In four experiments, this research sheds light on aesthetic experiences by rigorously investigating behavioral, neural, and psychological properties of package design. We find that aesthetic packages significantly increase the reaction time of consumers' choice responses; that they are chosen over products with well-known brands in standardized packages, despite higher prices; and that they result in increased activation in the nucleus accumbens and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, according to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results suggest that reward value plays an important role in aesthetic product experiences. Further, a closer look at psychometric and neuroimaging data finds that a paper-and-pencil measure of affective product involvement correlates with aesthetic product experiences in the brain. Implications for future aesthetics research, package designers, and product managers are discussed.

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The American cant of newness, so pervasive in the general culture, is all the more remarkable for its capacity to penetrate even specialized professional discourses. What a succession of "new" histories populate the profession's recent past: the new economic history, the new labor history, the new social history, the new urban history, the new political history, and other greater or lesser "news" too numerous to list. Although much intellectual excitement is associated with these newer modes of historical technique, they have provoked growing unease and discussion about the "problem" of synthesis. Beyond that worry is a deeper and ultimately fundamental one about the declining significance of history in the general intellectual culture of our time. History enrollments have dropped at universities, and history requirements have been reduced at all levels of education. Whereas history was once the common coin of intellectual and political discourse, today's journalists, writers, and intellectuals, to say nothing of political leaders, seem little inclined to attend to the work of our profession.Those who express worries about the apparent erosion of the place of history beyond our professional peers have tended to argue or to assume some correlation between the loss of a public following and the advent of newer historiographical modes and themes. l If that perception is correct, we cannot but ask: Is it possible to reap the positive achievements of the new history without assuming such an attendant and quite ironic liability?Perhaps we should begin by taking a somewhat longer view of the new history in our time. It is worth remembering that the original call for a "Lewis Mumford hailed it as an exemplar of the new history and as a standard against which future historians must measure their own work. If the next generation failed to write "a more sociological and synthetic history," Mumford reflected, it would not be "for lack of high example."3 However remarkable that book was -Perry Miller characterized it as the "inherited capital" of his generation -it is even more remarkable for its singularity. 4 After more than fifty years, it remains the only synthesis of American history based on the principles of the new history. Although the phenomenon would have puzzled the Beards, the "new" histories of our time pronounce themselves analytical, not narrative, history. The principles of the new history and the narrative form have become antagonists rather than ends and means. Before proceeding, therefore, we must reconsider narrative and what happened to it.

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