Benefits of looking at art and cultural content online

Trupp and colleagues found there are significant benefits to looking at visual art and cultural content electronically, even very briefly: “When experienced in-person, engagement with art has been associated—in a growing body of evidence—with positive outcomes in wellbeing and mental health. . . . Participants [in this study] . . . were asked to engage with one of two online exhibitions from Google Arts and Culture (a Monet painting or a similarly-formatted display of Japanese culinary traditions). 

With just a 1-2 min exposure, both improved negative mood, state-anxiety, loneliness, and wellbeing. . . . improvements in mood correlated with aesthetic appraisals and cognitive-emotional experience of the exhibition. . . .

The ‘non-art’ stimulus. . . . explored a diagram in the shape of a bento box, containing photos and facts introducing the viewer to the history and traditions of Japanese food, and included images of food and food-related activities, such as harvesting or drinking.”

MacKenzie Trupp, Giacomo Bignardi, Kirren Chana, Eva Specker, and Matthew Pelowski.  2022. “Can a Brief Interaction with Online, Digital Art Improve Wellbeing?  A Comparative Study of the Impact of Online Art and Culture Presentations on Mood, State-Anxiety, Subjective Wellbeing, and Loneliness.”  Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.782033