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It has long been believed in Western thought that in expressing our emotions in art, we come to understand them more deeply. This notion was the central theme of the intellectual and historical movement of Romanticism (Oatley, 2003), which we discussed in Chapter 1, and which we will use to organize our treatment of emotional expression in art. Artists themselves often understand their art as a mode of expressing and understanding emotions. The poet William Wordsworth said this about poetry:

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced and does itself actually exist in the mind.

(Wordsworth, 1802, p. 611)

The position was put succinctly by Martha Graham, the great dancer and choreographer: “The difference between the artist and the non-artist is not the greater capacity for feeling. The secret is that the artist can objectify, can make apparent the feelings we all have” (cit. Gardner, 1993, p. 298). The Romantic idea translates into four hypotheses about the communication of emotion in art. The first is that sometimes we experience emotions that we do not consciously understand, and that prompts us to explore them by expressing them in art. Are our emotions sometimes unclear? Oatley and Duncan (1992) found that the proportion of everyday emotion incidents recorded in structured diaries that had some aspect that participants did not understand varied between 5 and 25% in different samples. Many emotional experiences have an inchoate quality (Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987). A principal aim of artistic expression is to explore such unarticulated emotions in the different languages of art, including the visual, the musical, and the linguistic.

A second claim of the Romantic idea is that this exploration involves creative expression. Emotions tend to occur when expectations are not met, or when plans meet vicissitudes, or when we have no ready answer to some pressing concern. Thus they often demand a creative response (Averill & Nunley, 1992). Art is a creative activity of expressing, and thereby understanding, such emotions, as revealed in the quotations of William Wordsworth and Martha Graham. Djkic, Oatley, and Peterson (2006) found that by comparing the words used in interviews by fiction writers and physicists, the writers were (probably unconsciously) preoccupied by emotions, particularly negative emotions, in ways that the physicists were not. To investigate further the relation of emotions to creativity, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) and his students interviewed 91 exceptionally creative people, including many artists. One of the themes that emerged is indeed

that creative expression arises out of emotional experience. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from Hilde Domin, a leading German poet, in her seventies at the time of the interview. In her poetry, she says:

[The emotion] gets fulfilled . . . it is a kind of catalyst . . . . You are freed for a time from the emotion. And the next reader will take the place of the author, isn’t it so? If he identifies with the writing he will become, in his turn, the author.

(Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p. 245)

A third hypothesis that derives from the Romantic idea is that artistic expression often itself takes on themes and dynamic forms of emotions. For example, if you take to painting while enraged in the aftermath of a bitter breakup, your painting might have emotional tones of your rage and despair. Fiction that you write about a tragic childhood might center upon themes of loss and longing.

Further evidence of this third proposition, not so much in terms of themes as of dynamics, has been offered for music by Gabrielsson and Juslin (2001) and Juslin and Laukka (2003). They observe that the voice and music share many emotionally expressive properties, with acoustic features that the performer enacts, such as tempo, loudness, timbre, and pitch. This may account for how instruments such as the violin, cello, organ, the slide guitar, and saxophone can resemble the human voice. In the words of the famous composer, Richard Wagner, “The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice.” The philosopher Susanne Langer arrived at a similar conclusion: “Because the forms of human feeling are much more congruent with musical forms than with forms of language, music can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach” (1957, p. 235). In a recent analysis of the cues that people use to infer emotion from the voice and music, Juslin and Laukka (2003) found support for the claim that emotion is communicated in the voice and in music with similar acoustic parameters. They found that tempo, loudness, and pitch were used by listeners of vocal communication and music alike to infer that anger, sadness, happiness, and tenderness were being communicated.

A final hypothesis inspired by Romanticism is that readers or spectators of art should experience emotions that are communicated in art. Oatley’s (2012) book, The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories, is about how fiction embodies themes both of characters’ emotions and of the reader’s own emotions. It is a hybrid book: a seven-part short story written especially for the book, together with psychological discussions of the emotions of each part.

People respond emotionally to the emotional content of art (e.g., Lipps, 1962). We experience the emotions of protagonists in novels or films based on human action (Tan, 1996). We soar toward the heavens in the vaulted space of a great cathedral. Kreitler and Kreitler (1972) have even found that 84% of the time visitors to museums will unwittingly imitate in their bodies the postures conveyed in sculptures.

How accurate are we in recognizing the emotion communicated in art? Within the domain of music, Gabrielsson and Juslin (2003) and Juslin and Laukka (2003) have reviewed studies in which a performer was asked to sing a brief melody with no words and attempt to communicate anger, fear, happiness, sadness, joy, and on occasion tenderness or love. The listener was then asked, in a forced- choice paradigm, to choose the word from a list of words that best matches the emotion conveyed in the performance. Across over a dozen studies of this kind, listeners on average achieved accuracy rates of about 70%, which is comparable to the accuracy with which we perceive emotion in the face and voice.