We turn off the news when it gets too heavy and change the song when the lyrics hurt. And yet many of us hang a painting of Hammershøi’s solitary woman or Munch’s dark shoreline on the wall, and consider it the most beautiful thing in the room. Researchers call this the paradox of tragedy. In 2025, two new studies offered unusually concrete answers to why a sad poster can be the image we enjoy most. The answer isn’t that we’re gloomy people. It’s that art does something with sadness that reality never can.
Quick facts: The Distancing-Embracing model was published in 2017 by Winfried Menninghaus and five co-authors in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (volume 40, e347). The study "Sad Art Gives Voice to Our Own Sadness" by Venkatesan, Attie-Picker, Newman, and Knobe appeared in Cognitive Science in 2025 and was based on four experiments with nearly 2,000 participants. Dhallua, Winner, and Drake tested 150 American adults in the Journal of Positive Psychology in 2025.
Distancing-Embracing: The Model That Explains Why Sadness Can Be Beautiful
The most widely cited explanation comes from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. In 2017, Winfried Menninghaus, Valentin Wagner, Julian Hanich, Eugen Wassiliwizky, Thomas Jacobsen, and Stefan Koelsch published their Distancing-Embracing model in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The starting point is that negative emotions are not a special exception that applies only to tragedies. They are a general resource for art because they capture our attention, create deep immersion, and make the experience easy to remember.
The model has two parts. Distancing means that we know, at the same time, that what we see is art, a representation, or fiction. This gives us security and control, because we can leave or look away at any time. So the negative feeling doesn’t clash with our expectation of enjoyment. Embracing means that the art itself helps us receive the feeling: through a composition in which positive and negative elements interact, through colors and shapes, and by finding meaning in what we see. Mixed emotions, such as sadness combined with beauty, allow the difficult experience to be part of a whole that is still pleasurable.
For anyone choosing a poster, the first part is particularly interesting. A painting on the wall is control in its purest form. You decide where it hangs, how large it is, whether it has glass and a mat, and you can move it tomorrow. The frame itself is a tool for distancing. That explains why the same image that would be unbearable as a news photograph becomes something we want to live with as a work of art. In our look at Vilhelm Hammershøi's quiet interiors, the same thing is evident: the rooms are empty and cool, but many find them calming precisely because they view them from a distance.
Art that gives voice to our own sadness: four experiments with nearly 2,000 people
The second study is new, and its design is surprisingly simple. Tara Venkatesan, Mario Attie-Picker, George Newman, and Joshua Knobe had participants read exactly the same sad texts. The only difference was a label: sometimes the text was described as art, and sometimes it wasn't. Across four online experiments with nearly 2,000 people from the Prolific platform, the result was the same. The same sad text was liked more when it was called art.
The researchers first tested the obvious explanation: that fiction would make sadness harmless. It didn't hold up. On the contrary, participants liked the sad texts more when they thought the sadness was real. What explained the effect instead was what the authors call appropriation: the feeling that the work expresses our own emotions. Sad art thus works like language. It gives us words, colors, or shapes for something we're already carrying.
"We don't hang sadness on the wall to feel worse. We hang it there so it can finally be put into words for us."
In practice, this means you shouldn't choose sad images based on what's considered beautiful, but on what feels familiar. A poster with a solitary figure by a window works for someone who has felt lonely in a crowded home, and falls flat for someone who hasn't. The study says nothing about posters specifically, but the mechanism applies to any image that expresses an emotion: the best painting is the one that feels like yours.
Aristotle, Hume, and 2,300 years of the same question
The question is much older than psychology. In Poetics, Aristotle described catharsis over 2,300 years ago: the idea that tragedy purifies us by arousing fear and pity. The Scottish philosopher David Hume revisited the problem in 1757 in his essay "Of Tragedy," arguing that the language, art, and craft of the presentation transform an unpleasant feeling into pleasure. What Hume called conversion is essentially what Menninghaus's model later divided into distancing and embrace.
The difference today is that the idea can be measured. A 2024 review article in Frontiers in Psychology, written by Fabrizio Serrao and four co-authors, argues that enjoying negative emotions in art has evolutionary value. They point to three possible benefits: we practice interpreting our own inner states, become better at understanding other people’s feelings, and shared emotions bring groups together. It’s a theoretical article without original measurement data, so it should be read as a hypothesis. But it fits well with the idea that sad art is a kind of training ground for emotions.
Moved and reflective, not dejected: Winner and Drake on tragic art
The third study shows what happens to us when we actually look. Gurveen Dhallua, Ellen Winner, and Jennifer Drake published “The paradoxical benefits of viewing tragic art” in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2025. In two online studies involving 150 American adults aged 18 to 77, and 150 politically conservative participants in the second study, people viewed Susan Clinard’s sculptures of refugees. The result: viewing them evoked both positive and negative feelings, and both were linked to participants feeling moved and finding the experience meaningful.
In the second study, participants also became more sympathetic toward undocumented refugees. Interestingly, how much someone liked tragic art did not predict the extent of the change in their attitudes. So you don’t have to love the sad image for it to affect you. That’s an important nuance: sad art isn’t necessarily enjoyable, but it can be meaningful, and meaning is a different kind of reward from pleasure.
It’s worth noting the difference from what we’ve previously written about kama muta and tears in front of a painting. Kama muta is about a sudden, warming feeling of closeness. Sad art is more prolonged and reflective. It rarely brings tears, but often creates a silence you appreciate.
Quiet interiors and dark coasts: sad subjects art history has never tired of
A look through art history makes it clear that we have always needed sad images. Hammershøi’s gray rooms with a woman turned away from us, Helene Schjerfbeck’s pale portraits, and Edvard Munch’s coastal landscapes where anxiety hangs in the sky are all examples of subjects that remain popular. Our article about Edvard Munch and the art of living with powerful images shows how much space a charged subject can occupy in a home, and why it often works better than you might think.
According to Menninghaus’s reasoning, what these works have in common is that they are composed. Sadness is arranged in color, line, and silence. A black-and-white photograph of a street at night has the same quality: it is melancholy, but the composition makes us see beauty in it. That is why black-and-white posters so often work as sad art. The grayscale removes the direct emotional cues of color and leaves the mood behind, while photographic art provides the recognition that Venkatesan’s study points to as key. The collection of works by famous artists also includes many subjects from the periods when melancholy was an explicit ideal.
How to hang melancholy without making the room feel heavy
The research says nothing about how many sad posters a home can handle, so these are our own conclusions from the studies. The first is about control. Since distancing is the very precondition for enjoyment, you should hang sad prints where you can choose when to look at them: in the hallway, study, stairwell, or a corner of the living room. Less suitable are places you can’t look away from, such as directly in front of the dining table or above the head of the bed.
The second conclusion is about scale. A heavy subject in 30x40 or 40x50 centimeters becomes a thought you arrive at, while the same subject in 70x100 becomes a presence that takes over the room. Start small, and increase the size only when you notice that you miss the image when you can’t see it. The third is about balance: pair a sad poster with two that are warm, bright, or playful. Mixed emotions are precisely what the model describes as making sadness enjoyable.
Tip: Try the print for a week before framing it. Hang the poster with tape where you plan to put it and notice whether you want to look at it longer or avoid looking at it. If you miss it when you’re away, it’s the right print. Then use a wooden frame with a mount to accentuate the distance between the image and the room.
Frequently asked questions about sad art and the research behind it
Want to try it yourself? Explore our black-and-white posters and photo art and look for an image you recognize. You can also read the research in its original form: PsyPost’s overview of Sad Art Gives Voice to Our Own Sadness, PsyPost on Winner and Drake’s study and the Max Planck post’s summary of the Distancing-Embracing model.