Our research aimed to identify interrelationships between characteristics of personality life-meaning sphere and individual specificity of the perception and interpretation of works of fine art. To assess the latter, the “Strategies for free descriptions of pictures” technique was used, developed by Leontyev and Belonogova (Belonogova in Dissertation. Ph.D. psychol. Sciences: 19.00.01, 2003). To assess parameters of the life-meaning sphere we used the Meaning of Life Orientations (ML) test, a Russian adaptation of the PIL test, (Leontyev in Test of life-meaning orientations (SZhO), 1992), and the Existence Scale (Längle et al., in European Psychotherapy, 4(1), 135–151, 2003; Mainina in Orgler to a Russian-speaking sample: thesis, 2007, Adaptation of the Existence Scale by A. Langle, K. Orgler to a Russian-speaking sample: thesis). Results of the study revealed statistically significant correlations between a number of indicators of the personality life-meaning sphere and two of the ten assessed strategies for free descriptions of pictures. The results obtained suggest two trends in the way how a work of art is perceived, related to the state of the life-meaning sphere of personality. A “problematic” state of the life-meaning sphere, correlated with the associative strategy for free descriptions, manifests in using the observed picture as a steppingstone, pushing off from which a person dwells on issues relevant to his/her life situation and world view, so that the painting is just a tool for pushing off to surf the unbounded. In the other case, which manifests in close correlations of the indicators of the Existence Scale to the Stylistic description strategy, the subject focuses on the picture, its place, and specific meaning in culture, following cultural norms and traditions, not associations generated by his subjective experience.
Subsequently, using the cluster analysis method, we identified groups of subjects similar in the general pattern of characteristics of the life-meaning sphere of personality and analyzed the specificity of interpretations of works of art by representatives of each of the six clusters, considering their descriptions of paintings through the lens of the general pattern of characteristics of the life-meaning sphere of personality, revealed by cluster analysis.
