Negativity bias in attending to visual art

Human perception is inclined towards detecting and attending to negative stimuli, a phenomenon known as negativity bias. While extensively studied in various domains of human cognition, its manifestation in the attentional engagement with visual art remains largely unexplored. The present study (105 participants) established how viewing times on a sample of 60 different artworks (digitised paintings taken from openly available sources) relate to subjective ratings of artistic value, emotional valence and arousal. Estimates of each painting’s general artistic prominence featured as an additional control predictor in the analyses. We found that paintings that are judged to be of higher artistic value tend to attract proportionally longer viewing times. Independently of this, paintings that are rated as emotionally more negative attract longer viewing times than emotionally more positive paintings. The latter confirms a negativity bias in attending to visual art, adding evidence for the general pervasiveness of such a bias in human cognition.