Are musicians particularly sensitive to beauty and goodness?

Abstract

Overall, responsiveness proved to be related to the degree of involvement in musical practice. However, professional musicians displayed distinct profiles depending on their main occupational activity: Whereas music teachers and orchestra musicians showed a specific sensitivity to artistic beauty, soloists evidenced an overall high sensitivity to all types of beauty and goodness. Furthermore, results showed that the responsiveness dimensions correlated in a theoretically meaningful manner with dispositional awe, absorption, and experience seeking.Keywords: appreciation of beauty and excellence, engagement with beauty, responsiveness to the good and beautiful, personality of musicians During the last decade, two models of the sensitivity to beauty and goodness were proposed within the context of positive psychology; the appreciation of beauty and excellence model (Haidt & Keltner, 2004), and the engagement with beauty model (Diessner et al., 2008). Both models assume the sensitivity to beauty in the physical world to be linked with the sensitivity to goodness or excellence in the social world, and hypothesize a second-order factor of general sensitivity to beauty and goodness. To examine whether one or both of these models could be empirically confirmed, Güsewell and Ruch (2012a) conducted a structural equation modeling analysis in which they not only included the two already existing self-report instruments-namely, the Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence (ABE) scale of the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS;Peterson et al., 2005), and the Engagement with Beauty Scale (EBS; Diessner et al., 2008)-but also a newly developed, stimulus-based instrument, the Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence Test (ABET; Güsewell & Ruch, 2012a). The resulting model, which integrated the two existing ones, was labeled responsiveness to the good and beautiful. It was comprised of a second-order factor of general sensitivity to beauty and goodness, and three distinct, but related, dimensions; respon-

Trait Appreciation of Beauty: A Story of Love, Transcendence, and Inquiry

“…This raises the question whether subgroups of professional musicians would differ with regard to different measures of the sensitivity to beauty and goodness. Güsewell and Ruch (2014) compared soloists, orchestra musicians, and instrumental teachers on the one hand, and classical and nonclassical musicians on the other hand, but could find no significant differences.…”

“…With another German speaking sample a large correlation between a measure of awe and the EBS total score was shown (Güsewell & Ruch, 2012b). In yet another study, this one with German speaking musicians and nonmusicians, a measure of awe showed a large correlation with general appreciation of beauty and excellence, a large correlation with appreciation of natural beauty, and a medium correlation with appreciation of artistic beauty (Güsewell & Ruch, 2014). In that same study, using a German form of the Tellegen Absorption scale (absorption may be framed as a form of transcendence), large correlations were found between absorption and general appreciation of beauty and excellence, and with appreciation of natural beauty and a medium correlation with appreciation of artistic beauty.…”

Openness to experience and awe in response to nature and music: Personality and profound aesthetic experiences.

“…People complete each item on a 7-point response scale (1 = strongly disagree , 7 = strongly agree ). We were particularly interested in the awe subscale, which has been used in recent aesthetics work (e.g., Güsewell & Ruch, 2014). We also included the Unusual Aesthetic Emotions scale (Silvia & Nusbaum, 2011), a 10-item scale that asks how often people experience states like wonder, goose bumps, and being moved.…”

Teaching the Psychology of Engagement with Beauty

“…It is related to the concept of flow; when in flow, people are totally “into” what they are doing and lose track of time and lose track of self. Absorption is also closely related to experiences of awe (Güsewell & Ruch, 2013), and experiences of awe are typical of encounters with beauty (Haidt & Keltner, 2004). Mindfulness is a nonjudgmental awareness of being in the present (Germer, 2009).…”