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“You Can Tell a Man by the Emotion He Feels”: How Emotions Influence Visual Inspection of Abstract Art in Immersive Virtual Reality

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Extended Reality (XR Salento 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13446))

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Abstract

Art is a complex subject of analysis. Nonetheless, Empirical Aesthetics has proved that the interaction between some bottom-up and top-down mechanisms shapes individuals’ perception of a work of art. Recently, the Vienna Integrated Model for Art Perception [1] added that, during the observation of an artwork, the emotional state of the observer, as a top-down component, could influence the visual perception of the artwork, as a bottom-up one. Positive emotions can influence visual exploration, by broadening the attention focus during the observation of a normal stimulus [2]. However, whether this mechanism applies also for peculiar objects, i.e., abstract paintings, is still unexplored. In this study, we investigated how the emotional state of the subject influenced his/her following visual exploration of abstract works of art, featured in an immersive format. Thirty participants (20 males, 10 females) had been emotionally primed by either a positive (condition 1), negative (condition 2) or neutral affect (condition 3), as a control condition, before they observed 11 abstract paintings displayed in an immersive° format. Participants’ eyes gazes were measured during the view of artistic stimuli through an eye-tracking device integrated in a virtual reality viewer (HTC VIVE Pro-eye). Analyses of eye-tracking metrics from participants - fixations and saccades- showed that individuals experiencing an induced positive mood broadened their visual attention, thus exploring more each painting, while participants in a negative mood explore generally less each work of art. This study confirmed that positive emotions pushed subjects to visually explore more the paintings presented in a virtual environment and confirmed the influence of the emotional state of the observer, as a top-down component, also in the visual exploration of an artwork.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.random.org/lists/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.qualtrics.com/it/.

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Acknowledgment

The work has been supported by Fondazione Cariplo, grant: “Promoting Education of Scientific and Technological Societal Issues Through Sublime (PROMETHEUS)” n°: 2019-3536.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Research Center in Communication Psychology, Universitá Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Largo Gemelli 1, 20123, Milan, Italy

    Marta Pizzolante & Alice Chirico

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  1. Marta Pizzolante
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  2. Alice Chirico
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Correspondence to Marta Pizzolante .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

    Lucio Tommaso De Paolis

  2. Università di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy

    Pasquale Arpaia

  3. CNR-STIIMA, Lecco, Italy

    Marco Sacco

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Pizzolante, M., Chirico, A. (2022). “You Can Tell a Man by the Emotion He Feels”: How Emotions Influence Visual Inspection of Abstract Art in Immersive Virtual Reality. In: De Paolis, L.T., Arpaia, P., Sacco, M. (eds) Extended Reality. XR Salento 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13446. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15553-6_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15553-6_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-15552-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-15553-6

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