Aesthetic asymmetries, spatial agency, and art history: A social psychological perspective.

The analysis of works of art provides a fertile meeting point between the arts and the sciences. In this chapter we focus on the statistical regularities that can be identified in large series of paintings, and we discuss possible explanations for such regularities, particularly assessing the extent to which spatial arrangement is used strategically in portrait paintings, and how this is related to Spatial Agency Bias. The availability of large corpuses of artistic images provides fertile ground both for generating and testing such theories. Spatial regularities in artworks can be explained in terms of embodiment theory, as a consequence of cultural determinants such as the direction of writing and reading, as well as being a consequence of social group membership of both observers and those being portrayed, invoking social psychological processes such as stereotyping and intergroup processes.