Winfried Menninghaus, Valentin Wagner, Julian Hanich, Eugen Wassiliwizky, Thomas Jacobsen & Stefan Koelsch
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40:1-58 (2017)
Abstract |
Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability, and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positiveandnegative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of presentation on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our Distancing-Embracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories.
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DOI | 10.1017/s0140525x17000309 |
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References found in this work BETA
Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of Emotion.James A. Russell - 2003 - Psychological Review 110 (1):145-172.
The Cognitive Control of Emotion.K. N. Ochsner & J. J. Gross - 2005 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (5):242-249.
What Are Emotions? And How Can They Be Measured?Klaus R. Scherer - 2005 - Social Science Information 44 (4):695-729.
The Empathic Brain: How, When and Why?Frederique de Vignemont & Tania Singer - 2006 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (10):435-441.
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Citations of this work BETA
Ugliness Is in the Gut of the Beholder.Ryan P. Doran - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
Moving Through the Literature: What Is the Emotion Often Denoted Being Moved?Janis H. Zickfeld, Thomas W. Schubert, Beate Seibt & Alan P. Fiske - 2019 - Emotion Review 11 (2):123-139.
Art and Psychological Well-Being: Linking the Brain to the Aesthetic Emotion.Stefano Mastandrea, Sabrina Fagioli & Valeria Biasi - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
View all 17 citations / Add more citations
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