Reimagining empirical aesthetics through cross-cultural perspectives

Cross-cultural empirical aesthetics examines how aesthetic experience converges and varies across cultural contexts. In this short review, we synthesize recent work on visual art, music, and dance, with emphasis on the audience perspective within the psychology of art: how viewers, listeners, and observers perceive, feel, evaluate, and make meaning from artworks and performances. Evidence suggests that some perceptual and affective cues, such as harmony, contour, tempo, loudness, rhythm, and synchrony, can support partially shared responses, while aesthetic judgments are shaped by enculturation, expertise, familiarity, identity, context, and culturally patterned attention. These findings suggest that aesthetic experience arises from dynamic interactions between universal perceptual mechanisms and culture-specific interpretive frameworks. Using rasa theory from Indian aesthetics as a test case, we argue that cross-cultural empirical aesthetics should embrace a pluralistic, culturally grounded approach that employs theoretical constructs that best capture aesthetic experience within diverse artistic traditions.