The visual language of pain: the role of rendering style and pain type in aesthetic and empathetic appraisals of painful images

Art is capable of evoking empathetic and aesthetic responses in the presence of negative content like pain and suffering. The impact that artistic modes of depiction have on aesthetic and empathetic responses to painful stimuli has not been fully explored. In this study, participants viewed neutral and painful stimuli depicting humans with visible and invisible injuries across plain and artistic rendering styles. The results of an ANOVA and mediation analysis suggested that an artistic rendering style impacts empathetic responses in two ways: 1) An artistic rendering style communicates visual pain information which directly increases cognitive empathy, 2) An artistic rendering style impacts affective empathy, but this relationship is mediated by how much the viewer likes the image. This study illustrates the capacity of images to modulate multidimensional empathy by utilizing visual aids and aesthetic appeal. This has important implications for any discipline that treats, trains, informs, or entertains through use of images depicting pain.