scholarly journals Cultural influence on the aesthetic judgment of architecture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANBANG DAI

Architects should consider the aesthetic experience of potential users when designingarchitectures. Previous studies have shown that subjective aesthetic judgment ofarchitectures is influenced by Structure features, and Western observers preferstructures that have curvilinear contours, high ceilings, and open spaces. The commonbuilding styles, however, vary across cultures, and may potentially influence observer'saesthetic preference. It remains unclear whether the preference for contours, ceilingheight, and openness is universal or culture dependent. To investigate this issue, thisstudy analyzes the aesthetic judgment of Chinese observers, and the results demonstratethat Chinese observers also prefer high ceilings and open spaces, similar to previousresults based on Western observers. Preference for curvilinear contours is also observedbut strongly interacts with ceiling height and openness. Post hoc analysis reveals thatChinese observers prefer curvilinear contours only when the ceiling is low and the spaceis closed. In sum, these results suggest that preferences for high ceilings and openspaces are observed in both Western cultures and in the Chinese culture. Thepreference for curvilinear contours, however, is less reliable in the Chinese culture.

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-302
Author(s):  
Nancy Weiss Hanrahan

If, as Susan Buck-Morss (2003) suggests, aesthetic experience is an occasion for “making critical judgments about not only cultural forms but social forms of our being-in-the-world,” or if it is linked, in David Hesmondhalgh’s (2013) account, to the possibilities of collective flourishing, potential changes in the nature of that experience merit critical attention. This article reflects on the ways in which these social or ethical dimensions of the aesthetic experience of music are affected by digitization. It moves from a discussion of aesthetic experience as a form of encounter that refers to a common world, to consideration of recent work in music sociology that engages themes that emerge from that discussion: aesthetic judgment, and the question of difference and commonality. With illustrations from focus group interviews, I suggest that the quantization associated with digital environments is altering the cultural form of aesthetic judgment, just as personalization is changing the meaning of “difference” in this context. The essay is intended as a disclosive critique that takes as its primary object not the world observable through thick description or hermeneutic interpretation of actual cultural practice, but a world evoked through critical reflection on its actual and potential constellations of meaning.


2021 ◽  
pp. 199-202
Author(s):  
Beatriz Calvo-Merino

The article reviewed in this chapter discusses how questions initially originated in cognitive neuroscience can be answered with collaborations with nonscientific disciplines, such as performing arts. The author describes the first study that showed dancer’s brain activity when observing dance movements. By investigating how the expert brain works, they demonstrated the important role of sensorimotor processing for movement perception, emotion perception, and aesthetic judgment. This work opened a channel of communication between neuroscientists and performing artists, enabling conversations that have generated novel questions of interest to both disciplines. The chapter discusses three fundamental insights: the importance of prior experience for perception, the importance of motor representations for perception, and the existence of a system for embodied aesthetics. Finally, the author provides some consideration on neuroscientists’ capacity to dissect the aesthetic experience and how this knowledge can be absorbed by the performing artist during the artistic and choreographic process.


Author(s):  
Jukka Mikkonen

Global climate change has been characterised as the crisis of reason (Val Plumwood), imagination (Amitav Ghosh) and language (Elizabeth Rush), to mention some. The ‘everything change’, as Margaret Atwood calls it, arguably also impacts on how we aesthetically perceive, interpret and appreciate nature. This article looks at philosophical theories of nature appreciation against global environmental change. The article examines how human-induced global climate change affects the ‘scientific’ approaches to nature appreciation which base aesthetic judgment on scientific knowledge and the competing ‘non-scientific’ approaches which emphasise the role of emotions, imagination and stories in the aesthetic understanding of environment. The author claims that both approaches are threatened by global climate change and cannot continue as usual. In particular, he explores aesthetic imagination in contemporary times when our visions about environment are thoroughly coloured by worry and uncertainty and there seems to be little room for awe and wonder, which have traditionally characterised the aesthetic experience of nature. Finally, he proposes that art could stimulate environmental imagining in this age of uncertainty.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-47
Author(s):  
Yuanchen Zhang

Both television production practice and academic writings indicate the necessity of the localization of TV formats to fit sociocultural circumstances in different countries. This article narrows its focus to the issue of emotion display during localization. Inspired by Paul Ekman’s <em>neurocultural theory of emotion</em>, which describes human emotion expression in actual social situations, this article attempts to apply Ekman’s ideas about relations between culture and emotion to the field of media communication and to build a theoretical framework for the analysis of cultural influence in emotion display during the adaptation of a TV format. Applying the theoretical findings to the case of the singing competition show <em>The Voice of China </em>(adapted from <em>The Voice of Holland</em>), this article shows how the collectivist nature of Chinese culture influences the aesthetic and dramatic tools used to elicit emotion and to control emotion display in the Chinese version of the show.


The article examines the essence and relationship of aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment. It is argued that philosophical aesthetics deals with constants that are fundamental to aesthetic experience. Such constants are phenomena and characteristics that have a fundamental ontological status in the aesthetic sphere. It was found that the ontological characteristic of aesthetic experience is that it is not reducible to “pure” rationality, that is, it is not something that is “adapted” to complete and final comprehension by the mind alone. Therefore, a complete “absorption” of aesthetic experience by a certain semantic structure is impossible: such experience always goes beyond any discursive boundaries and simultaneously opens them. In addition, aesthetic experience serves as one of the means of a person’s “contact” with the world and society. Forming on the material of sensations, aesthetic experience extends from the most general ideas about the universe to the inner life of a person. The analysis also showed that the formulation of an aesthetic judgment is based on the concepts of the perfect and the imperfect. In turn, the mastery of such concepts is carried out in the process of correlating a certain aesthetic fact with the existing value scale. That is why aesthetic judgments have signs of normativity. They also create the basis for a common worldview and attitude, lay the foundation for mutual understanding between people of a certain culture. The study showed that the process of aesthetic assessment is a constant correlation of the existing state of affairs with something ideal (within a certain value scale), this is a permanent “demand” for perfection, as well as a tireless search for an opportunity to fulfill this “demand”. At the same time, ethical experience is dissociated from “pure” pragmatics, which personifies vital necessity, because the aesthetic sphere is always associated with a certain “redundancy” in human existence. Also, the results obtained in the course of the study suggested that philosophical aesthetics, which takes into account and investigates the specificity of the phenomenon of corporeality, as well as such phenomena of human existence as affective sensitivity and sensitive rationality, is able to overcome the limitation of “an-esthetic” naturalism in aesthetics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingcheng He ◽  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Hira Shahid ◽  
Yushan Liu ◽  
Xiaoling Liang ◽  
...  

Previous behavioral studies on aesthetics demonstrated that there was a close association between perceived action and aesthetic appreciation. However, few studies explored whether motor imagery would influence aesthetic experience and its neural substrates. In the current study, Chinese calligraphy was used as the stimuli to explore the relationship between the motor imagery and the aesthetic judgments of a participant using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The imaging results showed that, compared with the baseline, the activation of the brain regions [e.g., anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), putamen, and insula] involved in perceptual processing, cognitive judgments, aesthetic emotional, and reward processing was observed after the participants performed motor imagery tasks. The contrast analyses within aesthetic judgments showed that the kinesthetic imagery significantly activated the middle frontal gyrus, postcentral gyrus, ACC, and thalamus. Generally, these areas were considered to be closely related to positive aesthetic experience and suggested that motor imagery, especially kinesthetic imagery, might be specifically associated with the aesthetic appreciation of Chinese calligraphy.


Author(s):  
Lara Harb

The Arabic language has a rich history of literary criticism and theory, starting from the 8th century ce up to the 21st century. This literary criticism and theory engages with a poetic tradition that dates back to pre-Islamic times. The inquiry into literary quality was motivated by an interest in evaluating poetry, a general concern with eloquent speech, whether in verse or prose, and by the desire to articulate the beauty of the Quran. The transmission of Aristotle’s Poetics into Arabic also spurred interest in the poetic, particularly in Arabic philosophy. The study of eloquence crystallized into a standardized science by the 13th century ce, with branches focusing on (1) the role of syntax in literary beauty (the science of meanings); (2) simile, metaphor, and metonymy (the science of elucidation); and (3) rhetorical figures (the science of rhetorical figures). The aesthetic developed in the early criticism of the 9th and 10th centuries was concerned with articulating the merits of an idealized classical style of pre-Islamic poetry, from which the “modern” poets of the early Abbasid period diverged. This classically oriented aesthetic was dominated by a concern with the truthfulness and naturalness of poetry, typical of the style of the “ancients,” on the one hand, and the limits of unrealistic imagery and affected artificiality, which characterized the more ornate modern Abbasid style, on the other. This binary outlook shifted after the 10th century, however, to an aesthetic of wonder. A theory of aesthetic experience began to develop, therefore, which was based on the ability of poetic language to evoke wonder in the recipient. As a result, wonder-enhancing characteristics such as strangeness, the unexpected, and the rare became essential components of aesthetic judgment. Moreover, the ability of language to make meaning manifest in ways that allow for an experience of discovery and hence wonder, became the foundation of aesthetic inquiry in post-10th century Arabic literary theory.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 80-81
Author(s):  
Konstantinos Toulis ◽  
Krishna Gokhale ◽  
G. Neil Thomas ◽  
Wasim Hanif ◽  
Krishnarajah Nirantharakumar ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 51-52
Author(s):  
Vanita Aroda ◽  
Danny Sugimoto ◽  
David Trachtenbarg ◽  
Mark Warren ◽  
Gurudutt Nayak ◽  
...  

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoinette R. Miller ◽  
J. Peter Rosenfeld

Abstract University students were screened using items from the Psychopathic Personality Inventory and divided into high (n = 13) and low (n = 11) Psychopathic Personality Trait (PPT) groups. The P300 component of the event-related potential (ERP) was recorded as each group completed a two-block autobiographical oddball task, responding honestly during the first (Phone) block, in which oddball items were participants' home phone numbers, and then feigning amnesia in response to approximately 50% of items in the second (Birthday) block in which oddball items were participants' birthdates. Bootstrapping of peak-to-peak amplitudes correctly identified 100% of low PPT and 92% of high PPT participants as having intact recognition. Both groups demonstrated malingering-related P300 amplitude reduction. For the first time, P300 amplitude and topography differences were observed between honest and deceptive responses to Birthday items. No main between-group P300 effects resulted. Post-hoc analysis revealed between-group differences in a frontally located post-P300 component. Honest responses were associated with late frontal amplitudes larger than deceptive responses at frontal sites in the low PPT group only.


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