Experimental manipulation of disease threat leads to less favorable attitudes and inclinations toward sexual promiscuity

Parasites and promiscuity: Acute disease salience leads to more restricted sexual attitudes. James B. Moran et al. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, July 9, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075211030999

Abstract: How does disease threat influence sexual attitudes and behaviors? Although research on the influence of disease threat on social behavior has grown considerably, the relationship between perceived disease threat and sexual attitudes remains unclear. The current preregistered study (analyzed N = 510), investigated how experimental reminders of disease threat influence attitudes and anticipated future behaviors pertaining to short-term sexual relationships, using an ecologically valid disease prime. The central preregistered prediction was that experimental manipulation of disease threat would lead to less favorable attitudes and inclinations toward sexual promiscuity. Results were consistent with this preregistered prediction, relative to both a neutral control condition and a non-disease threat condition. These experimental results were buttressed by the finding that dispositional variation in worry about disease threat predicted less favorable attitudes and inclinations toward short-term sexual relationships. This study represents the first preregistered investigation of the implications of acute disease threat for sexual attitudes.

Keywords: Behavioral immune system, germ aversion, sexual behavior, sociosexuality

There isn’t a direct connection between doing good deeds & being seen as a good person; rather, prosocial actors are often met with suspicion, & sometimes castigated as disingenuous braggarts, empty virtue-signalers, or holier-than-thou hypocrites

Prosocial Behavior and Reputation: When Does Doing Good Lead to Looking Good? Jonathan Z. Berman, Ike Silver. Current Opinion in Psychology, July 9 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.06.021

Abstract: One reason people engage in prosocial behavior is to reap the reputational benefits associated with being seen as generous. Yet, there isn’t a direct connection between doing good deeds and being seen as a good person. Rather, prosocial actors are often met with suspicion, and sometimes castigated as disingenuous braggarts, empty virtue-signalers, or holier-than-thou hypocrites. In this article, we review recent research on how people evaluate those who engage in prosocial behavior and identify key factors that influence whether observers will praise or denigrate a prosocial actor for doing a good deed.

Keywords: Prosocial BehaviorCharitable GivingAltruismReputationCharitable CreditMoral Character

Contra pessimists... In everyday life, people use a whole package of self-control strategies to tame the demon that wants to tempt them into overspending

A meta-analysis of financial self-control strategies: Comparing empirical findings with online media and lay person perspectives on what helps individuals curb spending and start saving. Mariya Davydenko, Marta Kolbuszewska, Johanna Peetz. PLoS One, July 8, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253938

Abstract: Self-control can be assisted by using self-control strategies rather than relying solely on willpower to resist tempting situations and to make more goal-consistent decisions. To understand how self-control strategies can aid financial goals, we conducted a meta-analysis (Study 1) to aggregate the latest research on self-control strategies in the financial domain and to estimate their overall effectiveness for saving and spending outcomes. Across 29 studies and 12 different self-control strategies, strategies reduced spending and increased saving significantly with a medium effect size (d = 0.57). Proactive and reactive strategies were equally effective. We next examined whether these strategies studied in the academic literature were present in a media sample of websites (N = 104 websites with 852 strategies) and in individuals’ personal experiences (N = 939 participants who listed 830 strategies). About half the strategies identified in the meta-analysis were present in the media sample and about half were listed by lay participants as strategies they personally use. In sum, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of the self-control strategies that have been studied in the empirical literature to date and of the strategies promoted in the media and used in daily life, identifying gaps between these perspectives.

General discussion

Failures in self-control in the financial domain can have dire consequences. Financial security predicts overall quality of life [75] and subjective well-being [76], whereas financial stress has been linked to physical health struggles [77], problems in close relationships [78], and stress in retirement [79]. Self-control strategies can aid financial decision making, reducing spending, and increasing saving. This paper is the first attempt at collating the diverse self-control strategies that have been studied in the financial domain. A formal meta-analysis of the existing studies to date suggests that financial self-control strategies are effective in improving financial decisions (Study 1). Strategies purported in online media communications (Study 2) and those reported as part of lay persons’ financial habits (Study 3) show a considerable degree of overlap but also show that a number of financial self-control strategies that are recommended in online media and are reportedly used by lay people have not yet been studied empirically. All three perspectives showed a focus on proactive rather than reactive strategies, in line with theoretical models that argue that proactive strategies are superior to reactive strategies [5, 25]. However, proactive and reactive strategies in the meta-analysis were equally effective (Study 1) and were promoted equally by ‘financial expert’ websites or other websites (Study 2). More educated lay individuals were more likely to report proactive strategies compared to less educated individuals (strategy type did not differ age, gender, and income). It appears that both researchers and lay people with higher levels of education are drawn to self-control strategies that are used before a tempting situation occurs.

Self-control strategies in other domains

This paper summarizes research, online media communication, and personal experiences about a relatively understudied domain of self-control: financial goals. The majority of psychological research on self-control strategies has focused on academic goals (e.g., [29, 80–84]) and health goals (e.g., [85–90]). In contrast, in the present paper we focused specifically on self-control strategies specific to the financial domain. However, these specific financial self-control strategies nonetheless link to broader conceptual types of self-control strategies such as avoiding temptations more generally (e.g., [53, 91, 92]), changing how one thinks about a temptation (e.g., [54, 93, 94]), and pre-committing before encountering a temptation (e.g., [38, 95, 96]).

Therefore, the broad findings of this research–the overlap of online media communication and lay perspectives with empirically studied financial self-control strategies and the relatively greater importance of proactive strategies among the two former perspectives–likely generalizes to self-control strategies in other domains. It might also be that self-control strategies are more effective if they are conceived with regards to the specific self-control domain. For example, the general strategy ‘avoid temptations’ may be more effective for promoting health eating when phrased as ‘avoid the dessert menu at restaurants’ and more effective for promoting reduced spending when phrased as ‘avoid certain stores in the mall’. Just as for financial self-control strategies, there may be specific self-control strategies in other domains that have yet to be tested empirically but are commonplace in daily life.

Practical implications

A considerable portion of the existing self-control research has focused on the broader conceptualizations of self-control (e.g., [5, 10, 25]) or examined trait measures of self-control (e.g., [13, 97]). This more abstract conceptualization is useful for establishing a framework, but less useful for practical applications: It does not describe what specific behaviours might be enacted through self-control strategies to create meaningful change in people’s goal pursuit. In contrast, we focused on specific financial self-control strategies. Overall, we generated 28 self-control strategy categories across three perspectives (empirical studies, online media communications, lay perspectives). This list of financial self-control strategies might be fairly comprehensive as well as specific.

Limitations

While we did not find a significant difference in effectiveness between proactive and reactive strategies in the meta-analysis, it is important to acknowledge that when these types of strategies are tested against each other directly, strategies used before encountering a temptation are more effective than strategies used in the tempting situation [29]. There are several possible explanations for the lack of a moderation in the meta-analysis. First, the strategy type might shift between experimental in-lab and field applications. The decision to pay with cash versus card might be made in the situation and may thus be reactive, but in everyday life might require someone to pick up cash before even encountering a spending situation, thus being proactive. Second, the studies included in the meta-analysis might have lacked “regulatory fit” [98] between the strategies coded as proactive vs. reactive and the specific behavioral outcomes. Greater fit between the type of strategy and the temptation might make self-control easier (see [99] for a similar argument about the benefit of fit between personality and temptation).

It is important to note that the purpose of this research was not to discover the best self-control strategy. Daily life involves many diverse spending situations, and some situations may not suit some strategies (e.g., using cash rather than credit reduces spending but cash cannot be used in online transactions). Over time, people may have tried various self-control strategies and settled on those that were effective for them and their personal situation. Even though some specific financial strategies showed stronger effect sizes in the meta-analysis (Study 1) or were more frequently mentioned in online media (Study 2) or by lay people (Study 3), we do not have enough evidence to suggest that these strategies outperformed other strategies. It may be better to inform individuals of a variety of possible strategies to choose from as the situation allows.

We also caution that the present research cannot represent an exhaustive list of all possible financial self-control strategies, or even all empirically tested financial self-control strategies. Even though we included broad search terms in our meta-analysis, the meta-analysis search may have missed relevant studies. This limitation could be addressed by including even broader search terms in a systematic literature review or taking a different approach and focusing on the self-control literature (regardless of financial outcomes) instead.

Similar, conclusions drawn from the online media sample and lay sample are necessarily limited by the inclusiveness of these samples. Both represent the perspectives of WEIRD [100] culture and might not generalize to other populations or global media. Additionally, media advice encompasses a variety of communications, from print media (magazines, newspapers, books) to social media (Twitter, Facebook). Our media sample focused on online Google search results, including blogs, online versions of magazines and newspapers, and websites for financial organizations. Arguably, online searches are an important and commonly used way to learn about an issue (e.g., Google processes 3.5 billion searches per day, [101]), but it is important to keep in mind that the online media sample is just that: a sample of the available communications about financial strategies.

Future directions

Future research may examine which strategies are best in which situations, or even examine the optimal number of strategies to employ when making financial decisions. Indeed, simply providing people with a list of all possible self-control strategies may be mentally taxing. For example, one effective financial self-control strategy would be to pay for one’s purchases with cash [7]; however, in practice, this strategy would require a considerable amount of foresight and planning (i.e., additional self-control tasks) to ensure one always has cash on hand. Using this strategy in conjunction with other self-control strategies before every purchase, such as checking your account balance [51] and reflecting on future regret [54], may be too effortful considering the numerous spending situations individuals encounter on a daily basis. Thus, more selective use of self-control strategies depending on an individual’s personality and the specific spending situation may be most effective. There is likely no single, perfect financial self-control strategy to reduce spending or increase saving, and future research might examine whether educating people on sets of likely strategies can reduce their everyday spending. Future research could also examine how the strategies discovered in previous work on self-control strategies across goal domains [30, 31] compare to the strategies identified in the present research which focused exclusively on financial goals.

To address the limitation of sample representativeness, future research should examine a more representative sample of the American population, or examine strategy use across countries As Study 3 was relatively more educated and overrepresented young/middle aged adults their strategy use might have reflected a specific subset of the population (see online supplements for a comparison of Study 3 sample demographics with U.S. census demographics: https://osf.io/vpwfd/?view_only=ff460390e6f040f997131d907c75b4ba). Other subsets might use different strategies more frequently: for example, people closer to retirement may think about their future self more often as financial strategy than young adults further away from retirement.

Some subsets of the population may even reveal greater overlap between the academic research and the lay perspectives. For example, in a sample of undergraduate psychology students (a common convenience sample of many self-control studies) there may be greater awareness of the academic literature on self-control, and compared to other undergraduate samples, the strategies psychology undergraduates use may especially overlap with the strategies found in the meta-analysis literature search. Research on a more diverse sample could verify the results of the present research and can create a more complete list of financial self-control strategies. Sample demographic variables such as age and gender may not only moderate strategy use, but also strategy effectiveness for bringing spending and saving behaviour in line with people’s goals.

The meta-analysis showed that financial self-control strategies were effective but also showed that the vast majority of studies to date are lab-based. Future studies might examine whether these strategies as effective when used outside the lab, in lay person’s day-to-day life. Future studies might also study the effectiveness of the strategies that emerged from lay and online media perspectives but have not yet been studied empirically, in the lab or in the field.

Moderate Red Wine Consumption Increases the Expression of Longevity-Associated Genes in Controlled Human Populations and Extends Lifespan in Drosophila melanogaster

Moderate Red Wine Consumption Increases the Expression of Longevity-Associated Genes in Controlled Human Populations and Extends Lifespan in Drosophila melanogaster. Juan Gambini et al. Antioxidants 2021, 10(2), 301; February 16 2021. https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox10020301

Abstract: The beneficial effects of moderate red wine consumption on cardiovascular health are well known. The composition of red wine includes several compounds, such as the phytoestrogen resveratrol, that exert these beneficial effects, although not all the mechanisms by which they act are known. Our aim was to study the effect of red wine consumption on longevity-related genes in controlled human populations, such as cloistered nuns. We found that the expression of catalase, manganese-superoxide dismutase, Sirt1, and p53 was increased in peripheral blood mononuclear cells after 14 days of moderate red wine consumption. This increase was accompanied by an enhanced metabolic wellness: fatty acids, cholesterol, branched chain amino acids (isoleucine and leucine), ketone bodies (acetoacetate), bacterial co-metabolites (trimethylamine), and cellular antioxidants (taurine) contributed to a change in metabolic profile after moderate red wine consumption by the nuns. No serious unwanted side effects were observed. Finally, we tested the effect of moderate red wine consumption on longevity in a controlled animal population, such as D. melanogaster, and found that it increased average life span by 7%. In conclusion, moderate red wine consumption increases the expression of key longevity-related genes and improves metabolic health in humans and increases longevity in flies.

Keywords: lifespan; cardiovascular health; metabolic profile; resveratrol; phytoestrogens

Short-term challenges resulting from colder temperature experienced by hominins were apparently countered via phenotypic adaptation toward larger bodies as a buffer mechanism; no such association of temperature with brain size

Different environmental variables predict body and brain size evolution in Homo. Manuel Will, Mario Krapp, Jay T. Stock & Andrea Manica. Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 4116, Jul 8 2021. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24290-7

Abstract: Increasing body and brain size constitutes a key macro-evolutionary pattern in the hominin lineage, yet the mechanisms behind these changes remain debated. Hypothesized drivers include environmental, demographic, social, dietary, and technological factors. Here we test the influence of environmental factors on the evolution of body and brain size in the genus Homo over the last one million years using a large fossil dataset combined with global paleoclimatic reconstructions and formalized hypotheses tested in a quantitative statistical framework. We identify temperature as a major predictor of body size variation within Homo, in accordance with Bergmann’s rule. In contrast, net primary productivity of environments and long-term variability in precipitation correlate with brain size but explain low amounts of the observed variation. These associations are likely due to an indirect environmental influence on cognitive abilities and extinction probabilities. Most environmental factors that we test do not correspond with body and brain size evolution, pointing towards complex scenarios which underlie the evolution of key biological characteristics in later Homo.

Discussion

Climatic fluctuations and ecological factors have frequently been proposed as potential drivers of brain and body size evolution within the hominin lineage8,9,10,11,12,23. This study presents the first systematic attempt to quantitatively test different environmental effects on body and brain size variation for the genus Homo during the past ~1 Ma. The climate variables we investigated are representative of the climatological mean (30-year averages) for each 1000-year period of the past ~1 Ma. Hence, climate oscillations on sub-millennial time scales, which might have had some impact on human body and brain size evolution, are not resolved, but such a finer resolution is also precluded by the inherently larger dating uncertainty of Pleistocene human fossils.

We found that MAT is uniformly associated with body size across Mid-Pleistocene Homo, Neanderthals, and Pleistocene H. sapiens. The extent of this relationship is greater than that estimated for modern humans in a recent study31. The direction of this association supports some of the predictions of the Environmental Stress Hypothesis, with temperature (i.e., thermal stress) being the key driver: larger body sizes are consistently found in colder regions, where both annual mean and mean coldest quarter temperature are lower. These findings fit the general expectations of Bergmann’s rule and are consistent with some—though not all33,38—previous studies on humans, hominins, and other animals8,10,22,31. Following this interpretation, short-term challenges resulting from colder temperature experienced by hominin populations (thermal stress) were apparently countered via phenotypic adaptation toward larger bodies as a buffer mechanism, either through natural selection, plasticity, or a combination of both. We failed to detect any effect of low rainfall or nutrient-poor environments as determinants of stress in our analyses.

Our analyses detected no such association of temperature with brain size. We did find relationships with the 10 ka-sigma of mean annual precipitation (MAP) and NPP, but the variance in brain size explained by these variables was small compared to the effect of MAT on body size. These results suggest that brain size within Homo is less influenced by environmental variables than body size during the past 1.0 Ma. Apart from other drivers being likely more relevant (see below), one factor contributing to the difficulty of detecting environmental effects lies in the strong performance of the null model (LM-T) based on taxonomic differences in brain size variations that explained much more variance (R2 = 0.47) compared to body size (R2 = 0.05). This being said, our analyses suggest that brain sizes tend to be higher in regions of low NPP and smaller in more productive regions, although this only holds for Mid-Pleistocene Homo but not for Neanderthals or Pleistocene H. sapiens. This negative correlation is not necessarily a direct effect of environments on human phenotype but can rather be interpreted as an indirect interaction of behavioral changes with environmental variables: regions with lower NPP feature more open steppe and grassland habitats with more frequent large mammals and particularly bovids (“productivity paradox”; ref. 39). As such, our findings can be related to changes in subsistence strategies toward more frequent and systematic hunting of larger-sized bovids in these environments, in association with cognitive changes toward more complex weapons and coordinated group activity. The lithic, faunal, and isotopic records show an increase of such behaviors and ecosystems inhabited by Homo throughout the Middle Pleistocene that supports this interpretation40,41,42,43. The divergent pattern in Neanderthals and Pleistocene H. sapiens might be due to an already higher established brain size close to the physiological maximum during colonization of more northern latitudes (>40°; H. sapiens: mean = 1505 cm3, n = 37; Neanderthals: mean = 1398 cm3; n = 25), while the other taxon either evolved in situ in these areas or had higher growth potential. More early African H. sapiens fossils are required to adequately test this interpretation.

Our fossil data show a relationship between long-term variation in rainfall (MAPvar10) and brain size that is of opposite sign than expected from the Environmental Variability Hypothesis11,36. Instead, this prediction is consistent with the Environmental Consistency Hypothesis: larger brain sizes occur in more stable environments across all studied Homo taxa. This result is likely an effect of brain growth being constrained by reduced resource availability and predictability over multi-millennial scales, acting as an extinction filter.

Our linear models did not find associations with 10-ka variability measures for other environmental variables in either body or brain size. We also failed to find support for the Environmental Constraints Hypothesis (Table 1). However, we need to be careful in interpreting these negative results. The fossil hominin record is scarce and patchy in space and time, confounding the ability to find patterns in our data26. We thus modeled and analyzed synthetic datasets to assess the degree to which the intrinsic nature of the fossil record biases and distorts associations of body and brain size with environmental variables. The power analysis shows that we should have been able to detect at least medium to strong associations between brain size and MAT, MAP, mean temperature of the coldest quarter, and mean precipitation of the driest quarter (Fig. 2). The synthetic data thus suggest that our negative results for these variables, and the lack of support for the Environmental Stress and the Environmental Constraints Hypothesis, are either “true negative” findings or that true effect sizes are relatively small. On the other hand, we had little power to detect associations of body and brain size with long-term climate variability (i.e., the consequences of the Environmental Variability and the Environmental Consistency Hypotheses), leaving them as potential targets for future analyses with even larger sample sizes.

There are several implications from our study for human evolution that point toward future analyses. Many standard models and recent accounts of the origins, bio-cultural evolution, and dispersal of our genus and species have invoked environmental drivers as prime movers9,44,45,46. Yet, necessary temporal correlations of paleoanthropological and archeological data with environmental information have been plagued by issues of resolution, scale, and data availability47. Using emulated global climate model data27, this study shows that different climatic variables predict human brain and body size evolution over the past 1 Ma. These findings have implications beyond human evolution. The scaling between body size and brain size is remarkably consistent across vertebrates, but increased variability in brain growth appears to underpin observed patterns of encephalization among birds and mammals48. Consistency in the observed patterns of encephalization within lineages is often attributed to developmental constraints that link the ontogenetic trajectories of brain and body size, although there is emerging evidence that deviations from the patterns found in mammals and primates may be driven by functional variation and different selective pressures49. Such adaptive mechanisms likely underpin the variation in brain development observed in Pleistocene hominins50. The demonstration that brain and body size evolution were influenced by different environmental factors supports this broader interpretation of unique selective pressures driving phenotypic diversification in the hominin lineage.

We also note that many of the environmental variables provided no detectable correlations and explained variance is often low, raising doubts about an unquestioned a priori reliance on environmental factors in explaining macro-processes in human evolution. There is a need for more quantitative tests of such hypotheses in explicitly formulated theoretical frameworks. Future work on these questions could (i) expand analyses on environmental drivers into the entire Pleistocene and Pliocene and (ii) examine other proposed drivers that are not tested here (see below). There are ample changes in the size of endocranial volumes and body mass between ~5 and 1 Ma among taxa of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus Paranthropus, and Homo that could be the result of climatic forcing and ecological adaptations, or yet other factors. This period also constitutes the focus of the original variability hypothesis11,36; however, the fossil record ~5–1 Ma has lower sample sizes per taxon and is patchier in time and space. While we gathered datasets for body and brain size back to 4.4 Ma6, we refrained from extending our analyses to this period as the current quality of the fossil data with the added uncertainty of climate models >1 Ma renders such studies more speculative. Improved paleoclimate models and new discoveries with good chronometric ages and taxonomic information will eventually allow for such studies.

In the meantime, testing other proposed drivers of human body and particularly brain size could be more fruitful. Inter-species competition and niche exclusion likely drove some of the observed significant differences in brain and body size between (sympatric) species of Homo (e.g., refs. 2,4,18), including shifts to larger social groups or communication networks driving further encephalization16. Archeologically established changes in subsistence patterns likely played a role as the nutritional basis allowing for the evolution of larger bodies and the maintenance of energetically costly brains14,15,51,52, and we have found indirect evidence to support this in our study. Yet the spatio-temporal trajectories and taxonomic associations of these behaviors in the archeological record are not well resolved. Finally, there is a long-standing debate about a feedback process between culture, cognition, and encephalization. Increased reliance on technology and material culture might have started a long-term directed evolutionary process selecting for advanced cognition and larger brains19,20,21, with greater detachment from direct environmental effects, particularly in H. sapiens. In parallel with brain size increases, stone tool technology showed major changes over the past 2 million years53 with an accelerated pace of cultural change by ~300 ka and again with the onset of the Upper Paleolithic and Later Stone Age17,54,55,56.

While many of these factors might have played a key role in body and/or brain size evolution, future models should include interacting components57,58 such as the co-evolution of changing environments, subsistence, and technology in driving brain evolution14,18,51,52,59. Such potential influences on hominin brain and body size need to be tested by formulating and testing explicit hypotheses with statistical analyses. This strategy requires innovative ways to translate the often qualitative archeological information into comparable quantitative data, potentially via machine learning methods. In this study, the support or falsification of certain environmental hypotheses to explain body and brain size changes among Homo in the past million years exemplify the usefulness of this approach.

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.