Helmut Leder. Empirical Aesthetics? What Psychology contributes to our understanding of Aesthetics and the Arts

04.11.2015 - 04.11.2015

Angewandte Innovation Lab, AIL, Wien / Österreich

Empirical Aesthetics? What Psychology contributes to our understanding of Aesthetics and the Arts

Humans have an aesthetic sense that is shown in human proclivity for the creation and consumption of art. Art is a unique feature of human experience and for more than a century several approaches aimed to understand what the psychological aspects of this uniqueness are. Art appreciation involves the complex interplay among stimuli, perceiver and contexts, which have been discussed as eliciting a special combination of aesthetic judgments and aesthetic emotions.... Based on our model of aesthetic appreciation (Leder et al., 2004; Leder & Nadal, 2014), we conducted various empirical studies to e.g. understand the nature of stylistic processing (Augustin et al., 2008; Leder et al., 2012), the dependence of art appreciation of the class of artworks (Belke et al. 2010) as well as the complex interplay of the variables involved between these factors (Leder et al., 2012) when we assessed the contribution of emotion, arousal, and comprehension as determining factors of art appreciation. We also addressed directly questions regarding the role of emotion – employing online physiological measures of emotions – to study the effect of expertise, and more general the effect of beauty on emotions (Gerger et al., 2011; Leder et al., 2013). The implications of these studies are discussed in respect to underlying theoretical foundations, and illustrate, what Psychology can contribute to our understanding of Aesthetics and the Arts.

[Quelle: www.ailab.at]