This research is part of a project for which financial support was provided by the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation. We are greatly indebted to G. P. Murdock for supplying us with certain data, as indicated below, and to him and Thomas W. Maretzki for suggestions that have been used in this paper.

Esthetic judgment is used here as m a previous paper (Child, 1964) to mean the extent to which, when a person judges the esthetic value of works of art, his judgments agree with an appropnate extemal standard of their esthetic value The extemal standard used here is provided by the judgment of experts.Many hypotheses about esthetics, whether stated m philosophical or psychological terms, would suggest that esthetic judgment should be related to other personality charactenstics.Observational test of these hypotheses should make an important contnbution to scientific study of esthetic value. METHOD Ss for this study were 138 young men, one a graduate student and the rest undergraduates at Yale University They were obtamed as paid Ss for a psychological research project described as concemed witfi personality and preferences, some through a bulletm board used mamly to secure Ss for expenments connected with elementary psychology courses and some through the student employment bureau Opportumty to earn money appeared to be the mam mcentive, but mterest m takmg part m psychological research was probably significant for many Most Ss did not know that their reacbons to art were to be mvestigated, but since the research contmued through a considerable penod of time, some may have signed up after leammg from others that it was concemed with reactions to art Thus the samples may be somewhat biased m the direction of mcludmg an above-normal number of students with a defimte mterest m art ProcedureEach S made an appomtment for the first of two evenmg group sessions This first session, three hours m length, was followed, generally one week later, by a second group session In signing up, each student also committed himself to participate at a later tame m a smgle hour's mdividual session, ordmanly conducted withm a week 1 This research was done under Cooperative Research Contract No 669 of the U S Office of Education Esthetic ludgment 477 or two after the second group session In the group sessions the students were given vanous tests and quesbonnaires, and these were supplemented m the mdividual session by some procedures which could be admmistered to only one person at a time At the begmnmg of the first group session the students were mformed that tibe research was especially concemed with reacbons to art and with apbtudes, skiUs, and other characterisbcs that might he related to those reacbons They were told that the research was concemed with generahzabons about vanables and that all the mformabon obtamed about them as individuals would be used m a manner to gimrantee anonymity Measures of esthetic judgmentThe measure of esthebc judgment was suggested by that of the Enghsh esthebcian Margaret Bulley (1951) As used here, the method consisted of presentmg pairs of works of art m the form of projected shdes, with the S instructed to attempt to judge "which of the two works of art is better esthebcally-that is, is the better work of art" The S was asked to express an esthebc judgment of his own if he had one, if he had no su...

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The influence of 4 typeface variables (angular versus curved, bold versus light, simple versus ornate, serif versus sans-serif) on judgments of emotional meaning was studied in 40 college students. In addition to specific conclusions for each mood, it was found that, in general, moods such as sprightly, sparkling, dreamy, and soaring tend to be matched to curved, light, ornate, and perhaps sans-serif type; while moods such as sad, dignified, and dramatic are matched to angular, bold, and perhaps serif type