Art is a form of human expression that has its roots in the depths of the soul and touches sensitive strings of the person.
It has always had the power to evoke emotions, arouse reflections and create a sense of connection between the artist and the user.
But what is behind this extraordinary ability to influence our mind and emotions?
Art as a vehicle for emotional expression
One of the fundamental characteristics of art is its ability to express human emotions in a unique and powerful way.
The artist uses colors, shapes, sounds or words to transmit an emotional message that can be understood and interpreted – directly or indirectly – by the observer.
This emotional connection can arouse a range of emotions, ranging from joy to admiration, from amazement to deep sadness.
Art psychology deals with studying how these emotions are generated and experienced through interaction with the work of art.
Beauty and aesthetic pleasure
Beauty – of the message if not of the object represented – is a fundamental component of art and plays a crucial role in our emotional response.
There art psychology He has shown that aesthetic experience can generate pleasure and gratification.
This can be attributed to various factors, such as symmetry, harmony, complexity and originality of the work of art.
Numerous scientific studies have shown that exposure to works of art deemed pleasant can activate neural circuits connected to the reward and pleasure, triggering a positive response in the brain.
Art and brain
About 25 years ago the Indian neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran had proposed a theory on the relationship between some brain areas and aesthetic perception.
Neuroimmaging techniques allowed to understand some brain processes involved in the perception and processing of stimuli connected to art.
It has come to the conclusion that the foundations of the aesthetic experience can be traced back to elements of the cognitive psychology And to a complex system of brain connections between cortex, visual areas, orbit-fruries and emotional centers of the limbic system.
The collaboration between cognitive and emotional centers generates the experience of Gratification generated by the work of artinvolving dopaminergic systems in subcortical areas such as the insula, hypothalamus and ventral striped.
However, we must not neglect the importance of the cultural component that conditions the specific hedonic expectations we have on a work.
Creativity as an expression of the individual
Through artistic creation we can explore those emotions, thoughts and fantasies that could be difficult to describe with only verbal communication.
Creating something with artistic techniques can help focus, elaborate and shape our inner experiences.
Art and psychology have often gone under Abraccio since the dawn of the birth of the latter. Every psychologist who was interested in art relied – sometimes unfortunately in a dogmatic way – to his wealth of convictions and theories.
Unfortunately, it happened that instead of facing the “art” question with open -mindedness, we went to look for precisely in art evidence confirming their own hypotheses and psychological beliefs.
Since the field of art is large and rich, everyone in the end found something and they considered that they were just what they were looking for. The result was that art provided reassurance to psychology, while psychology has contributed only negligible to explain art.
New technologies
The advent of digital media and artificial intelligence (IA) has raised new issues. The case of a work by Boris Eldagsen – presented at the Sony World Photography Awards – entitled The Electrician and which portrays with vintage style two women in pose.
The work won the first prize that the author refused to withdraw, admitting that he is not the author of the photo but that he has created it through IA
An intentional act and not fraudulent aimed at activating the debate on the relationship between new techniques and the concept of art.
Yet for the observer, aware or not of the technique used, seeing the two women portrayed arouses an interesting aesthetic experience.
And when is the work of art viewed through the monitor of a computer?
In the Journal Computers in Human Behavior, an international research was published that involved the University of Vienna, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nimega and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Mpia) of Frankfurt.
The 240 participants were shown on a screen the work of Monet entitled “Le Ninfee” and they were asked, at the end, to fill in a questionnaire by providing information on the mental state, the intensity of the pleasure warned and the significance of the experience.
The results highlighted a significant improvement in mood and a reduction in anxiety after a few minutes of viewing. To draw more benefit were those subjects with high levels of aesthetic responsiveness, an index which describes how people react to different aesthetic stimuli such as art and nature and can predict who, after exposure to these, will react more intensely.
By committing the Aesthetic Resprasiveness Assessment (Area), the associations awaited between the scores of the Scala Area and the measures of related constructs, as well as the responses recorded continuously and retrospective to music, visual art and poetry were validated.
The exploratory and confirmation farms have suggested three first -order factors called aesthetic appreciation, intensity of the aesthetic experience And creative behavior, and a second -order factor called aesthetic reactivity.
Subjects with these characteristics can draw very benefit from the active research of works of art on the Internet; Let’s think of those who are immobilized at home or live in places far from everything.
In conclusion
If the aesthetic experience has remained in the millennia, even if changing forms and content, it is because it has its own function in the path of humanity.
Artificial intelligence has deprived us of one of the latest anthropocentric beliefs that remained there: only man can think and can generate works that arouse an aesthetic emotion.
I believe this is the minor evil for humanity considering that many atrocious and horrible things have occurred without artificial intelligence.
We disturb us to think that an aesthetic feeling can be activated by looking at a monet picture on the internet instead of seeing it on canvas? It may always be better than looking at an unadorned wall or an anonymous landscape from a window or worse still not observe at all.
Welcome tools that lead us to expand our perceptive and cognitive horizon. However, aspects remain that We cannot neglect.
A work of art created by a man necessarily leads us to retrace the creative act, understandable only by similar and transmissible (if all or partly it matters little) from person to person.
The artist’s mental processes enrich us in the continuous work of reassembly of the sense of self and the world that each of us, more or less consciously, does in our own existential path.
The direct observation of the work leads us to grasp the traces of the time, the permanence of something that resists its flow, the effort of those who performed it or those who represent it. It pushes us to get out of our usual spaces, to be in one other place with other people, to keep the sense of belonging and sharing alive. We can feel close to the artist and who, like us, enjoys aesthetic experience.
In the article entitled “Solitude: the suffering of social disconnection” we had highlighted the importance of sharing and sense of belonging.
Perhaps art, among the many functions, can also have that of making us feel a little less alone.
