A PSYCHOPHYSICAL EXPLORATION OF THE PERCEPTION OF EMOTION FROM ABSTRACT ART* STÉPHANIE DUBAL Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France JÉRÔME PELLETIER Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France AURE-ELISE LEREBOURS Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France YOLAINE ESCANDE Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage, Paris, France MARINE TAFFOU Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France KENNETH KNOBLAUCH Stem-Cell and Brain Research Institute, Lyon, France and Université Lyon, Lyon, France ABSTRACT Centuries ago, western philosophers of art proposed that an artifact may express emotion. The much older tradition of Chinese calligraphy and land- scape painting sees in the brushstroke a central element of the emotional expressiveness of pictorial art. How emotion is detected and perceived from artwork is a current subject of exploration in psychology. We used Signal Detection Theory to determine whether or not naive subjects were able to detect the emotional classification proposed by an artist. Thirty pairs of *This work was funded by a grant from the ANR (French National Research Agency; 10-CREA-005). 1 Ó 2014, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. doi: http://dx.org/10.2190/EM.32.1..EOV.4 http://baywood.com EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF THE ARTS, 32(1) 1-15, 2014