Jacobsen, Thomas

Following Fechner’s (1876) “aesthetics from below,” this study examines the conceptual structure of the aesthetics of various materials (Werkstoffe)—for instance, leather, metal, and wood. Adopting a technique used by Jacobsen et al. (2004), we asked 1,956 students to write down adjectives that could be used to describe the aesthetics of materials within a given time limit. A second subsample of a broader cross-section of the population (n = 496) replicated the findings obtained with the first subsample. A joint analysis of both subsamples identified the term “smooth” as by far the most relevant term, followed by the other core terms “hard,” “rough,” “soft,” and “glossy.” Furthermore, sensorial qualities (e.g., “warm” and “see-through”) constituted the main elements of the aesthetics of materials, and the great majority of these were haptic qualities (e.g., “cold” and “heavy”). The terms offered were mostly descriptive and of rather neutral valence, according to an additional valence rating study that we conducted with 94 participants. Comparisons between the terms offered for different materials revealed commonalities as well as material specificity of the conceptual structure of the aesthetics. In addition, the word “beautiful,” although by no means representing one of the most relevant terms in this study, still proved its preeminence in aesthetics in general. The results of this study contribute to the corpus of existing studies of the conceptual structure of aesthetics

Being moved has received increased attention in emotion psychology as a social emotion that fosters bonds between individuals and within communities. This increased attention, however, has also sparked debates about whether the term “being moved” refers to a single distinct profile of emotion components or rather to a range of different emotion profiles. We addressed this question by investigating lay conceptions of the emotion components (i.e., elicitors, cognitive appraisals, subjective feelings, bodily symptoms, and consequences for thought/action) of “bewegt sein” (the German term for “being moved”). Participants (N = 106) provided written descriptions of both a moving personal experience and their conceptual prototype of “being moved,” which were subjected to content analysis to obtain quantitative data for statistical analyses. Based on latent class analyses, we identified two classes for both the personal experiences (joyfully-moved and sadly-moved classes) and the being-moved prototype (basic-description and extended-description classes). Being joyfully moved occurred when social values and positive relationship experiences were salient. Being sadly moved was elicited by predominantly negative relationship experiences and negatively salient social values. For both classes, the most frequently reported consequences for thought/action were continued cognitive engagement, finding meaning, and increased valuation of and striving for connectedness/prosociality. Basic descriptions of the prototype included “being moved” by positive or negative events as instances of the same emotion, with participants in the extended-description class also reporting joy and sadness as associated emotions. Based on our findings and additional theoretical considerations, we propose that the term “being moved” designates an emotion with an overall positive valence that typically includes blends of positively and negatively valenced emotion components, in which especially the weight of the negative components varies. The emotion’s unifying core is that it involves feeling the importance of individuals, social entities, and abstract social values as sources of meaning in one’s life.

Our theoretical model (Menninghaus et al., 2019) defines aesthetic emotions by reference to their role in aesthetic evaluation, and specifically as being predictive of aesthetic liking/disliking. Skov and Nadal (2020) dismiss the construct of "aesthetic emotions" as a "dated supposition" adopted from a "speculative" tradition and assert that there are no such emotions. Accordingly, they question all pieces of empirical evidence we referred to as supporting our model. In our response, we rebut these objections point by point and defend as well as expand the empirical evidence in support of our model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

While covering all commentaries, our response specifically focuses on the following issues: How can the hypothesis of emotional distancing (qua art framing) be compatible with stipulating high levels of felt negative emotions in art reception? Which concept of altogether pleasurable mixed emotions does our model involve? Can mechanisms of predictive coding, social sharing, and immersion enhance the power of our model?

It is a common experience-and well established experimentally-that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry. Importantly, while these responses to poetry are largely analogous to those found for music, their neural underpinnings show important differences, specifically with regard to the crucial role of the nucleus accumbens. We also go beyond replicating previous music-related studies by showing that peak aesthetic pleasure can co-occur with physiological markers of negative affect. Finally, the distribution of chills across the trajectory of poems provides insight into compositional principles of poetry.

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 (apparent) 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 positive and negative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) 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.

Parallelistic features of poetic and rhetorical language use comprise a great variety of linguistically optional patterns of phonological, prosodic, syntactic, and semantic recurrence. Going beyond studies on cognitive facilitation effects of individual parallelistic features (most notably rhyme, alliteration, and meter), the present study shows that the joint employment of multiple such features in 40 sad and joyful poems intensifies all emotional response dimensions (joy, sadness, being moved, intensity, and positive affect) and all aesthetic appreciation dimensions (beauty, liking, and melodiousness) that we measured. Given that parallelistic diction is also used, to different degrees, in ritual language, commercial ads, political slogans, and everyday conversations, the implications of these findings are potentially far-reaching.