The primacy of beauty in judging the aesthetics of objects
Publication date
2004-06
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Organisational unit
Institut für Allgemeine Psychologie, Universität Leipzig
Publisher
Sage Publishing
Series or journal
Psychological reports
ISSN
Periodical volume
94
Periodical issue
3_suppl
First page
1253
Last page
1260
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
Nein
Language
English
Abstract
The conceptual structure of the aesthetics of objects was investigated. To this end, associative namings for the word “aesthetics” were collected from 311 nonartist German college students in a timed verbal association task. 590 different adjectives were produced, depicting diversification of the concept. The adjective “beautiful” was given by more than 90% of the participants. The adjective “ugly” was the second most frequent naming, used by almost half of the students. All other namings were markedly less frequently produced. It is argues that the beautiful–ugly dimension represents the primary concept in the aesthetics of objects, so that performing aesthetic judgments of the beauty of objects comes naturally to individuals. In other words, the most prototypical aesthetic judgments are those of beauty. Furthermore, the majority of generated words had a positive valence as measured by an additional valence-rating study including 41 participants. This result contrasts with comparable studies of emotion terms, as such studies typically show a negativity bias. Frequency in general language use and valence of the adjectives did not account for the results.
Cite as
Jacobsen, T., Buchta, K., Köhler, M., & Schröger, E. (2004). The Primacy of Beauty in Judging the Aesthetics of Objects. Psychological Reports, 94(3_suppl), 1253-1260. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.94.3c.1253-1260
Version
Published version
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