Negativity bias in attending to visual art

Human perception is inclined towards detecting and attending to negative stimuli – a bias potentially rooted in evolutionary pressures. We investigated whether this bias also exists in the perception of visual art. Study 1 established stimulus norms for 60 selected artworks. One-hundred-five participants rated each artwork for artistic value, affective valence and arousal. We also included objective measures of artwork fame and image complexity. Principal-component analysis yielded three orthogonal dimensions at item-level: Aesthetic Stimulation (image complexity, artistic value, arousal), Artistic Prominence (fame, artistic value, arousal), and Negativity (negative affective valence). Study 2 was preregistered and employed these components to predict artwork-viewing times and post-stimulus ratings in a new sample of 324 participants whose general knowledge of the arts was assessed via Cotter et al. (2023)’s Aesthetic Fluency scale. Following self-paced viewing, participants rated each of the 60 artworks for personal liking and familiarity. Analyses revealed that all three item-related components independently increased artwork-viewing times. Emotionally more negative artworks were indeed viewed for longer, confirming that negativity holds perceivers’ attention. This effect did not reliably interact with participants’ Aesthetic Fluency. Moreover, in spite of increasing viewing times, negatively-valenced artworks were rated lower for liking and familiarity, highlighting a negativity-specific dissociation between attentional engagement and personal appreciation. We conclude that the negativity bias also extends to the perception of cultural artefacts that have no immediate survival value.