The relationship between the activity of painting and performance of stereotyped and other stress-related behaviour was investigated in four captive Asian elephants at Melbourne Zoo, Australia. The activity involved the elephant being instructed to paint on a canvas by its keeper in front of an audience. Painting by elephants in zoos is commonly believed to be a form of enrichment, but this ass...

Usually it is accepted that human manifestations such as music or painting share a common artistic trait. However, very little is known about the genetic, behavioral, developmental and neurobiological basis of such a musical-pictorial "universal". In an attempt to approach commonalities and differences between the psychology of music and pictorial art in Experiment 1 we investigated the emotion...

BACKGROUND Psychological and social health of children with cancer may be severely affected by the disease and its treatment. Successive drawing by children can help them over time in terms of psychological and social adaptation. This study aimed to investigate the effects of drawing on depression in children with cancer undergoing chemotherapy. MATERIALS AND METHODS This quasi-experimental s...

Some paintings by renowned artists were drawn in inaccurate perspective, but the psychological effects of such technique on impression of paintings were not clarified. This study investigated the influence of information about inaccurate perspective on impression of paintings. Three famous paintings drawn in inaccurate perspective were used as stimuli. In two experiments, participants were aske...

The present study was conducted to investigate whether the calming effect induced by viewing traditional Chinese landscape paintings would make disengagement from that mental state more difficult, as measured by performance on a cognitive control task. In Experiment 1 we examined the subjective experience of viewing traditional Chinese landscape paintings vs. realistic oil landscape paintings i...

I measured preference for paintings (Renoir vs. Picasso or Kandinsky vs. Mondrian) in mice. In general mice did not display a painting preference except for two mice: one preferred Renoir to Picasso, and the other preferred Kandinsky to Mondrian. Thereafter, I examined discrimination of paintings with new mice. When exposure to paintings of one artist was associated with an injection of morphin...

Western and Chinese artists have different traditions in representing the world in their paintings. While Western artists start since the Renaissance to represent the world with a central perspective and focus on salient objects in a scene, Chinese artists concentrate on context information in their paintings, mainly before the mid-19th century. We investigated whether the different typical rep...

BACKGROUND Paintings have been used in Medical Humanities modules in Nepal at Manipal College of Medical Sciences and KIST Medical College. Detailed participant feedback about the paintings used, the activities carried out, problems with using paintings and the role of paintings in future modules has not been previously done. Hence the present study was carried out. METHODS The present module...

Understanding the emotional appeal of paintings is a significant research problem related to a↵ective image classification. The problem is challenging in part due to the scarceness of manually-classified paintings. Our work proposes to apply statistical models trained over photographs to infer the emotional appeal of paintings. Directly applying the learned models on photographs to paintings ca...

OBJECTIVE Artwork and psychiatric disorders are often linked. Accomplished artists with psychiatric disorders express themselves and their emotional distress through their works, and art therapists use the visual arts to help clients understand their problems and cope with them. There have been a number of psychiatric patients with no previous art training who produced artwork that many conside...