Conventional writing therapies are versatile, accessible and easy to facilitate online, but often require participants to self-disclose traumatic experiences. To make expressive writing therapies safer for online, unsupervised environments, we explored the use of text-to-image generation as a means to downregulate negative emotions during a fictional writing exercise. We developed a writing tool, StoryWriter, that uses Generative Adversarial Network models to generate artwork from users’ narratives in real time. These images were intended to positively distract users from their negative emotions throughout the writing task. In this paper, we report the outcomes of two user studies: Study 1 ( N = 388), which experimentally examined the efficacy of this application via negative versus neutral emotion induction and image generation versus no image generation control groups; and Study 2 ( N = 54), which qualitatively examined open-ended feedback. Our results are heterogeneous: both studies suggested that StoryWriter somewhat contributed to improved emotion outcomes for participants with pre-existing negative emotions, but users’ open-ended responses indicated that these outcomes may be adversely modulated by the generated images, which could undermine the therapeutic benefits of the writing task itself.

Previous studies have highlighted the communicative limitations of artistic visualizations, which are often too conceptual or interpretive to enhance public understanding of (and volition to act upon) scientific climate information. This seems to suggest a need for greater factuality/concreteness in artistic visualization projects, which may indeed be the case. However, in this paper, we synthesize insights from environmental psychology, the psychology of art, and intermediate disciplines like eco-aesthetics, to argue that artworks—defined by their counterfactual qualities—can be effective for stimulating elements of environmental consciousness. We also argue that different artworks may yield different effects depending on how they combine counter/factual strategies. In so doing, we assert that effective artistic perceptualization—here expressed as affectivization—exceeds the faithful translation of facts from one mode to another, and cannot be encapsulated in a single example of un/successful art.