Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement Are Reflected in Resting-State fMRI Connectivity: Implications for Stress Resilience and Stress-Related Growth

Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement Are Reflected in Resting-State fMRI Connectivity: Implications for Stress Resilience and Stress-Related Growth is a work by Kimberley T. Johnson (2021).

Core claims

• Johnson and colleagues demonstrate that individuals with greater aesthetic engagement show distinctive resting-state connectivity patterns in the brain — specifically stronger coupling between the default-mode network and sensory cortices — suggesting that aesthetic sensitivity is not a transient state but a stable neural trait.
• Higher aesthetic engagement predicts both greater stress resilience and greater capacity for stress-related growth, indicating that the capacity to be moved by beauty functions as a psychobiological resource for navigating adversity.
• The paper provides neuroimaging evidence for what depth psychology has long intuited: that the feeling function — the capacity to evaluate experience aesthetically and emotionally — is constitutive of psychological health rather than incidental to it.

Related questions

• If aesthetic engagement is a stable neural trait that predicts stress resilience, does this support Jung’s claim that the differentiation of the feeling function is essential to individuation — and does it imply that individuals with undifferentiated feeling are neurologically less equipped to metabolize adversity?
• How does the default-mode network connectivity pattern associated with aesthetic engagement relate to the network’s role in self-referential processing — could aesthetic sensitivity represent a mode of self-relation that is inherently more flexible and resilient than purely cognitive self-reflection?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/johnson-aesthetic-engagement-stress-growth/

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