Mixed Emotional Structure of Paintings

Mixed emotions are strongly linked to aesthetic emotions, which involve both positive and negative emotional experiences. Mixed emotions are aroused as complex emotional reactions to artworks. However, the mixed emotional experiences aroused by paintings have received scant attention in empirical science. This study seeks to quantify the intensity of mixed emotional experiences aroused by paintings and explore their relationships with the emotional and categorical characteristics of the paintings as well as with aesthetic emotion. In online surveys, 948 participants rated 356 paintings across seven emotional scales: three for basic positive emotions (amusement, happiness, and pleasure), three for basic negative emotions (sadness, fear, and disgust), and one for aesthetics (beauty). The strong co-occurrences of aesthetic and basic negative emotions, such as “sad beauty,” were demonstrated using data-driven principal component analysis (PCA) and theory-driven quantifications with minimum index (MI). The couplings of basic positive and negative emotions were also quantified using MI and their intensities were associated with the aesthetic emotion, albeit those couplings were relatively weak and not evident in the PCA. Furthermore, both qualitative and quantitative assessments of the paintings revealed that mixed emotional characteristics were distinctive between their negative emotional constituents. The contributions of mixed and negative emotions to aesthetic experiences have been discussed in philosophical aesthetics and art studies. This study provides empirical evidence and sheds new light on these philosophical questions.