Olfactory and gustatory beauty: Aesthetic emotions and trait appreciation of beauty.

Abstract

Philosophers of aesthetics universally agree that visual and auditory stimuli may be considered beautiful. Divergently, controversy greets the question "Can olfactory or gustatory experiences be conceptualized as beautiful?" In Study 1 participants inhaled Joy® perfume applied to a cotton pad for 30 s and immediately completed the AESTHEMOS (Schindler et al., 2017), a scale measuring aesthetic emotions. Results indicated stronger prototypical (feeling of beauty and liking, fascination, being moved, and awe), pleasing (joy, humor, vitality, energy, and relaxation), and epistemic (surprise, interest, intellectual challenge, and insight) aesthetic emotions, and fewer negative aesthetic emotions (feeling of ugliness, boredom, confusion, anger, uneasiness, and sadness), were elicited by the perfume compared with a no-scent control condition. Results showed 36% of participants found some beauty in the perfume experience. Study 2 showed significantly higher prototypical and pleasing aesthetic emotions, and less negative aesthetic emotions were stimulated by a Werther's caramel candy compared with a control condition (an unflavored sugar cube); and 45% of participants found some beauty in the taste. In both studies the findings were unrelated to participants' levels of trait appreciation of beauty, as measured by the Engagement with Beauty Scale-Revised (EBS-R; Diessner, Pohling, Stacy, & Güsewell, 2018). In Study 3 we found that when the EBS-R predicted the response to an artwork, it did not predict gustatory beauty; and when the EBS-R predicted olfactory beauty, it did not predict the beauty of an artwork. Thus, the general trait of appreciating beauty, as measured by the EBS-R, may not extend to olfactory or gustatory beauty. The results are discussed in the context of philosophical approaches and empirical aesthetic research.

Ugliness Judgments Alert us to Cues of Pathogen Presence

“…Further, olfactory and gustatory ugliness judgments are probable (cf. Diessner et al, 2019) and likely associated with disgust. Therefore, research on the nature and function of ugliness in nonvisual domains and how it may differ from visual ugliness is needed.…”

Dimensions and Clusters of Aesthetic Emotions: A Semantic Profile Analysis

“…Furthermore, all three studies show a great range of emotions that are associated with positive aesthetic evaluation: clearly, there is not just one kind of aesthetic pleasure or gratification (Bartsch and Viehoff, 2010;Menninghaus et al, 2019;Fingerhut and Prinz, 2020;Diessner et al, 2021). Rather, it is possible to distinguish epistemic emotions which are associated with pleasurable cognitive engagement, prototypical, and often mixed aesthetic emotions which are highly captivating, and pleasing emotions ranging from the good feeling of exhilaration to peaceful relaxation.…”

Altar-ing aesthetic emotions: Exploring responses to ecologically valid beauty stimuli and their relationship to trait engagement with beauty.

“…The AESTHEMOS’s utility in ecologically valid scenarios, as well as its breadth and depth of aesthetic emotions, make it the measure of choice to investigate responses to a very wide range of beauty stimuli. However, due to the AESTHEMOS’s recent addition to the field’s repertoire of measures, this cutting-edge aesthetic measure needs to be further validated, as it has only been employed in a few empirical investigations (Diessner et al, 2019; Fröber, & Thomaschke, 2019; Hosoya, 2020; Martillano, 2019).…”

“…Central to all types of approach and avoidance decision making (Damasio, 2005), emotions are a complex, fundamental aspect of the human experience and may well be socially constructed (Barrett, 2017). Aesthetic emotions are specific types of emotions that arise when evaluating a stimulus for its aesthetic value (Schindler et al, 2017) and are typically experienced through vision and hearing, but may also be catalyzed through olfaction and gustation (Diessner et al, 2019). Although a variety of lab studies have explored aesthetic emotional responses to artistic stimuli, typically reproductions of art (see Pelowski et al, 2017), surprisingly few investigations have examined a comprehensive range of aesthetic emotions evoked by natural settings, that is, ecologically valid settings such as museums or wild nature.…”