TY - JOUR
T1 - Beauty, the feeling
AU - Brielmann, Aenne A.
AU - Nuzzo, Angelica
AU - Pelli, Denis G.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank David Brainard for suggesting the memory experiment. Thanks to Amy Belfi and Elena Bai for providing the coding of beauty memories in terms of internal and external focus. Thanks to Alexandra R. Lang for her contributions to the planning stage of the first experiments. Thanks to philosophy student Lily Liu for estimating the correlation between 11 parameters and beauty according to Danto. Thanks to David Hobbs for his contributions to the initial exploration of the beauty memory descriptions. Thanks to Gary Tomlinson for telling us about surprise in music. Thanks to Ashley Feng and Laura Suciu for helpful comments. This work was supported by NIH Core Grant P30 EY013079 .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors
PY - 2021/9
Y1 - 2021/9
N2 - Many philosophers and psychologists have made claims about what is felt in an experience of beauty. Here, we test how well these claims match the feelings that people report while looking at an image, or listening to music, or recalling a personal experience of beauty. We conducted ten experiments (total n = 851) spanning three nations (US, UK, and India). Across nations and modalities, top-rated beauty experiences are strongly characterized by six dimensions: intense pleasure, an impression of universality, the wish to continue the experience, exceeding expectation, perceived harmony in variety, and meaningfulness. Other frequently proposed beauty characteristics — like surprise, desire to understand, and mind wandering — are uncorrelated with feeling beauty. A typical remembered beautiful experience was active and social like a family holiday — hardly ever mentioning beauty — and only rarely mentioned art, unlike the academic emphasis, in aesthetics, on solitary viewing of art. Our survey aligns well with Kant and the psychological theories that emphasize pleasure, and reject theories that emphasize information seeking.
AB - Many philosophers and psychologists have made claims about what is felt in an experience of beauty. Here, we test how well these claims match the feelings that people report while looking at an image, or listening to music, or recalling a personal experience of beauty. We conducted ten experiments (total n = 851) spanning three nations (US, UK, and India). Across nations and modalities, top-rated beauty experiences are strongly characterized by six dimensions: intense pleasure, an impression of universality, the wish to continue the experience, exceeding expectation, perceived harmony in variety, and meaningfulness. Other frequently proposed beauty characteristics — like surprise, desire to understand, and mind wandering — are uncorrelated with feeling beauty. A typical remembered beautiful experience was active and social like a family holiday — hardly ever mentioning beauty — and only rarely mentioned art, unlike the academic emphasis, in aesthetics, on solitary viewing of art. Our survey aligns well with Kant and the psychological theories that emphasize pleasure, and reject theories that emphasize information seeking.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103365
DO - 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103365
M3 - Article
C2 - 34246875
AN - SCOPUS:85109441098
VL - 219
JO - Acta Psychologica
JF - Acta Psychologica
SN - 0001-6918
M1 - 103365
ER -