We define aesthetic emotions as emotions that underlie the evaluative assessment of artworks. They are separated from the wider class of art-elicited emotions. Aesthetic emotions historically have been characterized as calm, as lacking specific patterns of embodiment, and as being a sui generis kind of pleasure. We reject those views and argue that there is a plurality of aesthetic emotions contributing to praise. After presenting a general account of the nature of (...) class='Hi'>emotions, we analyze twelve positive aesthetic emotions in four different categories: emotions of pleasure, contemplation, amazement, and respect. The emotions that we identify in each category, including feelings of fluency, intrigue, wonder, and adoration, have been widely neglected both within aesthetics and in emotion research more broadly. (shrink)

This paper investigates what I call aesthetic emotions in the “traditional” sense going back to Burke and Kant. According to Kant, aesthetic pleasure is disinterested, and so maybe for Kant aesthetic emotions would be too, for Kant, but emotions by their very nature cannot be disinterested. After dismissing the idea that aesthetic emotions are a special kind of distanced emotions or refined emotions, I extract from the writings of Clive Bell, (...) Peter Kivy, and Peter Lamarque the view that aesthetic emotions are positive, pleasurable, consummatory emotions—emotions of appreciation—which are noninstrumental and which take as their intentional objects the intrinsic qualities of an artwork, more particularly, its formal interrelationships and the way that the overall formal structure of an artwork molds its content. (shrink)

미적 감정주의는 미적 가치평가가 감정 반응에 근거한다는 생각이다. 이 글에서 나는 미적 감정주의에 기초하여 미적 감정이 있다고 주장하는 두 관점인 환원주의와 수정주의를 비판적으로 검토한다. 경이 환원주의는 비인지주의 감정 이론을 전제하고 미적 감상이 경이 감정으로 환원된다고 주장한다. 다수 감정 환원주의는 인지주의나 비인지주의를 전제하지 않고 미적 감상이 다수의 감정으로 이루어진 한 부류로 환원된다고 주장한다. 반면 수정주의는 감상 감정인 미적 감정이 별도의 감정적 기능인 완성적 기능을 갖기에 독자적인 감정 유형으로 분류돼야 한다고 주장한다. 그러나 환원주의는 개념 예술 감상을 적절하게 설명하지 못한다는 문제를 가진다. 이에 (...) 더해, 경이 환원주의는 재조정을 통해 미적 경이의 지향적 대상을 구성하는 데 취약하고, 다수 감정 환원주의는 미적 가치평가의 근거가 감정이 아닌 다른 반응이나 태도일 가능성을 간과하는 문제를 가진다. 한편 수정주의는 감정의 완성적 기능과 정감적 평가가 개념적으로 충돌하는 문제를 드러내며, 직접 경험 원칙에서 벗어나는 예술 감상 사례를 설명하지 못한다. 그러므로 나는 환원주의와 수정주의가 모두 성공적이지 않다고 결론 내린다. (shrink)

This article analyses the concept of ?aesthetic emotion? in John Dewey's Art as experience. The analysis shows that Dewey's line of investigation offers valuable insights as to the role of emotion in experience: it shows emotion as an integral part and structuring force, as a cultural and historical category. However, the notion of aesthetic emotion is characterized by a fundamental ambiguity. There is a conflict between a mechanical and an organic understanding of emotion, a confusion of emotion as (...) structure and of emotion as process, of emotion as content and as agency. The central problem may consist of the conception of aesthetic experience as the ideal. While evil and despair are thereby excluded from the art, everyday life is left wanting, as it cannot live up to the ideal. (shrink)

The ability to distinguish between emotions is considered indicative of well-being, but does emotion differentiation in an aesthetic context also reflect deeper and more knowledgeable aesthetic experiences? Here we examine whether positive and negative ED in response to artistic stimuli reflects higher fluency in an aesthetic domain. Particularly, we test whether knowledge of the arts and curiosity are associated with more fine-grained positive and negative aesthetic experiences. A sample of 214 people rated their positive and (...) negative feelings in response to various artworks including positive and negative themes. Positive ED was associated with the embracing sub-trait of curiosity that reflects engagement and enjoyment of novelty and complexity, but was unrelated to artistic knowledge and perceived comprehension. Negative ED was associated with higher curiosity and particularly more knowledge of the arts. This relationship was mediated by appraised comprehension suggesting that deeper engagement with art, by those with more art knowledge, is associated with more fine-grained emotional experiences. This finding extends ED beyond well-being research and suggests that more nuanced emotional experiences are more likely for those with expertise in the arts and motivation for exploration. (shrink)

The Creativity in Health and Care Workshops programme was a series of investigative workshops aimed at interrogating the subject of creativity with an over-arching objective of extending the understanding of the problems and possibilities of applying creativity within the health and care sector workforce. Included in the workshops was a concept analysis, which attempted to gain clearer understanding of creativity and innovation within this context. The analysis led to emergent theory regarding the central importance of aesthetics, emotion and empathetic imagination (...) to the generation of creative and innovative outcomes that have the capacity to promote wellbeing in the health and social care workforce. Drawing on expertise in the field, this paper outlines the concept analysis and subsequent reflection. (shrink)

For the properly “cultivated,” proclaimed Oscar Wilde in 1890, “beautiful things mean only Beauty.”1 The idea that artworks possess a discrete and autonomous type of value, by virtue of their capacity to provoke a distinctively aesthetic type of response, is most often associated with artists and critics belonging to the modernist tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certainly, many influential writers of the period who expressed more instrumentalist attitudes toward the value of their own work, such (...) as Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, have also without manifest perversity been classified as modernists. But latter-day, self-described defenders of modernism (e.g., Susan Sontag, Gabriel... (shrink)

Aesthetic emotions are elicited by different sensory impressions generated by music, visual arts, literature, theater, film, or nature scenes. Recently, the AESTHEMOS scale has been developed to facilitate the empirical assessment of such emotions. In this article we report a semantic profile analysis of aesthetic emotion terms that had been used for the development of this scale, using the GRID approach. This method consists of obtaining ratings of emotion terms on a set of meaning facets which (...) represent five components of the emotion process. The aims here were to determine the dimensionality of the GRID features when applied to aesthetic emotions and compare it to published results for emotion terms in general, and to examine the internal organization of the domain of aesthetic emotion terms in order to identify salient clusters of these items based on the similarity of their feature profiles on the GRID. Exploratory Principal Component Analyses suggest a four-dimensional structure of the semantic space consisting of valence, power, arousal, and novelty, converging with earlier GRID studies on large sets of standard emotion terms. Using cluster analyses, 15 clusters of aesthetic emotion terms with similar GRID feature profiles were identified, revealing the internal organization of the aesthetic emotion terms domain and meaningful subgroups of aesthetic emotions. While replication for further languages is required, these findings provide a solid basis for further research and methodological development in the realm of aesthetic emotions. (shrink)

In this article, we want to show the relevance and importance of melancholy as an aesthetic emotion. Melancholy often plays a role in our encounters with art works, and it is also present in some of our aesthetic responses to the natural environment. Melancholy invites aesthetic considerations to come into play not only in well-defined aesthetic contexts but also in everyday situations that give reason for melancholy to arise. But the complexity of melancholy, the fact that (...) it is fascinating in itself, suggests the further thought that it may be considered as an aesthetic emotion per se. To this end, we argue that it is the distinctive character of melancholy, its dual character and its differences from sadness and depression, which distinguishes it as an aesthetic emotion. (shrink)

This comment proposes that Bullot & Reber's (B&R's) emphasis on historical and intentional knowledge expands the range of emotions that can be properly viewed as aesthetic states. Many feelings, such as anger, contempt, shame, confusion, and pride, come about through complex aesthetic meanings, which integrate conceptual knowledge, beliefs about the work and the artist's intentions, and the perceiver's goals and values.

Part way through Stephen Frears’s film, The Queen , the monarch undergoes an extraordinary, magical experience whilstjourneying into the Scottish landscape that surrounds Balmoral, her grandancestral holiday home. Despite the anxious offers from her estate workersto chauffeur her, she drives alone into the mountains and proceeds to breakdown in the centre of a fast flowing river. While awaiting help a strangeevent occurs: a stag appears magically as if from nowhere and, unable tohide her admiration for the beast, the Queen gently (...) utters the words, ‘Oh!You beauty’ before the animal disappears as mysteriously as it arrived.Framed in a painterly way, and providing a marked punctuation to the urbansettings that have dominated the film so far, this short sequence presents aseries of sumptuous landscape images that elicit a spectator response whichis instinctive and intuitive. When analysed using an aesthetic approach – amethodology one might use for the examination of a painting – anemotional relationship is mobilised between the spectator and the film: asentiment not necessarily available through a narrative reading. (shrink)

In this paper we present a prototype approach to awe. We suggest that two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures. Five additional appraisals account for variation in the hedonic tone of awe experiences: threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue, and the supernatural. We derive this perspective from a review of what has been written about awe in (...) religion, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, and then we apply this perspective to an analysis of awe and related states such as admiration, elevation, and the epiphanic experience. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that the presence of music experienced as pleasant positively influences episodic memory (EM) encoding. However, it is unclear whether this impact of pleasant music holds regardless of how arousing the music is, and what influence, if any, music-induced aesthetic emotions have. Furthermore, most music EM studies have used verbal or facial memory tasks limiting the generalisability of these findings to everyday EMs with spatiotemporal richness. The current study used an online what-where-when paradigm to assess music's (...) influence on EM encoding in a rich spatiotemporal environment. 105 participants carried out the what-where-when task in the presence of either silence or one of four musical stimuli falling into the four corners of the 2-D circumplex emotion model. We observed an interaction effect between the pleasantness and arousingness of music stimuli, whereby for pleasant stimuli, the low arousing excerpt was associated with better recall performance compared to the high arousing excerpt. We also observed that, across all excerpts, experience of negative aesthetic emotions was associated with compromised recall performance. Together, our results confirm the deleterious influence arousing stimuli can have on memory and support the notion that aesthetic-emotional experience of music can influence how memories are encoded in everyday life. (shrink)

Installation art is one of the most important and provocative developments in the visual arts during the last half century and has become a key focus of artists and of contemporary museums. It is also seen as particularly challenging or even disliked by many viewers, and-due to its unique in situ, immersive setting-is equally regarded as difficult or even beyond the grasp of present methods in empirical aesthetic psychology. In this paper, we introduce an exploratory study with installation art, (...) utilizing a collection of techniques to capture the eclectic, the embodied, and often the emotionally-charged viewing experience. We present results from an investigation of two pieces, both part of Olafur Eliasson's exhibition "Baroque, Baroque" held at the Belvedere museum in Vienna. These were assessed by administered pre- and post-viewing questionnaires focusing on emotion, meaning-making, and appraisals, in tandem with mobile eye tracking to consider viewers' attention to both installed artworks and/or the museum environment. The data showed differences in participants' emotional states, appraisals, and visual exploration, which together paint a picture of the aesthetic reactions to the works. These differences also showed how viewers' appraisal strategies, meaning making, and physical actions facilitated relatively more or less deep engagement with, and enjoyment of, the art pieces. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for museum studies, art education, and theory in empirical aesthetics. (shrink)

The monograph is focused on the subjectivity of aesthetic experience and the problem of rational interpretation of emotionality. The text studies why does an aesthetic experience exist, what is its content and what is its informational role and structure? Has beauty any cognitive value? Can we analyse beauty? In what sense we can think about the information content of aesthetic experience? The second topic of the book is a cognitive role of emotionality and its research. Why we (...) have emotions? What can they tell us about yourself and about the world? The methodology of the study is designed as a phenomenological research of subjective experience that is combined with the newest results in Cognitive science research. --Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Argues that relations between mind and body are analogous to those between subject matter and style in art.

This article focuses on situations and emotional perception. To this end, I start with the Kuleshov effect wherein identical shots of performers manifest different expressions when cut to different contexts. However, I conducted experiments with a twist, using Darth Vader and non-primates, and even here expressions varied with contexts. Building on historically and conceptually linked Gibsonian, Gestalt, phenomenological and pragmatic schools, along with consonant experimental work, I extrapolate these results to defend three interconnected points. First, I argue that while perceiving (...) expression is sometimes about reading minds, it is more squarely about perceiving solicitations or closures for action. Second, I frame expressions as a subcategory of Gibson’s affordances. This includes those showing up through context, in turn suggesting Kuleshov-like scenarios are not mere perceptual tricks. Third, I maintain that situations—with or without other human beings—have action-motivating expressive qualities or what Gestalt theorists called physiognomic characters, following Werner. These likewise emerge through ecological relations, and are very much like affordances and in the world as much as them. With resemblance theories, my account agrees that we perceive expression in the world. However, it indicates a broad range of cases in which expression shows up as consequences of overall situations that solicit or close actions, as opposed to mere resemblance between entities and human expressions. (shrink)

Aesthetics is a normative domain. We evaluate artworks as better or worse, good or bad, great or grim. I will refer to a positive appraisal of an artwork as an aesthetic appreciation of that work, and I refer to a negative appraisal as aesthetic depreciation. (I will often drop the word “aesthetic.”) There has been considerable amount of work on what makes an artwork worthy of appreciation, and less, it seems, on the nature of appreciation itself. These (...) two topics are related, of course, because they nature of appreciation may bear on what things are worthy of that response, or at least on what things are likely to elicit it. So I will have some things to say about the latter. But I want to focus in this discussion on appreciation itself. When we praise a work of art, when we say it has aesthetic value, what does our praise consist in? This is a question about aesthetic psychology. I am interested in what kind of mental state appreciation is. What kind of state are we expressing when we say a work of art is “good”? This question has parallels in other areas of value theory. In ethics, most notably, there has been much attention lavished on the question of what people express when they refer to an action as “morally good.” One popular class of theories, associated with the British moralists and their followers, posits a link between moral valuation and emotion. To call an act morally good is to express an emotion toward that act. I think this approach to morality is right on target (Prinz, 2007). Here I want to argue that an emotional account of aesthetic valuation is equally promising. There are important differences between the two domains, but both have an affective foundation. I suspect that valuing of all kinds involves the emotions. Here I will inquire into the role of emotions in aesthetic valuing. I will not claim that artworks express emotions or even that they necessarily evoke emotions.. (shrink)

Emotion in Aesthetics is the first book on aesthetics to provide an extensive theory of emotion; application of the cognitive-emotive theory to aesthetics; analysis of the relationship between aesthetics, metaphor and emotion; a full theory of meaning and its application to aesthetics; discussion of the relationship between aesthetics, music and language in terms of phonetics, phonology and intonation; an analysis of humanistic aesthetics; a well-developed naturalistic theory of ethics as applied to aesthetics and emotion. Stress is placed on the views (...) of contemporary philosophers as well as some of the main historical accounts of emotion in aesthetics. The important recent work on emotion has not hitherto been applied to aesthetics. As a result there is still much confusion in aesthetics about aesthetic emotion and related concepts, such as the expression theory of emotion. The present book has been written to show how the theory can be used to clarify the issue, resulting in a major breakthrough in aesthetics. In addition, the theory presented is valuable in relating aesthetics to ethics and humanism. (shrink)

Nowadays, aesthetics are generally considered as a crucial aspect that affects the way we confront things, events, and states of affairs. However, the functional role of aesthetics in the interaction between agent and environment has not been addressed effectively. Our objective here is to provide an explanation concerning the role of aesthetics, and especially, of the aesthetic experience as a fundamental bodily and emotional activity in the respective interactions. An explanation of the functional role of the aesthetic experience (...) could offer new orientations to our understanding of embodied cognition and of aesthetics as a fundamental part of it. We argue that aesthetic experience, especially its emotional dimension, is an evaluative process that influences the anticipation for stable and successful interactions with the environment. In other words, aesthetics facilitates sense-making as they affect what might be anticipated by an action tendency with respect to an environment. (shrink)

Sport is a producer of both emotional and aesthetic experiences. But how do these relate? Does a spectator’s emotional engagement in sport enhance or hinder it as an aesthetic experience? And does the aesthetic perception of sport enhance or hinder the emotional experiences? These questions will be addressed with particular reference to the distinction that can be drawn between partisan and purist watchers of sport, and making use of thinking in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of emotion. There (...) are some reasons to think that emotion and aesthetics pull in opposite directions, in both sport and wider life. Does a purist miss out on the essence of sport if they adopt a detached aesthetic attitude? If that were the case, it would suggest that the sports spectator might have to choose between the two: experiencing one or the other but not both at the same time. Emotions and aesthetics would be a trade-off but I argue for some significant exceptions to this conclusion. (shrink)

Exploring emotions, in terms of their evolutionary origin; their basic neurobiological substratum, and their functional significance in autonomous agents, we propose a model of minimal functionality of emotions. Our aim is to provide a naturalized explanation – mostly based on an interactivist model of emergent representation and appraisal theory of emotions – concerning basic aesthetic emotions in the formation of aesthetic judgment. We suggest two processes the Cognitive Variables Subsystem (CVS) which is fundamental for (...) the accomplishment of the function of heuristic learning; and Aesthetic Appraisal Subsystem (AAS) which primarily affects the elicitation of aesthetic emotional meanings. These two subsystems (CVS and AAS) are organizationally connected and affect the action readiness of the autonomous agent. More specifically, we consider the emotional outcome of these two subsystems as a functional indication that strengthens or weakens the anticipation for the resolution of the dynamic uncertainty that emerges in the particular interaction. (shrink)

Roger Scruton appears to have been the first to argue for and articulate an anti-realist theory of aesthetic properties. In the case of emotional qualities of music, his principal argument against realism is unsound and cannot, I believe, be repaired. Nevertheless an anti-realist view of emotional qualities of music is in my view correct and I defend Scruton's insight against a rival realist conception. However, I prefer a rather different form of anti-realism to Scruton's.

This project aims to examine whether music has an emotional nature. I use the ancient Chinese text Music Has No Grief or Joy to construct three arguments for the illusion view, according to which music has no emotional nature and the emotional appearances of music are illusory. These arguments highlight representational inconstancy, expressive incapability, and evocative underdetermination as three ways to problematize the idea that music has an emotional nature. I draw on the Confucian tradition to formulate three responses to (...) the illusion view from representational reliability, expressive sincerity, and evocative appropriateness. These responses are shown to be inadequate. To examine the illusion view in detail, I adopt a comparative approach to structure a dialogue between ancient Eastern philosophy and contemporary Western philosophy. Nine arguments are constructed from three prominent approaches in contemporary Western musical aesthetics on the evocation, expression, and representation of emotion. I argue that each of these arguments reads emotion into music. Nevertheless, three insights emerge from the comparative discussion. The autonomy of emotional enjoyment, the possibility of emotional communication, and the function of emotional language in musical experiences call for explanations. I argue that the illusion view are amenable to these insights. The illusion view allows us to claim full ownership of emotional responses, have emotional communication by recognizing intended emotional meanings in music, and appreciate the practical value of emotional language in music industry and education. I formulate a possible objection on the basis of Charles Swann’s musical experience in Marcel Proust’s novel, according to which music has emotional agency in the formation of an emotion. This objection can be met and Swann’s musical experience can be integrated into the illusion view. The illusion view turns out to be experientially richer than it might appear at first. This project liberates musical listening and philosophical thinking from beliefs entrenched in the emotional illusion of music. (shrink)

In this paper I trace a theoretical path along Meinong’s works, by means of which the notion of aesthetic object as well as the changes this notion undergoes along Meinong’s output will be highlighted. Focusing especially on "Über emotionale Präsentation", I examine, on the one hand, the cognitive function of emotions, on the other hand, the objects apprehended by aesthetic emotions, i.e. aesthetic objects. These are ideal objects of higher order, which have, even though not (...) primarily, the capacity to attract aesthetic experiences to themselves. Hence, they are connected to emotions, being what is presented by them. These results are achieved on the basis of a fundamental analogy between the domain of value and the aesthetic domain. Finally, the notion of an absolute beauty is discussed. (shrink)