A Study on the Emotional Responses to Visual Art

We experimented with examining how Visual Art affects people's emotional responses to images. Participants viewed 27 images from our art image database, which were either static or dynamic. We aimed to gather subjective data through self-reports and physiological measures like skin conductance and heart rate to assess emotional responses. The results showed that dynamic pictures significantly increased arousal, incredibly when the image was already arousing. Both self-report measures and skin conductance data supported these findings. Additionally, dynamic picture motion elicited more heart-rate deceleration, indicating greater attention toward highly arousing images. However, the influence of dynamic pictures on affective valence was only evident in self-report measures. Images with motion were rated as more positive if they were positive, to begin with, and more damaging if they were negative. These findings have important implications for understanding the impact of dynamic pictures on emotional responses and can be applied to fields such as psychology, marketing, and media studies. Further research is needed to delve deeper into the underlying mechanisms of these effects.