Graywill, Kelsey and Chamberlain, Rebecca. 2024. The visual language of pain: the role of rendering style and pain type in aesthetic and empathetic appraisals of painful images. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, ISSN 1931-3896 [Article] (In Press)

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Abstract or Description

Art is capable of evoking empathetic and aesthetic responses in the presence of negative content like pain and suffering. The impact that artistic modes of depiction have on aesthetic and empathetic responses to painful stimuli has not been fully explored. In this study, participants viewed neutral and painful stimuli depicting humans with visible and invisible injuries across plain and artistic rendering styles. The results of an ANOVA and mediation analysis suggested that an artistic rendering style impacts empathetic responses in two ways: 1) An artistic rendering style communicates visual pain information which directly increases cognitive empathy, 2) An artistic rendering style impacts affective empathy, but this relationship is mediated by how much the viewer likes the image. This study illustrates the capacity of images to modulate multidimensional empathy by utilizing visual aids and aesthetic appeal. This has important implications for any discipline that treats, trains, informs, or entertains through use of images depicting pain.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	“©American Psychological Association, 2024. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. The final article will be available, upon publication, at: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/aca/index”
Keywords:	Visual art; aesthetic appreciation; empathy, pain perception,
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Psychology
Dates:	Date Event 7 March 2024 Accepted
Item ID:	35203
Date Deposited:	07 Mar 2024 11:13
Last Modified:	07 Mar 2024 15:33
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35203

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