Beauty Requires Thought

Current Biology : CB
Aenne A Brielmann, Denis G Pelli

Abstract

The experience of beauty is a pleasure, but common sense and philosophy suggest that feeling beauty differs from sensuous pleasures such as eating or sex. Immanuel Kant [1, 2] claimed that experiencing beauty requires thought but that sensuous pleasure can be enjoyed without thought and cannot be beautiful. These venerable hypotheses persist in models of aesthetic processing [3-7] but have never been tested. Here, participants continuously rated the pleasure felt from a nominally beautiful or non-beautiful stimulus and then judged whether they had experienced beauty. The stimuli, which engage various senses, included seeing images, tasting candy, and touching a teddy bear. The observer reported the feelings that the stimulus evoked. The time course of pleasure, across stimuli, is well-fit by a model with one free parameter: pleasure amplitude. Pleasure amplitude increases linearly with the feeling of beauty. To test Kant's claim of a need for thought, we reduce cognitive capacity by adding a "two-back" task to distract the observer's thoughts. The distraction greatly reduces the beauty and pleasure experienced from stimuli that otherwise produce strong pleasure and spares that of less-pleasant stimuli. We also find that strong ...Continue Reading

Citations

Oct 1, 2019·I-Perception·Doris I Braun, Katja Doerschner
Jan 4, 2020·Psychonomic Bulletin & Review·Aenne A Brielmann, Denis G Pelli
Aug 22, 2017·Frontiers in Psychology·Severi Luoto
Oct 26, 2018·Frontiers in Psychology·Katharina Bluehm
Nov 22, 2019·Frontiers in Psychology·Aenne A Brielmann, Denis G Pelli
Nov 19, 2020·Attention, Perception & Psychophysics·Aenne A Brielmann, Denis G Pelli
Apr 4, 2021·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Eugen Wassiliwizky, Winfried Menninghaus
Apr 25, 2019·Cognition·Samuel G B Johnson, Stefan Steinerberger
May 15, 2021·Aesthetic Plastic Surgery·Andrea SistiPayam Sadeghi
Jul 1, 2021·Cognition & Emotion·Jiajia CheMarcos Nadal

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