Exploratory Research on Influences of Style-based Categorization on Affective Evaluations of Paintings

Abstract

This study explores how style-based categorization of paintings influences affective evaluations of paintings through two psychological experiments. Participants were non-experts in art, and experimental stimuli were Vincent van Gogh’s and Paul Gauguin’s paintings. In Experiment 1, participants first learned how to distinguish the two styles and then rated the prototypicalities and their affective impressions of the paintings. In Experiment 2, participants rated their affective impressions of the paintings without undergoing a style-learning phase. Comparisons of the results of the two experiments demonstrate that style-based categorization of paintings makes affective evaluations of paintings become similar across people. The comparisons also helped us generate the hypothesis that a person’s preference for a style of painting influences his/her preference for a newly encountered painting of the style with an intensity that equals the product of the person’s preference for the style and the painting’s prototypicality to that style.