Yanulevskaya and colleagues (2012), at least someof the visual features in abstract artworks are basic enough that they can beused by computational vision algorithms to predict human emotion ratings.Thus, although the identity of objects and other forms of top-down knowledgeundoubtedly influence emotional responses, artists are also able to manipulatebasic visual features such as colour, shape and brightness in order to modulatethe respone of viewers.

4.2. Limitations of the Current Study and Directions for Future Research

Although consistency in ratings in the current study was high even when theneutrally rated paintings were excluded from the analysis, it should be notedthat a large proportion of the Geometric Abstraction artworks (70%) was ratedas ‘neutral’. This could be the result of the particular artworks that we selected,but it may also suggests that for this set of artworks perhaps the ‘happy–sad’scale was not the best possible dimension to assess affective responses (as acomparison, on the ‘calm–excited’ scale, less than half (40%) of the Geomartworks received a ‘neutral’ rating). One aim of the current study was to testthe feasibility of developing a dataset of abstract artworks, similar to the In-ternational Affection Picture Scale (Lang et al., 2008), for use in studying theneural correlates of emotional responses to a range of visual stimuli such asfaces, pictures and abstract paintings. The valence and arousal measures al-low for making such direct comparisons, but future research could consider awider spectrum of emotions and obtain ratings for different facets of emotion.For example, a study investigating emotions evoked by music, Zentner et al.(2008) identified nine factors, each including two or more items. For example,‘agitated’ and ‘nervous’ relate to the factor ‘tension’, while ‘energetic’ and‘fiery’ relate to the factor ‘power’. Moreover, this study took into account rat-ings for perceived and felt emotion, i.e., what emotion was expressed by themusic, and what emotion was felt by the subject. An open question for future

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research is the extent to which the complex mechanisms involved in creatingemotional responses to music, which changes dynamically over time (for re-view, see Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008), are similar to methods used for staticimages.

In addition to including more specific emotional labels to characterise whatemotions abstract art evokes, future research could focus on supramodal emo-tional processes that viewing abstract art shares with viewing emotional scenesor faces. If evoked emotions through abstract art are indeed highly consistent,it should be possible, for example, to classify brain activity related to viewing a‘happy’ artwork in a similar way to viewing a ‘happy’ scene. If there are brainareas that respond to ‘happy’ stimuli, irrespective of presentation type, thenwe would expect to find supramodal areas of activation regardless of whetherthe participants are shown abstract artworks, faces, or scenes.

4.3. Conclusions

We report here consistent emotional evaluations of abstract artworks. Our re-sults support the idea that artists can use low-level visual characteristics toinfluence the emotional perception of observers. Participants rated the Ge-ometric Abstraction artworks as more calm and more positive compared tothose belonging to Abstract Expressionism. The Geometric Abstraction art-works were overall brighter, contained discernible, more rounded shapes, andmore figure-ground contrast compared to the Abstract Expressionism art-works. Previous research has demonstrated that such visual features are —individually — regarded as positive, which may explain why ratings in ourparticipants were so consistent. The observers in our study had no formaltraining in art, yet awarded comparable emotional ratings to particular art-works. Hence, we conclude that affective reactions to viewing art may dependat least in part on bottom-up visual features, and that these aspects of emotionperception in art may be more universal than previously assumed.

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by a grant from the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmiodi Trento e Rovereto awarded to FB and DM.

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