Art can be a powerful, accessible, cost-effective, and nonpharmacological tool to reduce both pain and stress in everyday life.
When it comes to visual art as a tool for pain reduction, findings are mixed: beautiful paintings have the potential to decrease pain perception (de Tommaso et al., 2008) however, Mitchell et al. (2008) did not find that visual art influences pain tolerance or perceived control over pain. Therefore, the question remains whether beautiful visual art can really influence pain and stress experience.
Due to the sensory and affective component of pain and stress (Villemure & Bushnell, 2009), as well as the affective and cognitively engaging nature of visual art (Leder et al., 2004; Pelowski et al., 2017), we argue that art can be a beneficial tool in this regard.
In our study, we asked people (N=45) to select artworks that they found movingly beautiful and not beautiful—due to the private and personal nature of aesthetic experiences (Leder et al., 2016)—and compared these artworks to a neutral stimulus (a grey screen) in a within-subject design on different days. We investigated whether the aesthetic quality of the artworks has the potential to alter pain and stress perception– induced by a cold pressor test. Our findings are discussed in terms of subjective components of pain, and stress perception, as well as physiological (electrocardiogram, electrodermal activity), and endocrine (salivary alpha-amylase and cortisol) measures.