Bizarreness and Emotion Identification in Grete Stern Photomontages: Gender and Age Disparities

Abstract

Although the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is used to evaluate emotions (valence, arousal, and dominance evoked by a large set of photographs), bizarre images in works of art have not been assessed with the IAPS procedures. Understood here as strange, non-sense, and absurd mental contents or expressions accompanied by surprise and confusion emotions, bizarreness was assessed after healthy adult volunteers assigned this specified variable to 140 Grete Stern's photomontages overtly intended to illustrate strange, absurd, and non-sensical contents in dream reports. The images were presented to 21 Young Males (YM) and 30 Young Females (YF) who were instructed to use the IAPS Self-Assessment Manikin, along with an additional bizarre-to-normal scale, to evaluate their response to them. The valence and the bizarre-to-normal ratings showed a dissimilar pattern of distribution between genders. Ratings of scales were different, and a greater variation in scales occurred according to gender. When bizarreness was appraised, gender differences became more evident especially for YF, who rated half of the images as bizarre, and with a diminished feeling of control, while the neutral and normal images were deemed more pleased and controlled. Valence, bizarreness, and dominance formed a different component than arousal in both groups. Negative correlations between valence and dominance, and between valence and bizarreness were also found in both groups, plus a positive one for dominance and bizarreness in YF, along with curvilinear relationships among all scales. On a second experiment, 10 photomontages evaluated by YF as bizarre or as normal were administered to 18 Old Males (OM) and 28 Old Females (OF). OF's arousal showed less neutral evaluations than OM's. In OF the bizarre images evoked either more excitation or calmness than in OM. The distribution of the bizarre-to-normal scale was significantly different across the evaluations in YM, YF, OM, and OF. The use of this extended IAPS instrument to explore bizarreness and emotional variables in response to art images seems suitable and potentially valuable to characterize bizarre, absurd, or non-sensical mental states and their brain correlates.

Keywords: Grete Stern; age; art; bizarreness; emotion; gender.

Figure 1

Dream reports were interpreted by trained psychoanalysts and rendered into photomontages by Grete Stern and collaborators. Next, the evaluation of bizarreness and emotions by young students and later by old adults was carried on. Photomontages from Stern et al. (2012) are reproduced with permission.

Figure 2

Presentation timing of the task. A Stern photomontage is preceded by a fixation point. After the image, a black screen appears and ratings using the modified Self-Assessment Manikin format are requested.

Figure 3

Modified sheet format of the Self-Assessment Manikin of the International Affective Picture System for Young Adults with the additional bizarreness scale. For the 140 Stern photomontages, 10 per sheet were rated for Valencia (Valence), Alertamiento (Arousal), Dominancia (Dominance), and Extrañeza (Bizarreness).

Figure 4

Stern photomontages evaluated with the extreme values of 3 as “bizarre” or 7 as “normal” by most of the four groups. Of the 10 photomontages rated by young and old subjects, “Idilio 16” was bizarre for young adults. Only “Idilio 20” was bizarre for old and young women. Old male subjects rated neither of them as extremely bizarre or normal. Photomontages from Stern et al. (2012) are reproduced with permission.

Figure 5

Negative correlations in Young Males are shown in black between (A) valence and dominance and (B) valence and bizarreness. The same correlations for Young Females (C,D), and a positive one for dominance and bizarreness (E).

Figure 6

Means and standard errors of the four scales: Valence (V), Arousal (A), Dominance (D), and the Bizarreness scale (B) according to gender for the 140 Stern photomontages. YM (Young Males) and YF (Young Females) demonstrated an interaction between scales and gender (A). In both YM (B, left) and YF (C, right) V-A and A-B differed. In YM, V-D and V-B; in YF, A-D. Significant results (p < 0.05) are indicated in brackets according to Tukey tests.

Figure 7

Means of Stern images scatter plots split according to bizarreness (left) and to neutral-to-normal (right) evaluations in Young Males (A,B) and Young Females (C,D).

Figure 8

Means of the data of the scatterplots in Figure 7. Mean ratings in Young Males (in black) and Young Females (in red) separated Stern images into: bizarre (dotted lines), and neutral and normal images (continuous lines). Asterisks indicate significant differences between means. Level of significance set at p < 0.05.