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Going Beyond Beauty: Characterizing the Complexity of Aesthetic Experiences
Vicente Estrada Gonzalez1,2, Kohinoor Monish Darda1,3, Eileen R Cardillo1
1Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
|April 9, 2026
Summary
Traditional aesthetic judgments like beauty and liking show high agreement. However, complex aesthetic experiences, such as immersion and epistemic transformation, exhibit greater individual variability, regardless of viewing context.
Area of Science:
- Empirical aesthetics
- Cognitive psychology
- Art appraisal
Background:
- Aesthetic experiences traditionally assessed via beauty and liking judgments.
- Higher agreement exists for natural stimuli compared to artworks, highlighting subjectivity.
- Existing research lacks nuanced evaluation of aesthetic impact variability.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate agreement across diverse aesthetic impacts beyond global beauty and liking.
- Hypothesize that complex cognitive/emotional impacts are more variable than simple affective ones.
- Examine the influence of viewing context (in-person vs. digital) on aesthetic agreement.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a taxonomy of aesthetic impacts: positive affect, negative affect, immersion/motivation, and epistemic transformation.
- Employed the mean-minus-one method to measure individual agreement across impact categories.
- Compared agreement levels for artworks viewed in museum and digital contexts.
Main Results:
- Agreement was highest for liking and beauty judgments.
- Lower agreement observed for higher-order impacts, specifically immersion/motivation and epistemic transformation.
- Viewing context (in-person vs. digital) did not significantly alter agreement levels.
Conclusions:
- Traditional aesthetic evaluations (liking, beauty) demonstrate high inter-individual agreement.
- Complex aesthetic appraisals, including immersion and epistemic transformation, are more subjective and variable.
- Viewing context does not appear to be a significant factor in the variability of aesthetic evaluations.
Keywords:
agreement variabilitycognitive impactsdigital contextemotional impactsgallery contextpreference consistencyMore Related Videos
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