Aesthetic preference and resemblance of viewer’s personality to paintings

Abstract

We investigated the hypothesis that the degree to which a viewer likes a painting is related to the similarity between the attributes the viewer perceives in the painting and the attributes the viewer perceives in his or her own personality. This relation may reveal itself not only in terms of resemblance to the person's image of real self, but also in terms of resemblance to ideal self, the self the person would like to be. To test these hypotheses, 32 subjects (1) rated how much they liked each of 12 paintings, and (2) rated the same paintings, their "real" selves, and their "ideal" selves on identical sets of bipolar adjectives. The results showed a clear relation between liking and similarity to ideal self, and a weaker, although also reliable, relation between liking and similarity to real self.