Art

Gore and colleagues studied the effects of seeing art on anxiety among cancer patients.  They report that they compared anxiety levels for “three groups (participants who observed an electronic selection of artwork with and without guided discussion, and a control group that did not engage in either dedicated art observation activity).  . . .  [average] anxiety scores were significantly lower among those who participated in guided art observation, compared to [the  control group]. . . .

Duran-Barraza and colleagues evaluated how titles influence responses to artistic photography.  They report that “Conceptual information is central to the field of artistic photography. . . . we investigated whether artist's conceptual titles affected viewers’ interest in artistic photographs. Experiment 1 showed that adding artist's conceptual titles increased both the rated liking of and interest in the photographs, whereas adding a descriptive title had no effect.