Landscape of the Soul. A Psychosemantic Study of Paintings Perception

Psychosemantic methods were used to explore categorical structure of perception of landscapes that are viewed as artist's emotional states projections. Subjects were presented works of famous Russian artists. In the first series of experiment respondents were offered to estimate the type of mood each of the 100 landscapes evoked using a 7-item scale. In the second series mood descriptions evoked by landscapes were compared. As a result of data analysis, factor structures were indicated as well as factors scales loadings. Semantic spaces were built for each individual matrix. The results show that semantic spaces of landscapes and their verbal descriptions differ in number of dimensions (number of factors, their contents, and indicated factors). The majority of the "non verbal" factors are unipolar. Verbal semantic spaces have a bigger number of dimensions than nonverbal ones and are mostly bipolar. These findings indicate that natural language of emotional states description is more differentiated than image language. The latter expresses a holistic feeling and thus has a stronger emotional influence.

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