Ego-development and the aesthetics of structures
Publication date
2025-11-17
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Mühlenbeck, Cordelia
Organisational unit
Publisher
Sage
Series or journal
Sage Open
ISSN
Periodical volume
15
Periodical issue
4
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Funding(s)
Language
English
Keyword
Development of aesthetic experience
Loevinger’s ego-development
Aesthetics of structures
Development as increasing frame of reference
WUSCT
Abstract
In stage models of personality development, advancing development is understood as an increased interaction with the surrounding world. In the aesthetics of structures that can be found in the surrounding world, for example, in architecture or landscape design, it is this interaction between humans and the environment that is crucial. In order to investigate the connection between personality development and the aesthetics of abstract structures, especially their characteristics in terms of size and order, and how they change over the course of development, the present study combined Loevinger’s Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT) with a task of laying aesthetically pleasing structures that were composed of individual building blocks. The results show that further development is linked to an increased preference for larger, ordered structures, and therefore suggest that development as a process of change in the relationship to the environment is also reflected in aesthetic production and appreciation.
Description
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
Version
Published version
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