Aesthetic engagement, as treated across the depth-psychology and empirical-aesthetics corpus represented here, designates far more than passive exposure to art, music, or nature. It emerges consistently as a stable individual-difference variable — a facet of Openness to Experience in the Five-Factor Model — indexing the propensity to be moved, absorbed, or transported by aesthetic stimuli and to seek such encounters as constitutive of one’s dispositional orientation toward the world. The Williams and Johnson research programs establish aesthetic engagement as a predictor of adaptive stress regulation, growth-oriented reappraisal following adversity, and even reduced physiological reactivity to laboratory stressors, implicating it in downstream health outcomes ranging from cardiac resilience to decelerated cognitive decline. Crucially, the construct is not reducible to mere aesthetic taste or preference; it carries a motivational and attentional signature — cognitive flexibility, abstraction, and a capacity to transcend immediate circumstances — that distinguishes it from exposure frequency alone. Aesthetic chill proneness emerges as a correlated but separable subcomponent, serving as a physiological marker of peak emotional experience and linking aesthetic engagement to awe. Menninghaus and colleagues, approaching from the empirical-aesthetics tradition, situate aesthetic engagement within a broader architecture of aesthetic emotions, emphasizing the evaluative, pleasure-generating, and motivationally directive functions of emotional response to art. Taken together, the corpus reveals a productive tension between trait-based, health-oriented accounts and phenomenological-evaluative accounts — a tension that renders aesthetic engagement one of the most theoretically generative terms in contemporary psychological aesthetics.