Slobodan Markovic

Components of Aesthetic Experience: Aesthetic Fascination, Aesthetic Appraisal, and Aesthetic Emotion

In this paper aesthetic experience is defined as an experience qualitatively different from everyday experience and similar to other exceptional states of mind. Three crucial characteristics of aesthetic experience are discussed: fascination with an aesthetic object (high arousal and attention), appraisal of the symbolic reality of an object (high cognitive engagement), and a strong feeling of unity with the object of aesthetic fascination and aesthetic appraisal. In a proposed model, two parallel levels of aesthetic information processing are proposed. On the first level two sub-levels of narrative are processed, story (theme) and symbolism (deeper meanings). The second level includes two sub-levels, perceptual associations (implicit meanings of objects physical features) and detection of compositional regularities. Two sub-levels are defined as crucial for aesthetic experience, appraisal of symbolism and compositional regularities. These sub-levels require some specific cognitive and personality dispositions, such as expertise, creative thinking, and openness to experience. Finally, feedback of emotional processing is included in our model: appraisals of everyday emotions are specified as a matter of narrative content (eg, empathy with characters), whereas the aesthetic emotion is defined as an affective evaluation in the process of symbolism appraisal or the detection of compositional regularities.

Aesthetic experience and the emotional content of paintings

In this study we investigated the relationship between aesthetic experience and other emotional qualities judged in paintings. Aesthetic experience was defined as an exceptional state of mind in which a person is focused on a particular object, transcending its everyday uses and meanings and losing the awareness of surroundings and even of himself/herself. In this state a person has an exceptional emotional experience, that is a feeling of unity with the object. Our basic idea is that aesthetic experience is not reducible to pleasure or a positive hedonic tone, but a person can equally be fascinated with both pleasant and unpleasant objects. In preliminary studies we specified the stimulus set of figural and semi-figural paintings, and a set of descriptors of emotions, feelings and aesthetic experience. Participants judged the paintings on descriptors (seven-point scales). Factor analysis revealed two large factors: the bipolar factor Affective Tone (descriptors on the positive pole: lovely, charming, cheerful, etc; descriptors on the negative pole: scary, disgusting, hateful etc.) and Aesthetic Experience (descriptors: exceptional, profound, unique, etc.). Additional analyses have shown no significant correlation between the two factors. These findings confirmed our idea that aesthetic experience is independent of pleasure or affective attraction, and that it can be induced by both pleasant and unpleasant paintings.

Implicit and explicit features of paintings.

Implicit features of the paintings are properties that are imposed by the observer (e.g. how pleasant, interesting, tense a painting appears), whereas explicit features refer to properties that can be directly perceived (form, color, depth, etc.). The aim of Experiments 1 and 2 was to investigate the underlying structure of implicit and explicit features of paintings using the factor analysis of elementary judgments. In the preliminary studies, representative sets of paintings and elementary implicit and explicit dimensions (in the form of bipolar scales) were selected. Four implicit factors were extracted: Regularity, Relaxation, Hedonic Tone and Arousal. Four explicit factors were extracted: Form, Color, Space and Complexity. The following significant correlations between implicit and explicit factors were obtained: Regularity-Form, Regularity-Space, Hedonic Tone-Form and Arousal-Complexity. In Experiment 3 the role of implicit and explicit factors in similarity-dissimilarity ratings was specified. Significant correlations between the position of paintings in MDS space and mean judgments of explicit factors Color, Space and Complexity and implicit factor Relaxation were obtained, suggesting that similarity ratings of paintings are primarily based on explicit features. The causal relation of explicit and implicit features is discussed.

The effect of music background on the emotional appraisal of film sequences

In this study the effects of musical background on the emotional appraisal of film sequences was investigated. Four pairs of polar emotions defined in Plutchik’s model were used as basic emotional qualities: joy-sadness, anticipation-surprise, fear-anger, and trust disgust. In the preliminary study eight film sequences and eight music themes were selected as the best representatives of all eight Plutchik’s emotions. In the main experiment the participant judged the emotional qualities of film-music combinations on eight seven-point scales. Half of the combinations were congruent (e.g. joyful film - joyful music), and half were incongruent (e.g. joyful film - sad music). Results have shown that visual information (film) had greater effects on the emotion appraisal than auditory information (music). The modulation effects of music background depend on emotional qualities. In some incongruent combinations (joysadness) the modulations in the expected directions were obtained (e.g. joyful music reduces the sadness of a sad film), in some cases (anger-fear) no modulation effects were obtained, and in some cases (trust-disgust, anticipation-surprise) the modulation effects were in an unexpected direction (e.g. trustful music increased the appraisal of disgust of a disgusting film). These results suggest that the appraisals of conjoint effects of emotions depend on the medium (film masks the music) and emotional quality (three types of modulation effects).

Aesthetic valence of visual illusions.

Visual illusions constitute an interesting perceptual phenomenon, but they also have an aesthetic and affective dimension. We hypothesized that the illusive nature itself causes the increased aesthetic and affective valence of illusions compared with their non-illusory counterparts. We created pairs of stimuli. One qualified as a standard visual illusion whereas the other one did not, although they were matched in as many perceptual dimensions as possible. The phenomenal quality of being an illusion had significant effects on “Aesthetic Experience” (fascinating, irresistible, exceptional, etc), “Evaluation” (pleasant, cheerful, clear, bright, etc), “Arousal” (interesting, imaginative, complex, diverse, etc), and “Regularity” (balanced, coherent, clear, realistic, etc). A subsequent multiple regression analysis suggested that Arousal was a better predictor of Aesthetic Experience than Evaluation. The findings of this study demonstrate that illusion is a phenomenal quality of the percept which has measurable aesthetic and affective valence.

Introduction to the special issue on visual aesthetics

Visual aesthetics encompasses the studies of the relationship between vision and various aesthetic phenomena - from the beauty ratings of simple visual patterns to the appreciation of visual art, from the preference for natural objects and scenes to the preference for products of human creativity, from the aesthetic effects of culture to the aesthetic effects of biology, from the universal aesthetic sensitivity to the individual differences in taste, and so on. In this special issue ten papers reported the most recent studies on very different subjects related to visual aesthetics.

Subjective experience of architectural objects: A cross-cultural study

The purpose of the present study was to compare Serbian and Japanese participants in their subjective experience of Serbian and Japanese architectural objects. Subjective experience was operationalized through the ratings on the bipolar scales (e.g. pleasant-unpleasant). In the Preliminary study 1, a set of twelve rating scales was generated. In the Preliminary study 2 twelve Serbian and twelve Japanese architectural objects were specified. In the main experiment two groups of participants, twenty-one Serbian and twenty Japanese, rated twelve Serbian and twelve Japanese objects. A factor analysis extracted three dimensions of subjective experience: Beauty, Firmness and Fullness. Analysis of variance have shown that both Serbian and Japanese participants agreed that Japanese architectural objects looked more beautiful and firmer than Serbian objects. These finding is generally in line with perceptualist hypothesis that stimulus constraints are more effective than culture. However, interactions revealed some cultural differences that are consistent with culturalist hypothesis: compared to Serbian participants, Japanese participants rated Japanese architectural objects as more beautiful, whereas, compared to Japanese, Serbian participants rated Serbian objects as less fragile and emptier than Japanese objects. Generaly, our study have shown that Serbian (Western) and Japanese (Eastern) participants show general similarity in their subjective experience of architectural objects. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 179033]

The experience of beauty of different categories of objects

Participants were asked to mark the descriptors which well described their experience of beauty of five categories: of objects.. Check-list was used:137 descriptors X 5 categories.In experience of beauty two aspects of visual objects and scenes can be focused:1. Physical features such as symmetry, simplicity, golden section, color qualities and so on.3. Subjective, i.e. implicit features are imposed to the scene by the perceiver; e.g. some objects may look more or less harmonious, warm, interesting, charming and so on.

Judgement of abstract paintings

In two experiments the judgement of twenty one abstract paintings was investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects were asked to make similarity judgements of 210 pairs of paintings on a 7 step bipolar scale (similar-dissimilar). The Multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) method was used for data analysis. The distribution of paintings within MDS 2-D space suggested two grouping criteria: colorfullness (e.g. from Klee to Kline) and geometrization (e.g. from Vasarely to Kandinsky). In Experiment 2, subjects were asked to judge the same paintings on three factors of the instrument SDF 9 (Markovic et al., 2002b): Evaluation, Arousal and Regularity. The purpose of this experiment was to specify the subjective criteria on which the (dis)similarity judgements were based. In the regression analysis the three factors of SDF 9 were defined as predictors, whereas the x and y coordinates of MDS 2-D space were defined as dependent variables. The results have shown that the dimension x was reducible to the Evaluation factor, and dimension y is reducible to the Regularity factor.

Judgement of paintings belonging to different tendencies in the 20th century painting

In this study Trifunovic’ hypothesis that there are three objective lines in the development of modern art was psychologically evaluated. According to Trifunovic, in the first line (Cezanne - cubism - neoplasticism - suprematism) the geometrization of form prevails, in the second (Van Gogh - expressionism - abstract expressionism) the use of color is dominant, whereas the main features of the third line (Gauguin - fauvism) are symbolic use of color and reduction of perspective. Fifteen reproductions of paintings that represent the three developmental lines were used as stimuli. The subjects were asked to judge the stimuli on nine bipolar 7-step scales. These scales constitute the three factors of instrument SDF 9: Evaluation, Arousal and Regularity (3 scales x 3 factors = 9 scales). Four clusters of paintings were obtained: Abstract-expressionistic (moderate Evaluation, high Arousal and low Regularity), Figural-expressionistic (very low Evaluation, low Arousal and high Regularity), Constructivistic (moderate Evaluation, low Arousal and high Regularity) and Realistic (high Evaluation, high Arousal and high Regularity). The results partially confirm Trifunovic’ hypothesis indicating that, besides the formal features, the content (abstract vs. figural) is also significant factor of subjective clustering of paintings.