Empathy, engagement, entrainment: the interaction dynamics of aesthetic experience

Abstract

A recent version of the view that aesthetic experience is based in empathy as inner imitation explains aesthetic experience as the automatic simulation of actions, emotions, and bodily sensations depicted in an artwork by motor neurons in the brain. Criticizing the simulation theory for committing to an erroneous concept of empathy and failing to distinguish regular from aesthetic experiences of art, I advance an alternative, dynamic approach and claim that aesthetic experience is enacted and skillful, based in the recognition of others’ experiences as distinct from one’s own. In combining insights from mainly psychology, phenomenology, and cognitive science, the dynamic approach aims to explain the emergence of aesthetic experience in terms of the reciprocal interaction between viewer and artwork. I argue that aesthetic experience emerges by participatory sense-making and revolves around movement as a means for creating meaning. While entrainment merely plays a preparatory part in this, aesthetic engagement constitutes the phenomenological side of coupling to an artwork and provides the context for exploration, and eventually for moving, seeing, and feeling with art. I submit that aesthetic experience emerges from bodily and emotional engagement with works of art via the complementary processes of the perception–action and motion–emotion loops. The former involves the embodied visual exploration of an artwork in physical space, and progressively structures and organizes visual experience by way of perceptual feedback from body movements made in response to the artwork. The latter concerns the movement qualities and shapes of implicit and explicit bodily responses to an artwork that cue emotion and thereby modulate over-all affect and attitude. The two processes cause the viewer to bodily and emotionally move with and be moved by individual works of art, and consequently to recognize another psychological orientation than her own, which explains how art can cause feelings of insight or awe and disclose aspects of life that are unfamiliar or novel to the viewer.

Dialogue in the making: emotional engagement with materials

“…Emotion is necessarily multi-dimensional, multi-scalar, and multimodal, taking on a variety of functional roles (Ratcliffe 2009;Stern 2004). In agreement with phenomenology that sees affect as connecting body, self, and world Fuchs 2013, we conceive of emotions relationally, in the case of making as arising from the interplay between agent and material (Brinck 2018b) and infusing the experiences of self and other with valence.…”

Aesthetic Experience and Creativity in Interactive Art

“…Remarkably, there is a lack of research on how interactivity affects the aesthetic experience. Previous research alludes to certain elements of interactivity, such as movement, being a crucial part of the aesthetic experience (Brinck, 2018). Brinck (2018, p. 209) argues in her paper that "the more invitations to interact from artworks that a viewer responds to and the more ways of responding she masters, the more she will learn about her real possibilities to explore art visually and her ability to control the process".…”

Neuroendoscopy and the art of painting: reflections from the Dutch Golden Age

“…Ever since the humanity existed, it was realized that experiencing beauty has a positive impact on the psychology of human beings and their performance at all levels. Cognitive studies found that esthetic experience emerges from bodily and emotional engagement with works of art via complementary processes that modulate the overall affect and attitude [13]. Moreover, studies in the field of neuroaesthetics used functional MRI to demonstrate that experiencing beauty induces specific patterns of cerebral activity, like the activation of field A1 of the medial orbitofrontal cortex by beautiful visual or auditory stimuli [14] and the activation of caudate nucleus during experience of visual beauty [14,15] in a fashion similar to that which occurs during romantic love [16,17].…”