Beauty, the feeling

Beauty, the feeling. Aenne A. Brielmann, Angelica Nuzzo, Denis G. Pelli. Acta Psychologica, Volume 219, September 2021, 103365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103365

Highlights

• Over 850 people report their feelings while experiencing or remembering beauty.

• Beauty experiences are intensely pleasurable, subjectively universal, and meaningful.

• Beauty expresses harmony in variety, exceeds expectation, and begs continuation.

• Beauty memories are active and social.

• Our findings are the first comprehensive, empirical description of beauty.

Abstract: Many philosophers and psychologists have made claims about what is felt in an experience of beauty. Here, we test how well these claims match the feelings that people report while looking at an image, or listening to music, or recalling a personal experience of beauty. We conducted ten experiments (total n = 851) spanning three nations (US, UK, and India). Across nations and modalities, top-rated beauty experiences are strongly characterized by six dimensions: intense pleasure, an impression of universality, the wish to continue the experience, exceeding expectation, perceived harmony in variety, and meaningfulness. Other frequently proposed beauty characteristics — like surprise, desire to understand, and mind wandering — are uncorrelated with feeling beauty. A typical remembered beautiful experience was active and social like a family holiday — hardly ever mentioning beauty — and only rarely mentioned art, unlike the academic emphasis, in aesthetics, on solitary viewing of art. Our survey aligns well with Kant and the psychological theories that emphasize pleasure, and reject theories that emphasize information seeking.

4. Discussion

4.1. Survey vs. philosophers: model explains 72% of variance

We identified 11 feeling-of-beauty dimensions in the writings of seven philosophers. Our philosophical mixed-effects model uses those dimensions to account for 72% of the variance in beauty ratings. Compared to our survey results, of the seven philosophers considered here, Kant's claims are the most correlated (r = 0.74), and have the most matches to the data: 10 out of 11 assessed dimensions (see Table 2). Kant's theory also states our participants' belief that beauty is found in nature rather than art and that both the object as well as its story contributes to beauty. Yet, contrary to Kant's theory, higher surprise is not associated with more intense beauty. However, as we will show below, there is a kind of surprise, i.e., the surprise of something exceeding one's expectation, that is indeed linked to beauty.

4.2. Survey vs. psychologists: model explains 70% of variance

We identified 10 feeling-of-beauty dimensions in the 25 papers and books (by 54 authors) on psychological theories of beauty that we cite here and in the supplement. Our psychological mixed-effects model uses 7 of those dimensions to account for 70% of the variance in beauty ratings. The ratings for images, music, and memories reveal a link to beauty for seven out of the eleven here-considered characteristics that psychologists claim are linked to beauty. In all of our surveys, intense beauty was associated with intense pleasure, as claimed by Fechner (1876). A strong link between beauty and being moved was also evident, as reported by Vessel et al. (2013). The notion that a positive prediction error contributes to beauty (Salimpoor et al., 2015) was also confirmed. Harmony in variety, the central beauty criterion in Diessner et al.'s (2018) theory was associated with beauty, too, and so was meaningfulness (see Leder & Nadal, 2014). We found mixed results regarding Berlyne's (1971) claims. While our results indeed suggest an inverted-u-shaped relation between subjective complexity and beauty, where medium complexity levels are associated with most intense beauty, we did not find such a relationship between beauty and arousal (assessed as excitement). Our music results reject Kivy's (1990) claim that musical beauty is linked to interest.

Information-seeking — i.e. learning, interest, and wanting to understand the experience— was not systematically linked to beauty in our studies, contrary to previous claims (Biederman & Vessel, 2006). Our results reject Reber et al.'s (2004) claim that ease of processing—i.e., felt understanding—of the experience is tied to its beauty, at least not in a way that is consciously accessible to people. The other cognitive dimension we included, learning, was also not associated with beauty, contrary to claims by Armstrong and Detweiler-Bedell's (2008). Taken together, these negative findings indicate that information-seeking is not important for experiencing beauty, at least not in their awareness.

One might suppose that depiction of an ugly object could only be beautiful by offering information, but we do not believe that the lack of correlation between beauty and self-reported information seeking prevents beautiful depiction of an ugly object. For instance, it seems possible that the mature Rembrandt, seen in person, might have been thought ugly. But his way of painting himself – the brush strokes, color-selection, and so on – may evoke beauty among those admiring his self-portrait.

It is also worth noting that our findings regarding people's explicit, self-reported feelings of learning progress do not exclude the possibility that beauty or pleasure serves as a signal of unconscious learning progress, e.g., in the sense of increasing long-term processing efficiency (Brielmann & Dayan, 2021).

4.3. Implications for the science of beauty

Our results, summarized in Table 5, provide an empirical characterization of the beauty experience. They will inform current theories of aesthetic appreciation (e.g., Leder & Nadal, 2014; Pelowski et al., 2017) and provide a first broad test of philosophy- and psychology-based theories of beauty. Our findings complement previous efforts that contrasted people's theoretical conceptions of beauty to other aesthetic evaluations (Menninghaus et al., 2019; see Supplementary Material for a quantitative comparison between their and our data).

Our findings are in line with the notion that beauty is a positive emotion, i.e., strongly correlated with pleasure (Armstrong & Detweiler-Bedell, 2008; Fechner, 1876) and being moved (Vessel et al., 2013). We did not find a correlation between intense beauty and information-seeking here, i.e., wanting to understand the experience, learning, or interest, despite the prevalence of these notions in several psychological theories (Armstrong & Detweiler-Bedell, 2008; Kivy, 1990; Reber et al., 2004). We did, however, find that several other features mentioned in contemporary literature are indeed correlated with beauty, such as the feeling that the experience exceeded expectation (Salimpoor et al., 2015), harmoniously combined various elements (Diessner et al., 2018), and meaningfulness (Leder & Nadal, 2014).

Our current study documents the feelings that are correlated with beauty. This list of beauty-associated characteristics offers a basis for developing a predictive model. The development of a model that can predict the beauty intensity of a given experience with as few predictors as possible would be a big step in explaining beauty.

4.4. Beauty and art

The philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto (2002) noted that until World War I and the dada movement, it was generally accepted that beauty was central to the definition of art. Danto notes that dada and the subsequent postmodern movements “disconnect[ed] beauty from art”. Art today is much more general than just beauty. Danto says that beauty is merely one of many attributes that art can have and that the only necessary one is meaning. However, Danto's strict dichotomy between beauty and meaning is undermined by finding that beauty is associated with meaningfulness in our participants' reports.

Our participants' beauty memories and beliefs assign hardly any role to art. A typical memory of an intense beauty experience was a family vacation on the beach or the mountains, rather than a museum visit. Participants agreed that beauty lies in nature, not art (see Fig. 2), and most of those who believed in a universally beautiful object thought it was part of nature, like flowers or sky. Only 6% of the intense beauty recollections (31/479) mentioned any kind of art.

Beauty is central to popular notions of aesthetics (Augustin et al., 2012), but, in academia, aesthetics and empirical aesthetics (e.g. Leder & Nadal, 2014; Pelowski et al., 2017) focus on art appreciation. Our results challenge the relevance of art, and thus art appreciation, aesthetics, and empirical aesthetics, to how most people experience beauty.

Here, we set out to characterize people's notions and experiences of beauty. In our survey sample of ordinary people—neither artists nor academics—we found that moments of intense beauty are associated with nature and social interactions rather than art. We wonder how members of the art world, e.g. art school students, might respond to a feeling-of-beauty survey like ours. Art matters in their daily lives, but the modern movement assigns little role to beauty in modern art (Danto, 2002), so, even in the art world, descriptions of intense beauty experiences might only rarely mention art. Similarly, since we got so few mentions of art in the intense-beauty recollections, we also wonder if the beauty evoked by art might be different, possibly requiring more learning and understanding (Armstrong & Detweiler-Bedell, 2008). We leave that to future work, but our results already suggest that understanding everyday beauty experiences may require a theory of beauty that deals with social and nature-related experiences.