Mood, Mental States and Mortality

Intaglio Prints- 12"x18" each

This was my series for my senior exhibition. The concept behind the series was melding my art and psychology majors into this final project. I had always been interested in mood congruent memory, and mental state learning. Mood congruent memory is the tendency for people to recall memories similar to those of their current emotional state. Mental state learning is the similar concept that to recall certain information easiest, one should be in a similar mental state as when the information was encoded.

Based on these concepts, I theorized that if I manipulated my mental state, and produced drawings all with the same subjective content (mortality) that the differences between the drawing would be reliably detectable to observers.

Next, I created an experiment and administered it to 30 psychology students through the psychology lab on campus. Showing them images of my drawings (which were turned into prints for the final product) I asked them to match each drawing to the mental state that they thought it was produced in. The mental states used were; stressed, drunk, caffeinated, calm, sleep deprived and a control drawing (with no mental manipulation). Video explains how mental manipulations were achieved.

Results of the experiment found that participants could reliably pick the calm drawing, and there was near reliable results for the other states. When the caffeinated and stressed conditions were combined there were reliable results along with combining calm and sleep deprived. The hypothesis for these results is the crossover of these states was because the physiological similarities of the states.