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Why art gallery visits may be one of the healthiest habits you can build

This year’s top Health stories celebrate the kind of progress that hits close to home: advances that help us live longer, feel better, and take care of one another. From mental health wins to medical innovations, these 2025 highlights are all about healing, hope, and human potential.

Most of us know the feeling of standing in front of a painting that makes us pause. Maybe it’s a burst of color that lifts our mood or a quiet scene that steadies the mind. Either way, a new study from King’s College London suggests that these moments are doing far more than sparking emotion. Researchers have found measurable evidence that viewing original art can support both mental health and long-term physical wellbeing.
Their findings point to something powerful: spending even a short amount of time with original artworks may reduce stress, improve emotional balance, and potentially contribute to a longer, healthier life. And the best part is that you do not need to be an art expert to benefit.

What the study actually measured
To explore the connection between art and health, researchers invited fifty healthy adults between the ages of eighteen and forty to take part in an experiment. One group visited The Courtauld Gallery in London, where they viewed original masterpieces by artists including Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet. A second group viewed high-quality reproductions in a non-gallery setting.

Participants wore sensors that tracked heart rate, skin temperature, and other subtle responses. They also provided saliva samples before and after the experience so researchers could measure changes in stress and inflammation.

The results were striking:
Cortisol, better known as the body’s primary stress hormone, fell by 22 percent among gallery visitors. Those who saw reproductions saw only an eight percent drop.
Pro-inflammatory cytokines decreased by 30 percent in the gallery group and 28 percent in the reproduction group.
Gallery visitors also showed signs of emotional engagement, including small drops in skin temperature and variation in heart-rate patterns.
These shifts matter because high cortisol and inflammation are linked to chronic conditions such as anxiety, heart disease, and diabetes. In other words, your quiet moment with an original painting could be supporting your long-term health in ways you cannot feel immediately.

Why original art matters even more
Although both groups experienced some positive changes, the impact was stronger for those who viewed original artworks. Researchers believe that the immersive environment of a gallery adds layers of sensory experience with elements that highlight space, scale, texture, and atmosphere. These aspects work together to deepen the body’s response.

Importantly, the researchers emphasized that the benefits appeared regardless of art knowledge or emotional intelligence. You do not need to understand an artist’s entire catalog or even consider yourself an “art person” to gain something meaningful.

A simple, accessible step toward wellbeing

The implications of this study reach beyond museum walls. These findings help pave the way for broader integration of art and wellbeing, offering a low-cost and accessible option for reducing loneliness, easing depression, and improving life satisfaction.

And while art may not replace clinical care, it can be a gentle, joyful tool to add to your wellness routine. The next time you find yourself lingering in front of a painting, know that your body is responding in ways that support you; calming, stimulating, and restoring at the same time.

Source: https://www.optimistdaily.com/2026/01/why-art-gallery-visits-may-be-one-of-the-healthiest-habits-you-can-build-2/. Access on May 4th 2026.

Text 19A4-I

It is a universal fact that cinema is a visual medium. Films have the power to overwhelm our senses as well as our minds, subjecting us to a variety of experiences that can range from the sublime to the devastating. Colours play a crucial role in this interesting phenomenon, forming an integral part of the composition of each frame and dictating how the viewer perceives the spectacle on the screen. Apart from the cinematic medium, colours have always been a part of our experience and how we make sense of the vastly nuanced world around us. Although science has definitively explained what colours are in terms of light, they have always mystified artists and philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who tried to understand their importance in anthropological frameworks.
More notably, the famous German poet and artist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published a seminal exploration of colours in his 1810 work Theory of Colours . In it, he examined how each colour corresponds to various psychological states in the minds of human beings. He wrote, “Light and darkness, brightness and obscurity, or if a more general expression is preferred, light and its absence, are necessary to the production of colour… Colour itself is a degree of darkness.” Goethe’s theories might seem baselessly romantic in the 21st century but the underlying ideas have been implemented by filmmakers and cinematographers to curate the voyeuristic experiences of their audiences. Famed cinematographer Vittorio Storaro has based his artistic vision on Goethe’s work, insisting that colours do have a direct connection to the mind of the viewer.

Internet: (adapted).

Text 18A3-I
The roar of a waterfall suggests the power of water. Rampaging floodwaters can uproot strong trees and twist railroad tracks. When the power of water is harnessed, however, it can do useful work for humans.
Since ancient times, people have put the energy in the flow of water to work. They first made water work for them with the waterwheel, a wheel with paddles around its rim. Flowing water rotated the waterwheel, which in turn ran machinery that was linked to it. Today, new kinds of waterwheels – turbines – spin generators that produce electricity. Electricity from waterturned generators is known as hydroelectricity.
By building a dam across a river, the natural upstream water level is elevated and a difference in head is created that can be used to drive turbines and generate electricity. A large upstream reservoir may balance seasonal water flow; rain or melted snow can be stored in the reservoir during the wet season to provide electricity during dry seasons.
Waterpower is distributed unevenly among the continents and nations of the world. Europe and North America have developed much of their waterpower. Asia, South America, and Africa have abundant waterpower potential, but while countries such as China and Brazil have become leading hydroelectric producers, much of the waterpower resource on those continents remains undeveloped.
Elizabeth Lachner. Hydroelectricity . Rosen Publishing Group, 2018 (adapted).

Internet: (adapted).
Judge the following items, according to the preceding comic strip.

Text CG2A2

A new study on physical activity that involved more than half a million participants over age 40 found that modest exercise increases life expectancy regardless of weight.
Contrary to most of the attention given to obesity as the crucial risk factor for health, the study found that an active lifestyle increased life expectancy to a greater extent than a lower body mass index (BMI), in general. In fact, participants who were active but class 1 obese lived an average of 3.1 years longer than those who were at a normal weight but didn’t engage in physical activity. This is in-line with reports from earlier this year that excessive sitting is unhealthy and that reducing excessive sitting to less than 3 hours a day alone can improve longevity by 2.0 years.
The article states low level of physical activity of moderate to vigorous intensity would confer a 1.8-year gain in life expectancy after age 40, compared with no activity. A low level of physical activity is defined as up to 75 minutes of fast walking per week.
A consequence of this study is that it calls into question the reliance on BMI to assess fitness. That isn’t to suggest that BMI isn’t a factor, but that what we’ve heard for years in the media that being overweight is “bad” for you while exercise is “good” is a flawed message. A better message would be: Regular exercise is essential to longevity and a lower BMI helps too — do the first and the other will likely follow.

Internet: (adapted).

Concerning grammar and semantics in text CG2A2, judge the following items.

Text CB2A2
Anyone who has interacted with superbot ChatGPT or image generator DALL-E might be wondering what the future of artificial intelligence (AI) holds for humanity.
ChatGPT is an AI program that generates text in a very human-like manner when asked questions. Just ask DALL-E or similar programs to create a picture of a French bulldog driving a pink convertible and voila: you’ll see several versions in seconds.
Science fiction in the mid-20th century created good-natured AI such as the computer on Star Trek helping the Enterprise crew, as well as its evil twin set on destroying its creators like HAL in Arthur C. Clarke’s famous book (or Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film adaptation) 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 2023, however, we’re surrounded by AI that’s far more mundane than those examples. The virtual assistant in your smartphone, the airline chatbot and the robot vacuum cleaning your floors don’t seem to have any aspirations to rise above humanity and have been designed to help us.
We should be prepared for bigger things to come than games, better chatbots or photo generators. Connectivity is key: think of AI as a general-purpose innovation like electricity that powers and connects other technologies, including sensors, robots, genomic devices and 3D printers. AI’s use will only intensify and accelerate as faster computing technology is developed, along with greater sensors capturing data, often called the Internet of Things (IoT). In the future, AI will be interwoven in virtually every aspect of commercial and personal activities.
Peter Marber. Artificial Intelligence: Why Should We Care?.
Internet: (adapted).

Considering the linguistic and semantic aspects of text CB2A2, judge the following items.

Text 7A2

When it comes to the vocabulary of languages, is it true, as some suppose, that the vocabularies of so-called primitive languages are too small and inadequate to account for the nuances of the physical and social universes of their speakers? The answer is somewhat complicated. Because the vocabulary of a language serves only the members of the society who speak it, the question to be asked should be: Is a particular vocabulary sufficient to serve the sociocultural needs of those who use the language? When put like this, it follows that the language associated with a relatively simple culture would have a smaller vocabulary than the language of a complex society. Why, for example, should the Inuit people (often known by the pejorative term “Eskimo”) have words for chlorofluoromethane, dune buggy, or tae kwon do when these substances, objects, and concepts play no part in their culture? By the same token, however, the language of a tribal society would have elaborate lexical domains for prominent aspects of the culture although these do not exist in complex societies. The Agta of the Philippines, for example, are reported to have no fewer than thirty-one verbs referring to types of fishing, while in Munich, the terminology for the local varieties of beer is quite extensive, according to strength, color, fizziness, aging, and clarity, the full list exceeding seventy terms.
However, even though no language spoken today may be labeled primitive, this does not mean that all languages do all things in the same way, or are equally influential in the modern transnational world. The linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes claims that languages are not functionally equivalent because the role of speech varies from one society to the next. According to Hymes, though all languages “are potentially equal and hence capable of adaptation to the needs of a complex industrial civilization”, only certain languages have actually done so (Hymes 1961:77). These languages are more successful than others not because they are structurally more advanced, but because they happen to be associated with societies in which language is the basis of literature, education, science, and commerce.
Zdenek SALZMANN, James M. STANLAW and Nobuko ADACHI.
Language, culture, and society: an introduction to linguistic anthropology.
Boulder (CO): Westview Press, 2012. p. 6-7 (adapted).
Judge the following items concerning text 7A2.