Is there more
to aesthetic beauty than, well, aesthetics?  Office employees may think they’re enjoying art for art’s
sake, but the benefits of art may be more complex than that.  A study by Kweon, Ulrich, Walker, and
Tassinary (2008) found that state anger and stress can be significantly reduced
by the type of posters hanging in your office (or, for we more lowly servants,
our cubicles).  But there’s a catch
here: differences in anger and stress
were only significant for males (Sorry, ladies. Keep investing in those
yoga classes).

Kweon et al.
(2008) set up four office conditions in a lab experiment involving 210 college
students.  The conditions varied by
how office walls were decorated: abstract posters, nature posters, mixed
posters, or no posters.  Only four
posters were used per condition, and the participants were NEVER told
specifically to look at the posters (the artwork was in their peripheral
vision).  Participants completed
“mild anger-provoking computer tasks” and reported on their state anger and
current stress levels.

The
researchers found that males were least
angry and stressed while surrounded by mixed posters (abstract and nature
together), and they were most angry and stressed while under the no art
condition.  Descriptively, females were the least angry and stressed
while surrounded by either nature posters or no posters (yes, that’s right:
zero, zilch, nada . . .), and they were most angry and stressed while
surrounded by abstract posters (yes, the females weren’t grooving to Kandinsky
and Miro).  Kweon et al. (2008)
also found a mediating effect: nature paintings affected stress levels, which
affected state anger.