The idea of this pilot experiment within the context of the “Art in Hospitals” project was to
explore the fruitfulness and future perspectives for integrating psychophysiological methods
to the ethnographic approach so far implemented in the project. As a pilot study it serves to
open the doors to experimental avenues that can support the ethnographic investigation.
Therefore in order to form a basis for applications of these methodologies in future studies in
the field, this pilot was concentrated in one of the initial premises of the project, which
intended to challenge current recommendations for art in hospitals. Most of these guidelines
favor figurative over abstract art, based on ideas leaning to the emotional congruence theory,
which would claim that abstract art leads to ambiguity and therefore it could augment the
current emotional base-line of an already stressed patient. The early ethnographic studies of
the “Art in Hospitals” project challenged this perspective by investigating the positive or
negative effects of “lower-level” specific features (e.g.: bright colors vs. darker, contrast,
predominant shapes) independent of whether they were present in abstract or figurative art,
which as such could not be said to have universal positive or negative effects respectively. In
this sense it was retained necessary to assess whether significant differences can be detected
in cognitive processes when processing figurative or abstract art that has been manifestly
reported as pleasant or unpleasant by the subject – by providing a sample of stimuli that could
statistically contain both liked and disliked art pieces in two conditions (abstract and
figurative), under the assumption that it is not, abstract or figurative art per se, that makes the
difference. In other words, one may expect a significant difference in cognitive processing
between the abstract and figurative condition, but this difference in processing mode (or
effect) would not have necessarily to correlate with the subject’s aesthetic experience,
whether he or she enjoyed the painting or not.