One hundred years of Empirical Aesthetics: Fechner to Berlyne (1876 – 1976)

Abstract

In this chapter, we review the history of Empirical Aesthetics since its foundation byFechner in 1876 to Berlyne’s New Empirical Aesthetics in the 1970s. We explain whyand how Fechner founded the field, and how Wundt and Müller’s students continued hiswork in the early 20th century. In the United States, Empirical Aesthetics flourished aspart of American functional psychology at first, and later as part of behaviorists’ interestin reward value. The heyday of behaviorism was also a golden age for the developmentof all sorts of tests for artistic and aesthetic aptitudes. We end the chapter covering thecontributions of Gestalt psychology and Berlyne’s motivational theory to EmpiricalAesthetics.

Metaphors or mechanism? Predictive coding and a (brief) history of empirical study of the arts

“…The first half of the twentieth century, in some ways, was a rather fruitless time for empirical aesthetics, mostly due to the prevalent emphasis on behaviourism, with the obsession of restricting science to only observable behaviour or outward acts, which naturally saw very little research interest in phenomena that were more demanding of complex perceptual processes or muddled by emotion or other affective/ body response, and thus, as Martindale [1] summarized, 'best seen as a disaster for the discipline of psychology and an unmitigated disaster for psychological aesthetics' ( p. 123). This is, of course, a massive exaggeration that ignores many advances in, among other areas, empirical aesthetics of music, assessments of affective value in terms of tones, intervals, cadence, as well as an emergence of interest in basic visual form-related preference, impacts of context and testing of related mental processes (see [42]).…”