When experienced in-person, engagement with art has been associated—in a growing body of evidence—with positive outcomes in wellbeing and mental health. This represents an exciting new field for psychology, curation, and health interventions, suggesting a widely-accessible, cost-effective, and non-pharmaceutical means of regulating factors such as mood or anxiety. However, can similar impacts be found with online presentations? If so, this would open up positive outcomes to an even-wider population—a trend accelerating due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its promise, this question, and the underlying mechanisms of art interventions and impacts, has largely not been explored. Participants (N = 84) were asked to engage with one of two online exhibitions from Google Arts and Culture (a Monet painting or a similarly-formatted display of Japanese culinary traditions). With just 1–2 min exposure, both improved negative mood, state-anxiety, loneliness, and wellbeing. Stepdown analysis suggested the changes can be explained primarily via negative mood, while improvements in mood correlated with aesthetic appraisals and cognitive-emotional experience of the exhibition. However, no difference was found between exhibitions. We discuss the findings in terms of applications and targets for future research.

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When experienced in-person, engagement with art has been associated—in a growing body of evidence—with positive outcomes in wellbeing and mental health. This represents an exciting new field for psychology, curation, and health interventions, suggesting a widely-accessible, cost-effective, and non-pharmaceutical means of regulating factors such as mood or anxiety. However, can similar impacts be found with online presentations? If so, this would open up positive outcomes to an even-wider population—a trend becoming accelerated due to the current Covid-19 pandemic. Despite its promise, this question, and the underlying mechanisms of art interventions and impacts, has largely not been explored. Participants (N = 84) were asked to engage one of two online exhibitions from Google Arts and Culture (a Monet painting or a similarly-formatted display of Japanese culinary traditions). With just 1-2 minutes’ exposure, both improved negative mood, state-anxiety, loneliness, and wellbeing. Stepdown analysis suggested the changes can be explained primarily via negative mood, while improvements in mood correlated with aesthetic appraisals and cognitive-emotional experience of the exhibition. However, no difference was found between exhibitions. We discuss the findings in terms of applications and targets for future research.

The use of art installations to mediate people’s responses toward societal challenges— climate change, refugees, general prosocialness—is emerging as a main interest for arts institutions, artists, policy, and, recently, empirical study. However, there is still much need for data regarding whether and in what ways we might find detectable change. Even more, important questions concern whether typical methods, with two data points and theoretical question constructs, can reliably detect subtle impacts and, even if we do find change, how long effects last—a question which is almost completely unanswered in empirical research. We assessed an exhibition focused on power imbalances and acceptance for refugees, employing both a pre-post design (Study 1) and (Study 2) a daily diary method, which tracked participants’ reports, over two weeks, regarding how they had actually felt or acted each day and employing multilevel modeling to assess estimating changes from a first baseline week. The pre-post paradigm detected some reduction in self-assessed xenophobia and increased negative mood. However, effects were small/inconsistent with also some intriguing suggestions that people self-assessed as less empathic/prosocial than before visiting. The diary detected, inversely, several significant quadratic trends involving increased empathic concern and prosocialness-related thoughts and actions, but which returned to baseline by the next day. Only ‘trying to consider others feelings’ and ‘reflecting about oneself’ showed increases into the following week. Although non- significant, the diary changes also suggested some negative relations with the hypothetical self- assessment answers for the same questions, within participants, providing intriguing findings for much future research