The Psychology of Art-Viewing

Abstract A substantial body of research exists exploring the relationship between aesthetic engagement and well-being. Much of this involves the benefits associated with creativity and art-making. This chapter concerns perspectives on the psychology of art appreciation, specifically our understanding of interactions with visual art. In terms of art-viewing, well-being impacts have been described in numerous contexts and populations, from the social benefits of art viewed in a gallery to the transformative personal reflections of inmates viewing images in prisons. This diversity not only points to the potency of art appreciation in influencing how we feel, it also arguably reflects the challenges associated with defining, conceptualizing, and measuring encounters with artworks as necessitated by experimentation. Qualitative research offers a different set of tools for understanding human mental life. One such approach is Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, a method which foregrounds the idiographic inductive exploration of personal subjective experience. We report findings of a study in which IPA was used to explore the experience of looking at a painting, demonstrating the different kinds of understandings such an approach may contribute.