Beyond beauty: Does visual art facilitate social cognitive skills?

Engaging with art can move individuals through a myriad of emotions, provoke reflective thoughts, and lead to new ideas. Could art also influence interpersonal outcomes pertaining to the ways we interact with others and navigate the social world, that is, our suite of social cognitive skills? Here, we focus on visual art to explore the effect of art engagement on personal aesthetic experience and social cognitive skills. Across two studies, using veridical paintings and matched non-art photos, we examined the effect of art engagement on emotional (e.g., awe, being moved) and eudaimonic experiences (e.g., reflective thoughts), as well as social cognitive skills pertaining to Theory of Mind (ToM) and recognition of other’s emotions. Further, we varied the depth with which participants engaged with the experiences of the characters in the artworks, to assess whether deep social information processing could boost the effect of art engagement on social cognitive skills. Our findings showed that art engagement altered personal aesthetic experience through changes in emotional and eudaimonic outcomes. However, we did not find any support for the effect of art engagement on social cognitive skills: Neither engaging with art, nor art in combination with deep social information processing, influenced performance on social cognitive skills of ToM and emotion recognition. The effect of art engagement on personal aesthetic experience and the absence of effect on social cognitive skills highlight the nuanced nature of individuals’ interactions with art. We discuss these results considering the varied ways of engagement with different artforms and in relation to different operationalizations of social cognitive skills.