A Normed Art Database That Incorporates Diverse Cultures and Genres: The Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics Artwork Repository

Abstract

We present a comprehensive data set of digitized artworks designed for empirical aesthetics research. This database uniquely includes artwork from underrepresented cultures—Mexican/Central and South American, African, and Middle Eastern and South Asian—and covers subcategories of Western Art, such as Euro-American Modern, American-Public Art, and Euro-American-Religious Art. The collection features 320 paintings, normed on 11 specific aesthetic impact dimensions: pleasure, calm, compassion, anger, challenge, upset, interest, enrapturement, edification, enlightenment, and inspiration, along with general evaluations of beauty, liking, and how familiar were viewers with artworks and artists. Each artwork is normed with both fine-grained (individual impacts and evaluations) and coarse-grained impacts (grouped into positive emotions, negative emotions, immersion, and epistemic transformation). The data set was rated by 814 participants. An interactive digital platform(https://vicenteestradagonzalez.shinyapps.io/CfNdatabase/) organizes the art within a four-dimensional space, mapping artworks across three axes—positive affect, negative affect, and epistemic transformation—with the size of spheres representing the level of motivation/immersion. This enables users to select stimuli based on specific research questions. This data set, available at https://github.com/vstradag/TRT, encompasses a wide range of cultural representations and normed aesthetic impacts, making it a valuable resource for empirical studies and neuroaesthetic research. We propose several potential applications for this database, highlighting its broad utility in exploring the intersections of culture, perception, and aesthetics.