Dr Joanna Ganczarek received her PhD in Cognitive Psychology, Psychophysiology, and Personality Psychology from Sapienza University of Rome. She previously completed a master’s degree in Psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She currently works in the field of empirical aesthetics and art therapy. In addition, she is a practising psychotherapist at the Centre for Mental Health at the Babinski Clinical Psychiatric Hospital in Kraków.
Email: joanna.ganczarek@uj.edu.pl
Adress: ul. Ingardena 3, 30-060 Kraków
Her academic work concerns various aspects of art perception, including its potential therapeutic properties. From the Master's thesis, through art studies, to the PhD in psychology, she has been investigating the impact of visual art on viewers' aesthetic, emotional, and psychophysiological responses. She is particularly interested in contemporary art and in the multidimensional, embodied cognition that occurs in interaction with a work of art.
Recently, she has been focusing on developing a model of art therapy interventions that combines theories from the field of empirical aesthetics with the cognitive-behavioural approach in psychotherapy
She has led five research projects as principal investigator, including one funded by the National Science Centre (NCN) under the Miniatura scheme. She was also the main international collaborator in the Text & Image project, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of St Andrews (Dr Brendan Wolfe, Dr Dhanraj Vishwanath, and Dr Nicole Ruta) https://textandimage.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/, where she was responsible for designing and conducting eye-tracking studies on the perception of indeterminate art.
List of recent research projects:
● The influence of context and stimulus type on aesthetic experience in individuals with depressed mood (2023–2024)
● Predictors of aesthetic, emotional, and psychophysiological responses to visual stimuli: The role of stimulus type and context (2022–2023)
● Co-investigator in a project on the reception of text in indeterminate art (part of the Text & Image project, University of St Andrews, led by Dr Nicole Ruta, Dr Brendan Wolfe, and Dr Dhanraj Vishwanath) – eye-tracking research (2021–2022)
● Body sway as a correlate of responses to incongruities in contemporary art (2019–2021)
● Distance perception using natural perspective (2020–2021)
Other activities
● Section Editor (Cognitive Psychology) in Cognitive Processing journal https://link.springer.com/journal/10339
● Reviewer for Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts; Acta Psychologica; Empirical Studies of the Arts; Plos One and others
Full list of publications is available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate
Google Scholar
ResearchGate
Google Scholar
ResearchGate