Database of Expressionist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist paintings: Affective norms for 60 art pieces

Abstract

Modern painters’ art is not only different from canvas created earlier, but also shows high internal variability. Being aware of the conditions arising from art history, we used paintings from three art movements—Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Expressionism, to see if we are able to respond to claims made by art theorists by using methods specific to social sciences, and validate the paintings as stimuli which might evoke different emotional reaction based on the movement they were created in. We wanted to conduct an exploratory analysis comparing the mean assessment of valence, arousal, and dominance among the three art movements. A total of 60 different paintings were selected (20 for each art movement) showing figurative works and visible human figures. They were assessed on five different affective scales: valence, arousal, dominance, origin, and subjective significance with use of Self-Assessment Manikins. The results showed expected differences in affective reactions to Expressionist paintings compared with those of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist ones. Therefore, we provided the very first dataset of emotional stimuli with validated affective norms, categorised by the art movement that they were created in and ready to be used in future experimental studies.