aesthetic emotions
Aesthetic emotion occupies a distinctive and contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, designating those affective responses that are not merely elicited by art or aesthetic objects but that actively contribute to aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. Menninghaus and colleagues offer the most systematic treatment, grounding the concept in a Kantian inheritance: aesthetic emotions are defined by their direct predictive bearing on subjective liking and disliking, their differential tuning to specific aesthetic virtues, and their constitutive role in the pleasure or displeasure accompanying aesthetic experience. A central tension runs through the literature between aesthetic emotions and ordinary emotions — the two share linguistic and phenomenological surfaces yet diverge functionally, with aesthetic emotions carrying an implicit evaluative dimension that nonaesthetic feelings do not. The corpus further complicates any simple valence model: far from being uniformly pleasurable, aesthetic emotions encompass negative and mixed ingredients — sadness, boredom, horror, disgust — that may paradoxically enhance overall aesthetic appreciation through mechanisms of arousal, intensity, and coping. Motivational entailments are equally foregrounded: aesthetic emotions regulate not only appreciation but also approach, avoidance, and the wish for repeated exposure. The relative neglect of this construct across two centuries of empirical aesthetics — from Fechner through Berlyne — renders its systematic theorization an urgent and unfinished project.
it is the first and foremost characteristic of aesthetic emotions to make a direct contribution to aesthetic evaluation/appreciation. Each aesthetic emotion is tuned to a special type of perceived aesthetic appeal and is predictive of the subjectively felt pleasure or displeasure
Aesthetic emotions are defined by their constitutive, predictive function within aesthetic evaluation, distinguishing them from generic emotional responses to art.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015thesis
aesthetic emotions are associated with subjectively felt pleasure or displeasure during the emotional episode. For the same reason, aesthetic emotions are an important (though certainly not the only) predictor of resultant liking or disliking.
The passage establishes that aesthetic emotions function as key predictors of aesthetic liking, while acknowledging the two-century gap in systematic theorization after Kant.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015thesis
The association of aesthetic emotions with feelings of pleasure and displeasure is strongly asymmetrical and shows a clear positivity (pleasure) bias. The negative poles are treated with far less nuance, if at all.
The passage identifies a structural positivity bias in aesthetic emotion vocabularies, contrasting sharply with the negativity bias dominating standard psychological emotion catalogues.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015thesis
aesthetic emotions are a subgroup of the emotions that artworks actually elicit in recipients… it is distinctive of this subgroup of emotional responses that they are appreciative of specific aesthetic virtues… and predictive of overall liking.
The passage draws a principled boundary between art-elicited emotions in general and aesthetic emotions proper, grounding the distinction in their evaluative and predictive function.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015thesis
aesthetic emotions have a direct bearing on motivational tendencies and decision-making… they may motivate a wish to seek prolonged and repeated exposure (‘I want to see it again’) to a beautiful stimulus.
Aesthetic emotions are shown to entail motivational consequences, connecting the liking system to the wanting system and shaping approach and avoidance behavior.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
most aesthetic emotion terms cannot but draw on ‘ordinary’ emotion terms and hence are linguistically no different from the latter. This may have contributed to the conceptual confusion regarding aesthetic emotions.
The absence of a dedicated vocabulary for aesthetic emotions in natural language is diagnosed as a principal source of conceptual confusion, prompting a two-class taxonomic proposal.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
with regard to artworks, the use of these emotion terms is not just descriptive of emotional contents and effects but is also (implicitly) meant to be evaluative of the artwork qua artwork.
Ordinary emotion terms, when applied to artworks, acquire an implicit evaluative dimension that renders them simultaneously descriptive and aesthetic-appreciative.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
the emphasis on intrinsic pleasantness cannot by itself account for the important role of mixed and negative emotions—which typically are not experienced as (thoroughly) pleasant—in a broader range of aesthetic emotions.
The passage argues against reducing aesthetic emotions to intrinsic pleasantness appraisals, insisting that mixed and negative emotions are integral to aesthetic experience.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
this attribute clearly implies that the respective films or novels stand out as being well made, powerful, and emotionally engaging artistic achievements… the aesthetically evaluative dimension mostly comes not as an alternative to… the nonaesthetic meaning of that emotion term, but on top of it.
Using ‘being moved’ as an exemplary case, the passage shows how aesthetic emotion meaning is superimposed on rather than replacing ordinary emotion meaning.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
subjectively perceived ‘arousal’ and ‘intensity’ are often understood as sources of subjective pleasure and liking on their own, that is, irrespective of, or at least in some abstraction from, the valence of the respective emotions.
Arousal and intensity are identified as independent aesthetic-emotional sources of pleasure, decoupled from simple valence, across the full spectrum from suspense to peacefulness.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
Only the latter emotions are, in turn, directly predictive of both beauty ratings and overall liking… It may therefore be worth investigating to what extent the understanding of aesthetic emotions could profit from a threefold distinction.
The passage proposes refining the concept by distinguishing emotions directly predictive of aesthetic appreciation from those that contribute only indirectly via emotional mediation.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
no current model challenges the understanding that experienced positive aesthetic emotions associated with inherent processing pleasure prime the resultant liking.
A point of broad theoretical consensus is identified: positive aesthetic emotions with processing pleasure reliably predict liking, anchoring the concept across competing frameworks.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
sadness ratings for film clips made no direct contribution to liking ratings once the common variance with ratings of being moved was accounted for, but only via the mediation of feelings of being moved.
Path-analytic evidence is adduced to demonstrate that negative emotions such as sadness contribute to aesthetic appreciation only through the mediation of higher-order aesthetic emotions.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
there is substantial evidence that emotional responses with an aesthetically evaluative dimension… involve increased activations of classical physiological indicators of emotional arousal and the neural reward circuitry.
Physiological and neuroscientific data are marshalled to confirm that aesthetically evaluative emotions engage reward circuitry, bridging phenomenological and empirical levels of analysis.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
individuals could well acknowledge in a somewhat detached manner that a given object meets conventional beauty standards without necessarily personally feeling this beauty in any pronounced way.
The passage distinguishes object-directed beauty attributions from subjectively felt aesthetic emotions, insisting the two are not interchangeable for the purpose of neuroaesthetic research.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
it is only in the context of analyzing discrete aesthetic emotions that specific predictions can be made as to whether aesthetic perception and evaluation is driven in special cases more by arousing or by ‘de-arousing’ emotional factors.
The discrete-emotions framework is argued to be necessary for making specific predictive claims about the arousal profiles that drive aesthetic evaluation in particular cases.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
successful intellectual coping may in itself be a specific emotional reward for the connoisseur.
Coping potential in relation to cognitively challenging works is identified as an independent source of aesthetic-emotional reward, linking comprehension with positive affect.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
ordinary feelings of being moved need to reach a critical threshold of both duration and intensity in order to turn into predictors of liking, thereby (also) becoming aesthetic emotions.
A threshold hypothesis is proposed whereby ordinary emotions become aesthetic emotions only when they attain sufficient duration and intensity to function as liking predictors.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015supporting
virtually everything—and by no means only artworks—can be viewed with a focus on its aesthetic virtues.
The domain of aesthetic emotion is extended beyond art reception to cognitive achievements and natural objects, illustrating the breadth of the aesthetic stance.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015aside
Smiling and (positive) laughter frequently accompany delight and amusement in response to humoristic poetry, comedies, and other artworks… moist eyes and (silent) shedding of a few tears have repeatedly been shown to accompany art recipients’ emotional states.
Expressive behaviors — laughter and tears — are catalogued as observable correlates of aesthetic emotions, grounding the phenomenological account in behavioral evidence.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015aside
high familiarity does not necessarily predict only a ‘mild’ and relatively flat type of aesthetic appreciation-driven pleasure; rather, it is clearly compatible with experiencing strong emotional responses.
The assumption that familiarity attenuates aesthetic-emotional intensity is challenged, with evidence that repeated exposure can sustain or intensify affective engagement.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015aside