Can a Brief Interaction With Online, Digital Art Improve Wellbeing? A Comparative Study of the Impact of Online Art and Culture Presentations on Mood, State-Anxiety, Subjective Wellbeing, and Loneliness

Abstract

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.

Slow looking at still art: The effect of manipulating audio context and image category on mood and engagement during an online slow looking exercise.

“…That participants experienced an increase in pleasantness and decrease in arousal supports the short-term mood improvement observed in participant feedback from online slow art events (Slow Art Day, 2021) as well as other studies that have indicated mood changes after art viewing in physical (Ho et al, 2015) and, more recently, online (Trupp et al, 2022) environments. But because the present study did not include a control condition that had participants viewing artworks for a more "average" viewing time of about 30 s (Carbon, 2017;J.…”

Examining the Flourishing Impacts of Repeated Visits to a Virtual Art Museum and the Role of Immersion

“…Although fewer studies have examined the flourishing benefits of digital art engagement than in-person art engagement, these initial studies do suggest that digital art engagement also positively affects flourishing. Viewing art on a computer has been associated with lowering negative mood (Cotter et al, under review;Trupp et al, 2021), increasing positive mood (Cotter et al, 2022;Igdalova & Chamberlain, 2022), reducing pain levels (de Tommaso et al, 2018), and elevating overall well-being (Trupp et al, 2021). Given the well-documented impact of in-person art engagement on flourishing, we examine here whether digital art engagement has similar effects.…”

When the painting meets its musical inspiration: The impact of multimodal art experience on aesthetic enjoyment and subjective well-being in the museum.

“…Among the many reasons that have been provided to explain these well-being outcomes and the differential impacts of art type and context, aesthetic experience has been theorized to be key in how art viewing can impact psychological states, presumably through emotion regulation (Fancourt & Finn, 2019; Mastandrea et al, 2019; Trupp et al, 2022) and the experience of pleasure and the activation of the reward network in the brain (Mastandrea, Fagioli, & Biasi, 2019). For instance, empirical evidence indicates that appreciation of beauty was found to promote well-being, increased positive emotions, and decreased negative emotions in a randomized controlled trial web-based intervention (Martínez-Martí et al, 2018).…”