Politically motivated aesthetic judgments

Are people motivated to feel that clothes worn by members of their political ingroup (outgroup) are more (less) beautiful and valuable? Building on research on politically motivated judgments, affective polarization, and social distancing, this study investigated how aesthetic judgments about the design and color of clothes, and willingness to pay for identical clothes, changed among Swedes (N=638) after they learnt that the clothes were worn by politicians from their most- or least-liked party. The results supported both a negative outgroup effect (i.e., clothes associated with the least-liked party became less attractive) and a positive ingroup effect (i.e., clothes associated with the most-liked party became more attractive and valuable). Clothes worn by non-politicians were evaluated similarly after the identity of the person wearing them was revealed. Particularly the positive ingroup effect was stronger among rightists than leftists, consistent with theoretical accounts that posit ideological asymmetries in motivated reasoning and relational motivations.

Affective Responses to Image Color Combinations

Responses to colored patterns were collected for a group of 60 naive participants. We explicitly aimed at affective responses, rather than aesthetic judgments, so this is not ‘color harmony’ proper. Patterns were mainly spatially highly structured compositions, the color palettes reminiscent of what is found in generic ‘colorist’ art. Color combinations systematically cover mono-, di-, and trichromatic chromatic chords, whereas there was always an additional achromatic component. This sets the research apart from the bulk of the mainstream literature on ‘color harmony.’ Various ways of analysis are compared. Clustering methods reveal that the responses are highly structured through the teal–orange (cool–warm) dimension. Clustering reveals a large group of mutually concordant participants and various small, idiosyncratic groups. When the data is coarse-grained, retaining only a limited red–blue–yellow palette, the group as a whole appears quite concordant. It is evident that responses are systematic, thus the notion of a universal affective response to color combinations gains some credibility. The precise affective responses are specific because constrained by the seven categories used in the experiment. Thus, the systematic structure is perhaps to be understood as the generic result. We discuss tangencies with various traits found with ‘colorist’ art styles.

Finding Mutual Interest Between Neuroscience and Aesthetics

In the article under review in this chapter, a discussion between an art historian and neuroscientists led to a collaborative project to study the influence of authenticity on the reception of artwork. Brain-scanning with functional magnetic resonance imaging led to the identification of a number of distinct areas of the cortex that might be implicated in complex aesthetic judgments. This article provides an informal account of some of the background that led to this study.

Pictograph Portrays What It Is

As one origin of Chinese characters, pictograph has a graphical structure based on its referent. Are the aesthetic qualities of the reference objects reflected in the neural processing of pictographs? In the study reviewed in this chapter, participants were scanned while making aesthetic judgments of pictographs and their referents. The conjunction analysis revealed the common involvement of the bilateral inferior occipital gyri and inferior frontal gyri, the right superior occipital gyrus, the left middle occipital gyrus, and the inferior orbitofrontal cortex for the aesthetic judgments of pictographs and object images referring to beautiful objects. Moreover, only the beautiful judgments for pictographs but not object images activated the motor areas, implying that an approach motivation was elicited during the aesthetic perception of novel pictographs. Results indicate that not only the object images, but also the corresponding pictographs arouse a sense of beauty that relies on common neural mechanisms during aesthetic judgments.

Investigating the Role of Executive Resources across Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic Judgments

Aesthetic judgments dominate much of daily life by guiding how we evaluate objects, people, and experiences in our environment. One key question that remains unanswered is the extent to which more specialised or largely general cognitive resources support aesthetic judgments. To investigate this question in the context of executive resources, we examined the extent to which a central working memory load produces similar or different reaction time interference on aesthetic compared to non-aesthetic judgments. Across three pre-registered experiments that used Bayesian multi-level modelling approaches (N>100 per experiment), we found clear evidence that a central working memory load produces similar reaction time interference on aesthetic judgments relative to non-aesthetic (motion) judgments. We also showed that this similarity in processing across aesthetic versus non-aesthetic judgments holds across variations in the form of art (people vs landscape; Exps. 1-3), medium type (artwork vs photographs; Exp. 2) and load content (art images vs letters; Exps. 1-3). These findings suggest that across a range of experimental contexts, as well as different processing streams in working memory (e.g., visual vs verbal), aesthetic and motion judgments commonly rely on a domain-general executive system, rather than a system that is more specifically tied to aesthetic judgments. In doing so, these findings shine new light on the cognitive architecture that supports aesthetic judgments, as well as how domain-general executive systems operate more generally in cognition.

The role of expertise in the aesthetic evaluation of mathematical equations

There is a notion that mathematical equations can be considered aesthetic objects. However, whereas some aesthetic experiences are triggered primarily by the sensory properties of objects, for mathematical equations aesthetic judgments extend beyond their sensory qualities and are also informed by semantics and knowledge. Therefore, to the extent that expertise in mathematics represents the accumulation of domain knowledge, it should influence aesthetic judgments of equations. In a between-groups study design involving university students who majored in mathematics (i.e., experts) or not (i.e., laypeople), we found support for the hypothesis that mathematics majors exhibit more agreement in their aesthetic judgments of equations—reflecting a greater degree of shared variance driven by formal training in the domain. Furthermore, their judgments were driven more strongly by familiarity and meaning than was the case for laypeople. These results suggest that expertise via advanced training in mathematics alters (and sharpens) aesthetic judgments of mathematical equations.

The Impact of Motor Imageries on Aesthetic Judgment of Chinese Calligraphy: An fMRI Study

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.