🩸 How Art Helps You Process Pain

New research explains our craving for creative suffering

“Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

~ James Baldwin

There’s a certain fascination in human psychology with painful stories. News media focus on natural disasters, plane crashes, and political turmoil because it captures attention for prolonged periods.

In most cases, there is a limit to this fascination though. Most of us avoid looking at real-life horror because it comes with a risk of lasting trauma. Indeed, news media often censor or block photos that are too graphic. Even mainstream sports media avoid showing replays of injuries that are deemed too distressing.

But there may be one interesting exception to this rule: art.

When we’re choosing our next show on Netflix or next novel to read, it’s common to gravitate toward horror, drama, or tragedy genres. These portray painful, traumatic, and often gory events in great recreated detail. They typically won’t show direct visual images of real-life horrors, but will instead introduce some psychological distance with artistic retellings or reproductions of those horrors.

Some of the most popular paintings and sculptures in the world fit this same category. Think of the multiple famous paintings of Judith Beheading Holofernes (e.g. Caravaggio and Gentileschi) or The Massacre Of The Innocents (e.g. Peter Paul Rubens). These are extreme images of blood, violence, and infanticide, and yet people will visit art galleries specifically to see them in person. Many religious Christians even have a crucified Jesus in their living room.

So what does the latest research say about our strange craving for pain and trauma in artistic imagery?

🖼️ Why is trauma in art so compelling?

In a study released last week, researchers pulled together a series of paintings and photos depicting emotionally distressing events such as child labor, physical fighting, and military attacks on civilians. Each of the events had a painting version and a photo version that were visually similar to each other but differed in their artistic quality. As confirmed by participant ratings, the paintings were consistently perceived as more artistic than their photo equivalents.

For comparison, the researchers also had a series of emotionally positive paintings and photos, including a family enjoying a meal together and people planting trees.

The researchers showed 200 participants descriptions for each of the individual images. After reading a description, participants could choose whether or not they wanted to see the image. If they responded yes, the image would appear, while if they responded no, they’d transition directly to the next description.

Unsurprisingly, people were significantly more willing to look at emotionally positive images compared to negative images, and it didn’t matter whether they were paintings or photos. However, the image form did matter when looking specifically at negative content: participants were significantly more likely to look at distressing images when they knew it was a painting rather than a photo.

The researchers repeated their experiment, this time forcing people to choose between seeing a painting vs photo version of each of the emotionally negative events described. Participants had a significant preference for the artwork over the photography, selecting the paintings 57% of the time.

In addition to their overall choice preferences, participants also spent longer looking at paintings than photos. The artistic paintings captured attention for longer than the photos did, and negative images held attention longer than positive images.

To work out what explained people’s inclination toward emotionally distressing paintings, the researchers asked participants to rate each image along 11 key dimensions including how moving the image was, how aesthetically pleasing it was, and how much it felt like an emotional cost to engage with it.

Compared to photos, paintings were rated as significantly more aesthetically pleasing and less emotionally costly. No differences were found in how moving the images felt, how much compassion they evoked, or how much moral reflection they stimulated.

When an image was aesthetically pleasing or thought-provoking, this was an all-round positive predictor of engagement regardless of whether it was a painting or photo. Importantly though, emotional cost was a significantly stronger deterrent for photos than paintings. If participants expected an image to be high in its emotional cost, they were more discouraged from viewing it when it was an upcoming photo rather than a painting.

In other words, while all images of distressing events can move people and evoke compassionate instincts, artistic images do it with less threat of personal emotional cost. If you view horrors like beheadings or infanticide in paintings from Caravaggio or Rubens, you can be moved to stimulating moral reflections. But if you view them in online photos and videos, there’s a risk of creating distressing memories that are difficult to shake off.

As a general rule, art provides a safe playground for exploring our darker fears, instincts, and experiences.

⭐️ Takeaway tips

#1. Art can help you manage difficult emotions

• Negative emotions are part of being human, but it’s important to manage them well. One healthy option is to explore those emotions in art. We feel less alone in our suffering when we notice that others have lived through the same challenge, and artists are skilled at recreating common human experiences in ways that are thought-provoking and beautiful. Next time you feel dejected, wistful, or heartbroken, seek artwork that speaks to how you’re feeling. It may completely reshape how you’re thinking about your experience.

#2. Find safe ways to tackle emotional avoidance

• Sometimes, negative emotions can scare us away from important challenges or experiences that would benefit us. A common example is anxiety about public speaking or fear of rejection. They can be more specific too: I recently got caught in a sudden episode of vertigo while on a ski lift with no safety bar. Instead of letting these experiences dictate complete behavioral avoidance (e.g. refusing all ski lifts), find safer opportunities for reliving your sensations (e.g. trying the less rickety ski lifts) until you build up the confidence to tackle the bigger challenges. Art is one helpful medium that allows you to explore and process challenging emotions in a low-stakes environment.

#3. Be attentive to beauty and meaning each day

• With so much addictive news and content occupying our attention, it’s easy to lose track of the things we find truly beautiful or meaningful in life. I like to set myself a challenge to see or experience at least one thing each day that gives me a sense of awe or poetic beauty. It could be as simple as dew-laced leaves on my morning walk or an unfamiliar piece of music. These small moments can help you escape the echo chamber of your own head and reconnect you to the world around you.

“All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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