See me, feel me! Aesthetic evaluations of art portraits.

Abstract

Aesthetic experiences comprise aesthetic emotions as well as those cognitive states that are reflected in judgments of aesthetic liking (Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin, 2004). In Study 1, we examined whether aesthetic liking and emotional valence of artistic portraits are influenced in different ways by several factors. We analyzed ratings given to more than 400 portraits. Participants were asked to rate the likability of the depicted person, an evaluation of the portrait's style, elicited arousal, interestingness, emotional valence, aesthetic liking, and familiarity. Likability showed particulariy strong effects on liking and emotional valence. Study 2 further explored differences in the determinants of art appreciation through levels of expertise; art experts showed enhanced aesthetic pleasure and style appreciation turned out to be particularly important. For nonexperts, likability and style had similar influence. To differentiate the effects of style and content more directly, in Study 3 we asked for an explicit subjective weight of how much style and content affected aesthetic liking for each portrait. Results showed that style was more important. Thus, as expected from psychological theories of aesthetic experiences, both content and appreciation of the artists' style represented distinct influential dimensions of aesthetic experiences.

When Challenging Art Gets Liked: Evidences for a Dual Preference Formation Process for Fluent and Non-Fluent Portraits

“…Furthermore, in line with previous research in aesthetics e.g. [ 132 , 169 , 180 , 181 ] we utilized portraits to address fundamentals in art perception. One may therefore question the ecological validity of the study’s findings.…”

Ten years of a model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments : The aesthetic episode – Developments and challenges in empirical aesthetics

“…This figure retains the main elements, processing stages and variables, but has been carefully updated. Major changes are the emotional processes – in grey, that have been updated according to new evidence ((1) e.g., Cupchik et al ., ; Leder et al ., ; (2) Brieber et al ., ; (3) Gerger, Leder, and Kremer, ). The emotional state is no longer an external state.…”

“…Although it is still unclear how the rather well studied features that determine facial attractiveness are related to beauty in other domains, such as design, and art, researchers interested in psychology of the arts have exploit the strong effects of faces. They have studied representational artworks containing faces and people (Massaro et al ., ), or they have used portraits as a kind of special visual material for which aesthetic judgments can be made (Graham, Pallett, Meng, & Leder, ), while allowing the beauty of content – the depicted person – and style to be assessed separately (Leder, Ring, & Dressler, ).…”

Perceived cognitive challenge predicts eye movements while viewing contemporary paintings

“…Subjective ratings of aesthetic judgments have been classically considered a final output of an aesthetic experience (Leder et al, 2004), with liking, amongst others, being a key component of aesthetic appraisals that has been studied most broadly (Leder, Gerger, Dressler, & Schabmann, 2012;Leder, Ring, & Dressler, 2013). Here, however, we proposed that they might also be regarded as input for eye movement.…”