Serene arts the effect of personal unsettledness and of paintings narrative structure on personality

EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF THE ARTS, Vol 30(2) 183-193, 2012 SERENE ARTS: THE EFFECT OF PERSONAL UNSETTLEDNESS AND OF PAINTINGS’ NARRATIVE STRUCTURE ON PERSONALITY MAJA DJIKIC KEITH OATLEY JORDAN B PETERSON University of Toronto ABSTRACT Previous research has demonstrated that art can produce some variation in self-reported personality traits The present experiment addressed two questions First, does visual art cause greater fluctuations in personality for unsettled or serene individuals, and second, unsettled individuals respond more to art as a function of its narrative structure? Participants (N = 61) completed a set of questionnaires, then viewed a series of paintings, Giotto’s Seven Vices, either unmodified to exhibit high narrative structure, or modified to exhibit low narrative structure, and then filled another set of questionnaires The results show that unsettled individuals experienced significantly less fluctuation of personality across conditions, and that in the condition of low narrative coherence, serene individuals experienced significantly more personality fluctuations than unsettled individuals The results suggest that unsettled persons may need more narrative coherence in the art they engage with, while serene individuals may remain open to less-structured and more ambiguous art Developmental psychologists have long known that periods of increased variability can precede developmental transitions, a process that has been found to be relevant for changes in generally stable systems such as personality (Vallacher, 183 Ó 2012, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc doi: http://dx.org/10.2190/EM.30.2.e http://baywood.com 184 / DJIKIC, OATLEY AND PETERSON Read, & Novak, 2002) According to research on dynamical systems theory, an important factor in predicting whether a change in a stable system will happen is a type of discontinuity in the system called “critical fluctuation” (Bak & Chen, 1991; Schiepek, Eckert, & Weihrauch, 2003; van der Maas & Molenaar, 1992), which must be reached if the system is to be reorganized into a new configuration Besides movements through developmental stages, perturbation can be produced by traumas such as those that give rise to post-traumatic stress syndrome (Bonanno, 2004), by psychotherapeutic interventions (Hayes et al., 2007), by dramatic life transitions sometimes called “adversarial growth” (Linley & Joseph, 2004; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004), and by stressful life events (Oatley & Djikic, 2002) Recent research shows that art can also produce increases in the variability of personality traits (Djikic, Oatley, Zoeterman & Peterson, 2009a, 2009b; Djikic, 2011), and these results point toward a path by which art might prompt personality changes This article addresses two related questions The first is whether art is more likely to cause fluctuations in unsettled individuals or in those who are more serene On one hand, individuals who suffer from “crystallization of discontent” (Baumeister, 1994), and who find themselves in a state of distress and dissonance that often precedes change, may be more fragile when exposed to other stimuli that can produce further destabilization However, it can also be argued that unlike what happens in response to trauma or during genetically prompted developmental growth, individuals usually choose to expose themselves to art voluntarily If we present people with pieces of art as experimental stimuli, individuals who already feel unsettled may defensively maintain their representations of personality, while serene individuals may let themselves experience and represent fluctuations of personality produced by art The first hypothesis that will be tested in this study is that when exposed to art, unsettled individuals will experience significantly less personality variability than serene individuals The second issue we address in this paper is whether unsettled and serene individuals show preferences for works of visual art in terms of levels of narrative description that different kinds of picture invite Disruptions due to personal uncertainty can lead to compensatory conviction (McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001), while a threat to one’s sense of self may provoke “hardening of categories” (Kelly, 1955), and “hardening of attitudes” (Altemeyer, 1994) In such cases, a response to distress caused by an uncertainty may lead to a need for structured ideas about who one is, about what one thinks about the world and oneself (Peterson, 1999) The less narrative structure there is in a picture, the more threatening it may become for unsettled individuals, who may prefer more structure and try to stabilize their sense of self The second hypothesis, then, proposes that it is serene, rather than unsettled, individuals who will experience more personality variability in response to works of visual art with less narrative structure SERENE ARTS / 185 The works of visual art we chose for this study were Giotto’s (1267-1337) cycle of Seven Vices, frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy The Vices, each represented as a single figure in a separate painting, are Desperation, Envy, Infidelity, Injustice, Wrath, Inconstancy, and Foolishness These paintings are not portraits but pictures that invite viewers to observe them, and to tell themselves a certain kind of narrative story about them We think it is safe to say that the intention of the painter was to induce in his viewers a repulsion from each Vice he depicted, and a disposition to avoid succumbing to it An example is Envy, depicted as a woman standing within the plinth of a building She extends her right hand in the shape of a claw, while her left hand grasps a bag of money Coming from her mouth is a serpent that has turned round and is about to bite her eye The bottom of her long dress is enveloped in flames The narratives we might tell ourselves are not just about each picture individually, but about the series So, for instance, we might think that whereas in the Vice of Envy we torment ourselves, in the Vice of Injustice we torment others Although Giotto’s unmodified paintings are not realistic in the nineteenthcentury sense, they present recognizable human figures, about whom viewers can tell themselves narratives, of the kind described above We have chosen to think about the pictures we presented here in terms of the coherence of narratives they suggest, prompted by the titles of the pictures, “Desperation,” “Envy,” and so on, because we want to relate our results to previous studies in which we have measured personality change in response to manipulations of more explicit forms of narrative in a short story (Djikic et al., 2009a, 2009b) Equally, however, we could think of the manipulation we make here in terms of visual art that is representational as compared with visual art that is less representational and more abstract To vary the level of narrative structure (the pictures’ representational quality), we presented reproductions of Giotto’s paintings either unmodified, or modified by exchanging their diagonally opposite quadrants For instance, in the modified version of Envy, the woman figure was no longer presented whole, but cut into four pieces The section that shows her claw-like hand and the serpent, originally the top left quadrant, was moved to the bottom right quadrant, and its place was taken by half of the depiction of the flames enveloping the bottom right hand part of the figure’s long dress Our hypotheses were: (a) that serene individuals would experience more personality fluctuation than unsettled individuals across the comparison between unmodified and modified pictures, and (b) that participants’ level of unsettledness would interact with whether the pictures were unmodified or modified such that the modified pictures (with less narrative structure and less of a representational quality) would prompt less fluctuation of personality in unsettled than in serene individuals 186 / DJIKIC, OATLEY AND PETERSON METHOD Participants Sixty-one first year undergraduates at the University of Toronto participated in the study (50 females, mean age = 18.9 years) All participants were treated in accordance with American Psychological Association and Canadian Psychological Association’s ethical standard for treatment of human participants All were awarded course credit for their participation Procedure Participants were ushered into a room and seated at a desk with a computer To begin (Time 1), all participants filled out a package of thirteen questionnaires, which included Demographics Questionnaire, Emotions Checklist, and the Big Five Inventory (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) Participants were then randomly assigned by a computer program to one of the two experimental conditions (unmodified or modified paintings), and they viewed the pictures There were 33 participants in the Unmodified Paintings condition, and 28 participants in the Modified Paintings condition Following this, at Time 2, participants completed five questionnaires, which included another administration of the Big Five Inventory (John et al., 1991) It was hoped that the multiplicity of questionnaires, both before and after participants had viewed the pictures, would mask the purpose of the experiment and prevent demand characteristics Participants were then fully debriefed Instruments Paintings Giotto’s seven Vices are in frescoes of slightly different sizes, and we maintained their relative sizes on the computer screen All paintings were shown on black background All participants were first shown the name of the cycle (“Giotto’s Seven Vices”) for five seconds Then each of the paintings, with its title, “Desperation,” “Envy,” and so on, at the top, was shown for one minute each Participants in one group (N = 33) viewed Unmodified Paintings Participants in a second group (N = 28) viewed Modified Paintings, for which the modification was that the picture was cut into four rectangular quadrants, and the diagonally opposite quadrants crossed The experimental condition of the study, then, was to compare viewers of Unmodified Paintings versus Modified Paintings for which, apart from the transpositions of parts, other aspects of the paintings were held constant SERENE ARTS / 187 Demographics Questionnaire Participants were asked for their gender, age, and number of years they had spent speaking English in English-speaking environments The Big Five Inventory This is a 44-item scale (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) measuring the BigFive dimensions of personality—extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability/neuroticism, and openness It uses short descriptive phrases prototypical of each of the Big Five dimensions (John & Srivastava, 1999) In these items individuals are asked whether they see themselves as someone who, for example, “is talkative,” or “tends to find fault with others,” and the responses are scored on 5-item Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, = strongly agree) John et al (1991) reported test-retest correlations (based on 6-week interval) between 0.65 and 0.83 Emotions Questionnaire, Including Unsettledness In order to measure the state level of how unsettled participants were, a questionnaire was administered in which 10 different emotions were named, and these included Unsettledness The other nine emotions were sadness, anxiety, happiness, boredom, anger, fearfulness, contentment, excitement, and awe Participants were required to indicate, on an 11-point scale (0 = The least intensity I’ve ever experienced, 10 = The most intensity I’ve ever experienced), how much they feel each emotion at that moment The measure of Unsettledness was people’s 0–10 score on this scale Artistic Merit and Level of Interest Following the viewing experience (just before Time questionnaires) participants were asked to report how Artistic and how Interesting they found the pictures they had seen, on Likert scales from to 10 (0 = Not at all, 10 = Extremely) This was done to check whether the manipulation of the paintings (Unmodified versus Modified) degraded the artistic merit of the painting too much If there were a significant difference between the sets of paintings on how Artistic they were perceived by the participants, it would add a confounding variable to the causal effect of narrative coherence on personality Also, unless both sets of paintings were equally Interesting, the level of interest would confound our results as well 188 / DJIKIC, OATLEY AND PETERSON Dependent Measure Personality Change Index This was constructed to measure the sum of the changes in traits at an individual level Previous research (Djikic et al., 2009a; Djikic, 2011) suggests that impact of art of personality is idiosyncratic rather than directional, and that aggregating particular traits across individuals could drown out changes that are present on an individual level A Personality Change Index was calculated by regressing scores for the five traits at Time (assessed with the Big-Five Inventory) on scores for the five traits at Time 1, followed by summing the absolute values of standardized residuals over the five traits Absolute values were used since there was no prediction about the direction of trait change The composite index thus created was sensitive enough to detect idiosyncratic changes in personality profile that would otherwise be lost in the overall variability of individual responses, as well as preventing potentially inflating p-values due to a large number of traits tested The Personality Change Index therefore represents an overall idiosyncratic change in trait profile for each individual Another potential option for measuring instability in personality traits would be to see whether there was a destabilization at the item level of traits, which would result in reliability measures for trait scales (such as alphas) at Time being smaller than those at Time This measure was not pursued, however, since a change in self-representation on a particular trait need not necessitate unstable responses within that trait For example, a participant who feels more open as a consequence of viewing a painting at Time could consistently mark all the Openness items to represent this change So, while the participant would experience change, the degree to which the items on a scale cohered would remain stable, as would the reliability statistic for that scale RESULTS The mean and standard deviation of the Personality Change Index were 0.76 and 0.30, respectively Means, standard deviations, and reliability statistics for all five traits, at Time and Time are presented in Table 1, as well as correlations of traits at two times (across both conditions) In order to verify that Unmodified Pictures and Modified Pictures had equivalent artistic merit and level of interest, two independent sample t-tests were run They showed no significant differences (p > 0.2) for either how Artistic or how Interesting the pictures were in the two conditions A routine univariate analysis of the effect of gender on the dependent variable revealed an unexpected result There was a significant effect of gender on the Personality Change Index, F(1, 59) = 4.21, p < 0.05, R2 = 0.067, such that men experienced significantly more change (M = 0.92, SD = 0.41) than women (M = 0.72, SD = 0.26) SERENE ARTS / 189 Table Means, Standard Deviations, and Reliability Statistics for the Big-Five Traits, and Correlations between Time and Time Traits across Conditions Time Time M SD a M SD a r Extraversion 3.25 71 84 3.35 36 84 925 Agreeableness 3.54 58 75 3.35 28 80 953 Conscientiousness 3.40 56 74 3.54 33 77 864 Neuroticism 2.84 71 81 3.19 39 83 924 Openness 3.56 57 74 3.47 41 78 907 Given that our sample contained only 11 men we could not meaningfully run analyses on the male sample separately from the female sample.1 In a test of our first hypothesis, we found that Unsettledness and the Personality Change Index were correlated There was a strong and significant negative correlation (r = –0.39, p < 0.01) in the hypothesized direction It appears that the higher the level of Unsettledness of the participants, the less they were likely to experience change in their self-reported experience of personality traits To test our second hypothesis, that the level of Unsettledness would interact with the condition of Unmodified Paintings versus Modified Paintings such that more Unsettled participants would need more structural coherence to be open to change, we ran a univariate analysis with the condition (Unmodified Paintings versus Modified Paintings) as a fixed factor, and the level of Unsettledness as a covariate The results supported our hypothesis and showed a significant effect of these two variables on the Personality Change Index, F(2, 58) = 5.45, p < 0.01, R2 = 0.158 Figure displays predicted values of Personality Change Index at different levels of Unsettledness across the two conditions Serene participants increase, while highly unsettled participants decrease, on Personality Change Index when exposed to modified paintings We tested the differences by employing a tertiary split, dividing the sample into the groups with high, mid and low Unsettledness scores Serene participants (those who scored low on Unsettledness) had a significantly higher Personality Change Index when exposed to the Modified Paintings (which had lower narrative coherence and were less representational) t (20) = –2.15, p < 0.05 The All the analyses that are presented in the Results section were rerun on a sample that excluded the males, and the results remained unaffected 190 / DJIKIC, OATLEY AND PETERSON Figure Predicted Values of Personality Change Index across Condition (Unmodified Paintings vs Modified Paintings) and across three levels of Unsettledness: Low Unsettled (1 SD below the mean), Mid Unsettled (mean), and High Unsettled (1 SD above the mean) slopes for the mid and low Unsettledness samples remained non-significant across conditions However, testing within each condition, it was found that of those participants exposed to the Modified Paintings, individuals who scored high in Unsettledness had a significantly lower Personality Change Index than serene individuals, t (26) = –2.74, p < 05, while there were no such differences in the Unmodified Paintings condition As a test of discriminant validity, we have run univariate analyses with Condition as a fixed factor and each of the four other negative emotions measured (sadness, anxiety, boredom, fearfulness) as covariates, and found the results in each case to be non-significant DISCUSSION We found support for the hypothesis that individuals who were high on Unsettledness would experience less personality change when exposed to the Modified Paintings as compared with the Unmodified Paintings This is an interesting finding when considered in conjunction with the research showing that literature can induce variability in emotions of defensive individuals (Djikic et al., 2009b) The result points to a possibility that personality change may involve three steps: an instability of emotion, followed by an instability of SERENE ARTS / 191 personality, followed by a re-stabilization to another personality configuration Instability of emotion, however, leads to instability of personality only in some circumstances In more general terms, one might hypothesize, for instance, that a romance novel would lead to an instability of emotion (as we emotionally pursue the heroine’s goals of getting her man), and yet there might be little instability in personality because identity would be fortified rather than induced to fluctuate With different types of art, a defensive or unsettled individual, though emotionally moved, might choose to fortify their experience of identity, thus preventing any destabilizing fluctuations in their sense of self The second hypothesis, that the condition of Unmodified Paintings as compared with Modified Paintings would interact with Unsettledness, was supported too With the Modified Paintings, serene individuals (low in Unsettledness) experienced significantly more personality fluctuation than did individuals who were high in Unsettledness So when it comes to narrative structure—the representational quality—of a piece of art, it is the serene individuals who can allow themselves to loosen their experience of their personality in response to the unusual It would be interesting to examine further whether, in states of uncertainty or unsettledness, individuals spontaneously choose art pieces with structures that lend themselves to more coherent narrative description—for instance representational art—and whether there would be preferences across different arts (ballet versus modern interpretative dance; nineteenth century novels versus post-modern novels) Thinking further about this second hypothesis, we believe that those who viewed the pictures in this experiment engaged in what Bartlett (1932) called an “effort after meaning” (p 20) For those who saw Giotto’s Unmodified Paintings of the Vices, the meanings what was depicted would not necessarily have been obvious, but they would have been more straightforward than for those who saw the Modified Paintings Among those who saw the Modified Painting (with the same titles) attentional and cognitive resources may have been pressed further than for those who saw the Unmodified Paintings This may have raised such questions as (for instance in the Modified Painting of Envy): “I can see some elements, here, of envy: the claw-like hand, the snake biting at the face, but why have the parts been moved? Is it to show that vices like this are difficult to recognize within ourselves?” We didn’t ask our participants to say what they thought of the paintings they saw, but as we consider our results, we think that the extra cognitive effort, and the possibilities of more disturbing conclusions with the Modified Paintings, may have contributed to promptings of serene people to make larger changes in their personality Perhaps the cognitive resources of the Unsettled people were already more occupied It is also important to keep in mind that what we have measured in this experiment are the self-reported personality ratings before and after exposure to art, rather than changes in behavior, emotion, or cognition While it is the case that the destabilization of self-representations often leads to the actual change in 192 / DJIKIC, OATLEY AND PETERSON personality (Hayes et al., 2007; Schiepek et al., 2003; Vallacher et al 2002), this does not mean that the kind of induction of variability into self-representation of personality induced by art will necessarily yield the same results All we have, at this point, is empirically supported short-term destabilization of personality, and then anecdotal reports of long-term change (Ross, 1999; Sabine & Sabine, 1983) The lines connecting the two need to be drawn empirically The experiment yielded one surprising finding, which is that men experienced significantly more variability when exposed to the paintings than women The finding that women more literary reading than men (National Endowment for the Arts, 2009) is usually taken to mean that they are more emotionally moved by literary works than are men The present study points that another gender gap could perhaps be measured during attendance to museums Perhaps men may be more moved by visual arts than women are Unfortunately, since our study included only 11 men, we are unable to draw any conclusions, but further study or replication of this gender gap, if it exists, would be of interest CONCLUSION The power of art to transform personality appears qualitatively different from personality change due to the effect of physical and psychological trauma, distress, religious conversion, and even psychotherapy One can envision it as a voluntary destabilization of one’s personality for purposes of exploration, a chance to strive for one’s “real” self at home, in a museum, or at a concert hall Understanding conditions under which art leads transformation may shed light not only on the process of personality change, but also the elusive meaning and function of art REFERENCES Altemeyer, B (1994) Reducing prejudice in right-wing authoritarians In M P Zanna & J M Olson (Eds.), The psychology of prejudice: The Ontario Symposium (pp 77-101) Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Bak, P., & Chen, K (1991) Self-organized criticality Scientific American, 264, 36-33 Bartlett, F C (1932) Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Baumeister, R F (1994) The crystallization of discontent in the process of major life change In T F Heatherton & J L Weinberger (Eds.), Can personality change? 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