The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

hospital; the mean of up to 10 paintings by each person was taken, and all comparisons
were between groups, so a considerable number of the control group would have had to
be deliberately and consistently altering their style to seriously affect the results.
It must be restated here that diagnoses were necessarily quite distinct because
ICD-10 classifications were made from casenotes, which included lists of observations
of the patient by trained psychiatrists but nevertheless, some diagnoses may have been
made from uncertain criteria. These circumstances were controlled as much as possible;
difficult to classify cases and dual diagnoses were excluded, the groups were as widely
distinct as possible and patients were usually in severe states requiring hospitalisation.
Controls were as far as could be determined, functioning members of the working
population, so existing mental health problems would have been mild and quite distinct
from the patients.
Strengths of the study as a whole
Through a careful review of the literature, this study showed that traditionally the
study of art has fallen into the domain of the subjective rather than the objective.
Attempts to externalise subjective and probably non-verbal responses have usually relied
on explanations which are longer and more complicated than the picture itself and
influenced by expectation. The argument has been that significant indices of the quality
or direction of a painting can be indicated by attending to intuitions and a combination of
knowledge of style, skill and history of the maker that usually serves an encounter with
art. In this sense mental projection onto the object is intrinsic to the nature of how the
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