Paint Your Personality

Interestingly, I discovered that art is closely linked to one's personality at this site. As with my earlier post, I find the genres of Cubism & Abstract Expressionism fascinating.

Dr Stian Reimers, a research fellow in experimental psychology at the University of Warwick, helped the BBC design the art preference and psychology experiment.

MY RESULTS
Your favourite type of art is Cubism. In the personality profile you had a high intellectualism score, which suggests you like to think about abstract ideas and have a creative imagination.
High Intellectualism
People with high intellectualism scores are interested the abstract. They like thinking about things they can't see and have creative imaginations, able to dream up whole new worlds. They like to feel they understand things and will probe deeply into a subject to get as good an insight as possible.
Average Agreeableness
People with average agreeableness scores tend not to be as keen to understand other people's feelings as people with high agreeableness scores. But they are also more likely to seek a compromise or avoid offending others than people with low agreeableness scores. They are somewhere in between. They can engage positively with others and put people at their ease, but they may be more likely to speak their mind, even at the risk of offending someone.

RESULTS OF THE EXPERIMENT
If you like a party, you may prefer abstract paintings. The results of the online experiment into art preference and personality type suggest that extraverts prefer works by artists who don't attempt to paint reality.

• People who prefer abstract art tend to be more conservative, dogmatic, and are often sensation seekers.
• People who are open to new experiences are less likely to enjoy looking at realistic paintings. They seek something more atypical and challenging.
• People with low emotional stability tend to prefer abstract and pop-art paintings.

The main findings of this experiment were that extraverts preferred abstract and cubist art relative to more representational forms like Impressionism and Japanese art. There are theories of extraversion that suggest introverts crave less external stimulation than extraverts, and these results back up theories of this type. It's likely that, for many people, more modern paintings tend to have a higher visual impact than traditional forms or art, which are more widely accepted as the norm. Of course, the impact a piece of art has on an individual can never be predicted.

The opposite was true for agreeableness. People who were more agreeable tended to prefer Impressionism and Japanese art, whereas people who were less agreeable liked what you might call more challenging art – Abstract, Cubism, Islamic and Renaissance. Intellectuals – those open to new aesthetic experiences – tended to avoid Impressionism, possibly because it was too familiar. The Abstract style was rated very similarly to cubist art: People who liked Cubism also liked Abstract. This is not surprising given the similarity of styles and the similar era in which they were painted.