Art and Psychological Well-Being: Linking the Brain to the Aesthetic Emotion

Art and Psychological Well-Being: Linking the Brain to the Aesthetic Emotion

Empirical studies suggest that art improves health and well-being among individuals. However, how aesthetic appreciation affects our cognitive and emotional states to promote physical and psychological well-being is still unclear. In this review, we consider the idea that the positive emotional output elicited from the aesthetic experience affects mood, and indirectly promotes health and well-being. First, we examine evidence that arts promoting well-being involve art museums, healthcare settings, and education. Second, we review some neuroimaging studies addressing aesthetic experience and emotional processing. In particular, we leveraged advances in neuroaesthetics to explore different hypotheses about the determinants of aesthetic pleasure during art reception, in the attempt to clarify how experiencing art promotes well-being. Finally, we propose research on aesthetic experience and psychophysiological measures of stress, with the goal of promoting a focused use of art as a tool for improving well-being and health.

INTRODUCTION

Aesthetic experience concerns the appreciation of aesthetic objects and the resulting pleasure. Such pleasure is not derived from the utilitarian properties of the objects but linked to the intrinsic qualities of the aesthetic objects themselves. Hence, the aesthetic pleasure is disinterested. Aesthetic experiences can arise from the appreciation of human artifacts, such as artworks (e.g., poetry, sculpture, music, visual arts, etc.) or aesthetic natural objects like sunsets or mountain vista. In this review, we refer to aesthetic experiences associated with the appreciation of artworks, particularly visual arts.

Aesthetic experiences are offered by multiple contexts, (e.g., museums, galleries, churches, etc.). Several psychological perspectives considered aesthetic experience as a rewarding process and suggested a link between aesthetic experience and pleasure. Recent studies suggest the arts can promote health and psychological well- being and offer a therapeutic tool for many, e.g., adolescents, elderly, and vulnerable individuals. Aesthetic experience has been associated with mindfulness meditation, as it leads to enhancing the capability of perceptually engaging with an object. However, how aesthetic experience affects cognitive and emotional states and promotes physical and psychological well-being is a matter of debate. Several theoretical models have been proposed, suggesting alternating key roles for cognitive or emotional facets of the aesthetic experience. A common theme in the models is that the aesthetic evaluation of an artwork is the result of bottom-up stimulus properties and top-down cognitive appraisals. The result affects mood, therefore promoting health and well-being.

In this vein, neuroimaging studies highlighted that immediate emotional responses to artwork and low-intensity enduring changes in affective states are associated with recruitment of brain circuitry involved in emotion regulation, pleasure, and reward. Thus, for instance, images rated as beautiful elicit activity in reward-related areas, such as the medial orbitofrontal cortex, and are associated with higher reward value than those rated as ugly. Moreover, the activation of an emotion processing network comprising the ventral and the dorsal striatum, the anterior cingulate and medial temporal areas has been associated with the transient mood changes in response to happy and sad classical music.

Here, we review evidence showing that arts promote well-being across several domains, and discuss the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience, emotional processing, pleasure, and reward. In particular, we assess the idea that a common physiological mechanism underlies aesthetic processing in multiple places for experiencing art. Implications for therapeutic and educational uses of art are discussed.