ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
Visual Complexity and Affect: Ratings Reflect More Than Meets the Eye.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Topological structure and the creation of visual complexity.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Central tendency biases in temporal memory: extending Vierordt's law to sequential order and distance judgments under emotional contexts.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Information and affective valence influence judgments of complexity, liking and understanding.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Article
- Drawings of THINGS: A large-scale drawing dataset of 1854 object concepts.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Ornamental motifs and visual concerns: Exploring aesthetic pleasure and conservation intention in architectural heritage renovation.PloS one · 2026Article
- Engaging with uncertainty when engagement is uncertain.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Interpersonal Contributors to Depression in Sexual Minority Adolescents: An Examination of Exposure to Acute Stressors and Neural Reactivity to Interpersonal Emotional Images.Developmental psychobiology · 2026Article
- Unveiling the Role of Theory of Mind: Neural Response to Emotional Stimuli in Context.Affective science · 2025Article
- The Second Database of Emotional Videos from Ottawa (DEVO-2): Over 1300 brief video clips rated on valence, arousal, impact, and familiarity.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- A toolbox for calculating quantitative image properties in aesthetics research.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- The effects of emotion on retrospective duration memory using virtual reality.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Assessment of human emotional reactions to visual stimuli "deep-dreamed" by artificial neural networks.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- A standardised set of images for judgements of proportion.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Polish norms for a set of colored drawings of 168 objects and 146 actions with predictors of naming performance.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Does prior knowledge increase or decrease perceived visual complexity of texture images?Heliyon · 2023Article
- Temozolomide treatment inhibits spontaneous motivation for exploring a complex object in mice: A potential role of adult hippocampal neurogenesis in "curiosity".The Journal of comparative neurology · 2023Article
- Judgments of learning reveal conscious access to stimulus memorability.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Marble melancholy: using crossmodal correspondences of shapes, materials, and music to predict music-induced emotions.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Improper weapons are a neglected category of harmful objects.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Pictorial stimuli can vary on many dimensions, several aspects of which are captured by the term 'visual complexity.' Visual complexity can be described as, "a picture of a few objects, colors, or structures would be less complex than a very colorful picture of many objects that is composed of several components." Prior studies have reported a relationship between affect and visual complexity, where complex pictures are rated as more pleasant and arousing. However, a relationship in the opposite direction, an effect of affect on visual complexity, is also possible; emotional arousal and valence are known to influence selective attention and visual processing. In a series of experiments, we found that ratings of visual complexity correlated with affective ratings, and independently also with computational measures of visual complexity. These computational measures did not correlate with affect, suggesting that complexity ratings are separately related to distinct factors. We investigated the relationship between affect and ratings of visual complexity, finding an 'arousal-complexity bias' to be a robust phenomenon. Moreover, we found this bias could be attenuated when explicitly indicated but did not correlate with inter-individual difference measures of affective processing, and was largely unrelated to cognitive and eyetracking measures. Taken together, the arousal-complexity bias seems to be caused by a relationship between arousal and visual processing as it has been described for the greater vividness of arousing pictures. The described arousal-complexity bias is also of relevance from an experimental perspective because visual complexity is often considered a variable to control for when using pictorial stimuli.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.