Personality correlates of esthetic judgment in college students¹

Abstract

Esthetic judgment is used here as m a previous paper (Child, 1964) to mean the extent to which, when a person judges the esthetic value of works of art, his judgments agree with an appropnate extemal standard of their esthetic value The extemal standard used here is provided by the judgment of experts.Many hypotheses about esthetics, whether stated m philosophical or psychological terms, would suggest that esthetic judgment should be related to other personality charactenstics.Observational test of these hypotheses should make an important contnbution to scientific study of esthetic value. METHOD Ss for this study were 138 young men, one a graduate student and the rest undergraduates at Yale University They were obtamed as paid Ss for a psychological research project described as concemed witfi personality and preferences, some through a bulletm board used mamly to secure Ss for expenments connected with elementary psychology courses and some through the student employment bureau Opportumty to earn money appeared to be the mam mcentive, but mterest m takmg part m psychological research was probably significant for many Most Ss did not know that their reacbons to art were to be mvestigated, but since the research contmued through a considerable penod of time, some may have signed up after leammg from others that it was concemed with reactions to art Thus the samples may be somewhat biased m the direction of mcludmg an above-normal number of students with a defimte mterest m art ProcedureEach S made an appomtment for the first of two evenmg group sessions This first session, three hours m length, was followed, generally one week later, by a second group session In signing up, each student also committed himself to participate at a later tame m a smgle hour's mdividual session, ordmanly conducted withm a week 1 This research was done under Cooperative Research Contract No 669 of the U S Office of Education Esthetic ludgment 477 or two after the second group session In the group sessions the students were given vanous tests and quesbonnaires, and these were supplemented m the mdividual session by some procedures which could be admmistered to only one person at a time At the begmnmg of the first group session the students were mformed that tibe research was especially concemed with reacbons to art and with apbtudes, skiUs, and other characterisbcs that might he related to those reacbons They were told that the research was concemed with generahzabons about vanables and that all the mformabon obtamed about them as individuals would be used m a manner to gimrantee anonymity Measures of esthetic judgmentThe measure of esthebc judgment was suggested by that of the Enghsh esthebcian Margaret Bulley (1951) As used here, the method consisted of presentmg pairs of works of art m the form of projected shdes, with the S instructed to attempt to judge "which of the two works of art is better esthebcally-that is, is the better work of art" The S was asked to express an esthebc judgment of his own if he had one, if he had no su...

Effects of distorted auditory and of rhyming cues on retrieval of tip-of-the-tongue words by poets and nonpoets

“…The selfreport fmdings are encouraging, but far from compelling: Perhaps poets and nonpoets differ in their willingness to report what is happening to them, rather than in their ability to monitor their cognitive processes. Nevertheless, the present results do coincide with work showing perceptual or cognitive style differences (e.g., Klein, 1970) between appreciators and nonappreciators of art or between artists and nonartists (e.g., Child, 1965;Stumberg, 1928). It is interesting to speculate that nonpoets suffer a type of cognitive myopia to the workings of poetic language.…”

Likeable Likeness: Personality, Experience and Preference for Abstract and Low Complexity Art

“…Child (1965) suggested that with the increase in art knowledge, personality traits become less important in predicting aesthetic preferences. Paintings reproductions chosen as study stimuli were all created by worldknown artists, but with an intention to present least known artworks.…”

Complexity-Simplicity, Creativity, Intelligence, and Other Correlates

“…This test was composed of five short-form personality tests of six items each taken from Child (2), and chosen so that the per sonality characteristics should be consistent with creativity. The specific tests were tolerance of complexity, tolerance of ambiguity, scanning, independence of judgment, and regression in the service of the ego.…”