Brian Detweiler-Bedell

Beauty as an Emotion : The Exhilarating Prospect of Mastering a Challenging World

Beauty has received sparse attention from emotion theorists, some of whom have argued that aesthetic pleasure is cognitive in nature and too “disinterested” to be emotional. This view is supported by research suggesting that aesthetic pleasure is based on processing fluency. The authors review recent findings in the psychology of aesthetics and present two arguments. First, processing fluency explains the mild pleasure associated with simple or familiar objects, but it cannot account for the more intense pleasure associated with complex or novel objects. Immediately recognizing an object tends to be mildly pleasant, whereas sensing the prospect of successfully representing a complex object can be exhilarating. Second, to explain how these forms of aesthetic pleasures differ, a theory must go beyond cognitive dynamics. The authors’ affect-based model of emotion differentiates aesthetic pleasures in terms of epistemic goals. Pretty, fluently processed stimuli implicate prevention goals that maintain and protect knowledge. Beautiful, novel stimuli implicate promotion goals that reshape and expand knowledge. The emotional nature of interest and awe are also discussed.

Early detection and avoidance of threatening faces during passive viewing

To evaluate whether there is an early attentional bias towards negative stimuli, we tracked participants’ eyes while they passively viewed displays composed of four Ekman faces. In Experiment 1 each display consisted of three neutral faces and one face depicting fear or happiness. In half of the trials, all faces were inverted. Although the passive viewing task should have been very sensitive to attentional biases, we found no evidence that overt attention was biased towards fearful faces. Instead, people tended to actively avoid looking at the fearful face. This avoidance was evident very early in scene viewing, suggesting that the threat associated with the faces was evaluated rapidly. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and extended it to angry faces. In sum, our data suggest that negative facial expressions are rapidly analysed and influence visual scanning, but, rather than attract attention, such faces are actively avoided.