Relationships between Aesthetic Response Scales Applied to Paintings

Abstract

Relationships among seven aesthetic response scales were studied by requiring subjects to rank fifteen paintings on each scale, using a between-subjects design. Three of the five evaluative scales used, likeability, pleasingness, and preferability were strongly positively intercorrelated. Using these scales to examine painting content (landscape, portrait, still-life) and style (Impressionism, Surrealism, etc.) effects, however, revealed that the scales did not always yield similar results. Although content effects were similar on all three scales, likeability and preferability were relatively insensitive to style effects, while pleasingness was more sensitive. These sensitivity differences appear to be linked to variation in the degree of intersubject agreement on the different scales, leading to the suggestion that some scales, such as pleasingness, are relatively homogeneous while others, such as likeability, are more heterogeneous. Another commonly-used evaluative scale, interestingness, was unrelated to the other four but was relatively sensitive to style effects. Data are also presented on an additional evaluative scale, wish to see again, and on two descriptive scales, complexity and familiarity. Overall, the results suggest that conclusions drawn from studies using aesthetic scales may depend crucially on the particular scale used and in particular that the commonly used likeability and preferability scales, despite their apparent ecological validity, may not be the most informative ones.

Neuroaesthetics: A Coming of Age Story

“…Any work of art can be decomposed into its early, intermediate, and late vision components. Aesthetic perception can distinguish between form and content (e.g., Woods, 1991;Russell & George, 1990), a distinction demonstrated experimentally (Ishai, Fairhall, & Pepperell, 2007). Similarly, scientists observe that form is processed by early and intermediate vision, whereas content is processed by later vision.…”

Emotive hemispheric differences measured in real-life portraits using pupil diameter and subjective aesthetic preferences

“…Pleasantness was chosen as an appropriate evaluative measure in that Russell and George (1990) established that pleasantness was highly correlated with likeability and preferability and was the highest of 5 diVerent evaluative scales in intersubject agreement.…”

Berlyne Revisited: Evidence for the Multifaceted Nature of Hedonic Tone in the Appreciation of Paintings and Music

“…He observed that beauty and pleasingness were highly positively correlated, which also held true for the relationship between beauty and liking as well as for the relationship between pleasingness and liking. In a between-subjects design, Russell and George (1990) further investigated evaluative responses to 15 paintings of diverse Western styles by obtaining ratings of preferability, pleasingness, likability, complexity, and familiarity. The negative correlation between complexity and pleasingness was stronger than those correlations observed for preferability and likability.…”

“…In addition, we surmised that the relationship between complexity and arousal would be positive in all picture sets but stronger in paintings than in environmental scenes and cartoons (Marin and Leder, 2013). Furthermore, we hypothesized that the multifaceted nature of hedonic tone in relation to complexity may be most obvious regarding visual arts in comparison to environmental scenes and cartoons (Berlyne and Ogilvie, 1974; Russell and George, 1990; Imamoglu, 2000). …”