Personality correlates of liking for ‘unpleasant’ paintings and photographs

Previous studies have associated liking for violent, morbid and unpleasant paintings with a range of personality variables. The present study developed sets of ‘pleasant’ and ‘unpleasant’ representational paintings, abstract paintings and photographs, and administered these with a range of personality questionnaires to 188 undergraduate students. Compared to females, males liked unpleasant exemplars of all three stimulus-types. High-scorers on the personality dimensions Sensation Seeking, Unusual Experiences (schizotypy) and Psychoticism preferred unpleasant paintings when compared to low-scorers. Openness and Experience Seeking were associated with liking for abstract, in comparison to traditional, representational paintings. Neuroticism was negatively correlated with liking for both types of photographic stimulus and for pleasant abstract paintings. Separate principal components analyses of the paintings and photographs implicated the unpleasant content of visual stimuli as a major determinant of preference in non-expert viewers. Regression analyses supported the conclusion that sex-differences, Sensation Seeking and Unusual Experiences independently contribute to liking for unpleasant paintings.