Aesthetic sensitivity: Origin and development of an idea

Abstract

Aesthetic sensitivity is a core idea in empirical aesthetics, referred to the appreciation of sensory objects. Throughout the history of the discipline, it has been conceptualized in many ways. Two antagonistic notions of aesthetic sensitivity encompass most contributions in the literature: On one side, the promoters of a normative notion—comprising determinist and educative views—devised it for educational purposes. On the other, the advocates of sensitivity as responsiveness to sensory stimulation—as sensitivity is commonly understood and defined conceived it as a means to investigate sensory valuation. This chapter critically reviews each notion’s emergence and development through its leading proponents, considering their influences, context, and scientific impact.

Explaining the curvature effect

“…Eighty-seven adults (64 women and 23 men, aged 18-70 years, M = 34.20, SD = 12.35), residents in the UK with English as their first language and recruited through Prolific (https://www.prolific.co/) with a minimum approval rate of 80%, completed the study using laptops or computers of minimum 13 inches and 4 Mbps internet connection-data collected from 18/02/2021 to 30/04/2021 and accessed on 30/04/2021. Previous research in the lab using mixed-effects models with random effects per participant and per stimulus consistently employed sample sizes of around 40 participants (e.g., Clemente et al, 2022, 2022b. Following recommendations for online studies (Sauter, Draschkow & Mack, 2020;Stewart, Chandler & Paolacci, 2017), we doubled this sample size.…”

“…Likewise, perceptual evaluations seem to be affected by individual differences (Powell et al, 2016;Skewes et al, 2015;Zaidel et al, 2015). Regarding personal factors, we examined the impact of art experience-involving interest and knowledge in visual art (Chatterjee, Widick, Sternschein, Smith II & Bromberger, 2010)-, openness to experience-a personality trait captured by the abridged personality inventory (Gosling, Rentfrow & Swann, 2003)-and need for cognition-denoting a preference for cognitively-demanding objects and activities (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982)-on perceptual and hedonic sensitivities-i.e., the way people use a particular stimulus feature in their perceptual and hedonic evaluations, respectively (Clemente, 2022). As for the experimental conditions, we probed the impact of question polarity-i.e., asking about curved or angular-, response laterality-i.e., the position of the angular and curved ratings on a continuous scale-and the experimental paradigm-i.e., whether evaluations are made according to an internal (absolute) standard or by comparison to an external reference.…”

“…Like most psychological phenomena, the curvature effect has been almost exclusively studied and established by averaging across participants (e.g., Bertamini et al, 2016;Palumbo et al, 2015). As a matter of fact, common limitations in the empirical aesthetics literature stem from neglecting individual differences (Clemente, 2022;Güçlütürk et al, 2016). Indeed, investigating how and why individuals behave is crucial to understanding general behavioural mechanisms.…”

“…Therefore, to ascertain whether the curvature effect is genuine and reflects a psychologically meaningful phenomenon, it must be tested at the individual level. To that end, we examined individual sensitivities, defined as individual responsiveness to specific features when evaluating an object (Clemente, 2022;. This approach allowed us to inspect and compare how people used the geometric features of interest when evaluating a figure perceptually and hedonically, individually and collectively.…”

“…Second, most studies have focused on group-level effects (e.g., Bar & Neta, 2006;Bertamini et al, 2016;Palumbo et al, 2015), which conceals considerable individual differences that are key to understanding the psychological mechanisms driving preferences (Clemente, 2022;Clemente, Pearce, Skov & Nadal, 2021;. Thus, it seems reasonable to ask whether the curvature effect is genuine in the sense that it reflects a meaningful psychological phenomenon operating at the individual level.…”