Fear, happiness or arousal: which state is best for appreciating art?

Apparently it’s fear, according to researchers from the City University of New York who have now drawn an uncommon link between danger and art appreciation.  One review of the findings spawned this provocative headline (from Research Digest): “Why you should watch a horror film before going to the art gallery,” but fear not, the film doesn’t have to be of mega-length. Apparently a short video clip will do.

In recent years researchers have confirmed a link between one’s emotional state and their perception of artwork.  But this was the first study, according to its authors, that examined which emotional state (fear, happiness or physiological arousal) provides the most juice for enjoying abstract art.

A Research Digest review of the study asked: “Why should feeling afraid enhance the sublime power of art?”  And the researchers, quoted in this same review, explained: “The capacity for a work of art to grab our interest and attention, to remove us from daily life, may stem from its ability to trigger our evolved mechanisms for coping with danger. . . . Art is not typically described as scary, but it can be surprising, elicit goose bumps, and inspire awe. Like discovering a grand vista in nature, artwork presents new horizons that pose challenges as well as opportunities."

In the study, participants were asked to evaluate a series of abstract works of art, but before the rating began, they were assigned to one of five conditions, designed to induce emotions of fear, happiness and/or arousal (via physical activity).  The chief finding, according to the study abstract: “Only the fear condition resulted in significantly more positive judgments about the art. These striking findings provide the first evidence that fear uniquely inspires positively valenced aesthetic judgments.”

Bob Duggan, in a piece published by bigthink.com, explained that study participants were asked to evaluate the abstract art on how “inspiring, stimulating, dull, exciting, moving, boring, uninteresting, rousing/stirring, imposing and forgetful” they were.  And Duggan pointed out that “to control for subject prejudices either for or against a certain artist or art movement, works by the relatively unknown Russian geometric abstract artist El Lissitsky were shown.”

The study is titled “Stirring images: Fear, not happiness or arousal, makes art more sublime” and is co-authored by Eskine, Natalie Kacinik and Jesse Prinz.

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Alcohol, Marijuana or E-cigarettes: which of these is a gateway drug?

The “gateway theory” of substance abuse has again taken center stage as dozens of states debate the legalization of marijuana, and, quite suddenly, a new substance has entered the conversation: e-cigarettes. In the first national analysis of the increasingly popular e-cigarette, researchers found that e-cigarettes “may actually be a new route to conventional smoking and nicotine addiction,” according to the study, out of the University of California, San Francisco.  The study involved nearly 40,000 youth nationwide.

Noted lead author Lauren Dutra, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF’s Center for Tobacco Control Research & Education: ““Despite claims that e-cigarettes are helping people quit smoking, we found that e-cigarettes were associated with more, not less, cigarette smoking among adolescents.”

Both the UCSF study, and another that involved 75,000 Korean adolescents, found that teens who use e-cigarettes (battery-powered devices that deliver an aerosol of nicotine and other chemicals) were less likely, not more likely, to stop conventional smoking.  Explained senior author Stanton Glantz, UCSF professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education: ““It looks to me like the wild west marketing of e-cigarettes is not only encouraging youth to smoke them, but also is promoting regular cigarette smoking among youth.” The UCSF study cited statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which estimates that 1.78 million U.S. students used e-cigarettes as of 2012.

Said the report: “In spite of the growing consumption of e-cigarettes and the fact that there has been limited research on their health effects, e-cigarettes are currently unregulated by the FDA.  Unlike traditional tobacco products, e-cigarettes are not subject to federal age verification laws and can be legally sold to children unless state or local laws bar their sale to minors.  Presently, 28 states prohibit the sale of e-cigarettes to minors.”

Marijuana legalization

Is marijuana a gate drug? The body of research continues to grow, and the dial, increasingly, points to no. Maintains the Marijuana Policy Project: “[Marijuana is] simply the first (or more likely, third, after alcohol and cigarettes) in a normal progression to more dangerous substances among those predisposed to use such drugs.”

A 2012 study out of Yale, in fact, found alcohol’s gateway effect to be much larger than marijuana’s.  The study set out to examine the “gateway effect” as it relates to the abuse of prescription opiate drugs.  In other words, the researchers wanted to know if a person’s early use of substances (alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana) correlated with abuse patterns later in life.  The short conclusion: yes, “people who used alcohol or tobacco in their youth are almost twice as likely to abuse prescription opiate drugs than those who only used marijuana,” according to an article authored by Stephen Webster for www.rawstory.com.  Webster noted that, according to the CDC, prescription opiate overdoses kills more Americans each year than cocaine and heroin overdoses combined.

Webster cited two additional studies which pointed the finger at alcohol.  The first, published in the Journal of School Health, “pinpointed alcohol, instead of marijuana, as the most commonly abused substance for first-time drug users.” The second, published in 2010 in the medical journal Lancet, “ranked alcohol as the most harmful drug known to man, with more than double the potential harms of heroin use.” 

The fact that fewer Americans now consider marijuana a gateway drug may account for the rising tide for legalization. A Huffington Post article listed 14 states which appear next in line to legalize the product – following positive experiences in Washington (the state) and Colorado. The 14 states, according to Huffington Post, are as follows (in each state, surveys found that a majority of residents are in favor of legalization): Alaska, Arizona, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont.

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When you get out of the pool, why do your fingers and toes wrinkle?

Consider this: when human beings step out of the pool, just two areas of their body wrinkle up, their fingers and their toes.  Consider further that scientists have little idea whether other mammals (save for the macaques) experience this same phenomenon. What’s the purpose?

Years ago, it was believed that wrinkled fingers and toes was caused by osmotic (think: osmosis) reactions. Two common theories were advanced: 1. Fingers wrinkle because water enters the tip, and seeks to balance the water content on both sides; and 2. Wrinkling is the result of water passing into the outer layer of the skin and making it swell up.  But in the 1930s, researchers discovered that if you sever the nerves in your finger (not recommended, by the way), the wrinkles won’t form. 

The ready conclusion? Wrinkling is an involuntary reaction by the body’s autonomic nervous system (the system that controls breathing, heart rate and perspiration). Specifically, wrinkling is caused by blood vessels constricting below the skin.

But why does it exist?  What’s the evolutionary purpose? Recently, neurobiologist Mark Changizi and colleagues developed a theory that wrinkling is designed to enhance human grip, and last year an independent research team out of the UK’s Newcastle University confirmed his hypothesis.  They found that, like rain treads on tires, pruney fingers “create channels that let water drain away, allowing them to make better contact with damp surfaces,” according to a piece authored by Ed Yong, for National Geographic’s Phenomena.

Becky Summers, author of an article written for Nature magazine, quoted Tom Smulders, an evolutionary biologist at Newcastle University, UK, and a co-author of the paper. Said Smulders: “We have shown that wrinkled fingers give a better grip in wet conditions — it could be working like treads on your car tires, which allow more of the tire to be in contact with the road and gives you a better grip.”  Summers, paraphrasing Smulders, explains that “wrinkled fingers could have helped our ancestors to gather food from wet vegetation or streams.” The analogous effect in the toes, the article adds, could help us to get a better footing in the rain.

Summers goes on:

“Given that wrinkles confer an advantage with wet objects but apparently no disadvantage with dry ones, it's not clear why our fingers are not permanently wrinkled, says Smulders. But he has some ideas. ‘Our initial thoughts are that this could diminish the sensitivity in our fingertips or could increase the risk of damage through catching on objects.’”

Some take issue with Changizi’s evolutionary hypothesis, raising the concern that testing human beings in their current form won’t necessarily help us explain evolutionary origins. Said Yong, in his piece for Phenomena: “The new study . . . raises some interesting questions about how to test evolutionary explanations. So far, all of the evidence for Changizi’s idea comes from looking at modern human fingers. . . . If modern human fingers grip wet marbles well, and form patterns that resemble rain treads, does that tell us anything about the origins of such patterns or are all such explanations merely just-so-stories?”

Steve Ferber is author of “21 Rules to Live By,” available either at Amazon.com or Island Expressions, located on Daniel Island. Reviews at www.21rules.com.