TY - JOUR
T1 - What makes an art expert? Emotion and evaluation in art appreciation
AU - Leder, Helmut
AU - Gerger, Gernot
AU - Brieber, David
AU - Schwarz, Norbert
N1 - Funding Information:
Correspondence should be addressed to: Helmut Leder, Department of Psychological Basic Research, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 5, 1010 Vienna, Austria. E-mail: [email protected] Present address: Norbert Schwarz, Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. This paper was supported by a grant from FWF [National Austrian Scientific Funds; P23538] to HL.
PY - 2014/8
Y1 - 2014/8
N2 - Why do some people like negative, or even disgusting and provocative artworks? Art expertise, believed to influence the interplay among cognitive and emotional processing underlying aesthetic experience, could be the answer. We studied how art expertise modulates the effect of positive-and negative-valenced artworks on aesthetic and emotional responses, measured with self-reports and facial electromyography (EMG). Unsurprisingly, emotionally-valenced art evoked coherent valence as well as corrugator supercilii and zygamoticus major activations. However, compared to non-experts, experts showed attenuated reactions, with less extreme valence ratings and corrugator supercilii activations and they liked negative art more. This pattern was also observed for a control set of International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures suggesting that art experts show general processing differences for visual stimuli. Thus, much in line with the Kantian notion that an aesthetic stance is emotionally distanced, art experts exhibited a distinct pattern of attenuated emotional responses.
AB - Why do some people like negative, or even disgusting and provocative artworks? Art expertise, believed to influence the interplay among cognitive and emotional processing underlying aesthetic experience, could be the answer. We studied how art expertise modulates the effect of positive-and negative-valenced artworks on aesthetic and emotional responses, measured with self-reports and facial electromyography (EMG). Unsurprisingly, emotionally-valenced art evoked coherent valence as well as corrugator supercilii and zygamoticus major activations. However, compared to non-experts, experts showed attenuated reactions, with less extreme valence ratings and corrugator supercilii activations and they liked negative art more. This pattern was also observed for a control set of International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures suggesting that art experts show general processing differences for visual stimuli. Thus, much in line with the Kantian notion that an aesthetic stance is emotionally distanced, art experts exhibited a distinct pattern of attenuated emotional responses.
KW - Aesthetic evaluation
KW - Art
KW - Emotion
KW - Expertise
KW - Facial EMG
KW - IAPS
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84902822923&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/02699931.2013.870132
DO - 10.1080/02699931.2013.870132
M3 - Article
SN - 1464-0600
VL - 28
SP - 1137
EP - 1147
JO - Cognition & Emotion
JF - Cognition & Emotion
IS - 6
ER -