Pupillary responses in art appreciation: Effects of aesthetic emotions.

Abstract

The authors examined effects of aesthetic emotions in art appreciation. Subjects were presented three groups of slides of cubistic paintings that differed in their processing fluency. In an explicit classification procedure, subjects were asked to indicate by button press the moment when they recognized any depicted object in the painting. The time to recognize a depicted object was shortest for high processing fluency paintings, which were also rated higher in their preference. This is in accordance with the "hedonic fluency model" that predicts higher processing fluency being associated with positive aesthetic emotions in art appreciation (Reber, Schwartz, & Winkielman, 2004). In addition, higher processing fluency was associated with increased pupil dilations following the point of explicit classification. The finding of higher pupil dilation associated with easy-to-process stimuli is interpreted as reflecting aspects of aesthetic emotions that follow explicit classification of art stimuli as proposed in the "model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments" (Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin, 2004).

Do fluency-induced pupillary responses reflect aesthetic affect?

“…Other researchers found similar results (Blackburn & Schirillo, 2012), or, if unpleasant pictures were also included in the stimulus set, observed a U-shaped relationship (Bradley et al, 2008;Hayes, Muday, & Schirillo, 2013;Powell & Schirillo, 2011). Kuchinke et al's (2009) study is pioneering, because, to our knowledge, it is the first that combined research on processing fluency with pupillometry in the field of experimental aesthetics. They used reproductions of cubist paintings as stimuli and asked their participants to classify the depicted objects.…”

“…Recently Kuchinke et al (2009) tried to answer this question using pupillary responses. Research shows that pupillometry can well be used to examine emotional responses, because pupils dilate if people are excited (Bradley, Miccoli, Escrig, & Lang, 2008;Henderson, Bradley, & Lang, 2014;Partala & Surakka, 2003;Siegle, Ichikawa, & Steinhauer, 2008;Võ et al, 2008).…”

“…As consequence, cubist pictures are usually rather abstract. Indeed, the mean abstractness ratings for the pictures used by Kuchinke et al (2009) varied only over a small range. In contrast, expressionist painters express their emotional responses to the depicted objects (Thomas, 2000), which also allows them to depict objects less abstractly.…”

“…Because Kuchinke et al's (2009) result is promising, it is important to know whether it is replicable and can be generalized to pictures of other art styles. The present study addressed this issue by conducting a similar experiment, where, in addition to the original selection of cubist pictures, reproductions of expressionist paintings were also presented.…”

“…Accordingly, these pictures can vary from very figural illustrations to highly abstract forms, therefore covering a larger range of abstractness and aesthetic preference. If, as assumed by Kuchinke et al (2009), the abstractness of a picture determines how fluently it can be processed, and if fluency elicits aesthetic emotions, then pupil size should also vary over a larger range, compared to the cubist art style. Because of this property, we also included expressionist pictures as stimuli.…”