Compared with traditional Western landscape paintings, Chinese traditional landscape paintings usually apply a reversed-geometric perspective and concentrate more on contextual information. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we discovered an intracultural bias in the aesthetic appreciation of Western and Eastern traditional landscape paintings in European and Chinese participants. When viewing Western and Eastern landscape paintings in an fMRI scanner, participants showed stronger brain activation to artistic expressions from their own culture. Europeans showed greater activation in visual and sensory-motor brain areas, regions in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and hippocampus when viewing Western compared to Eastern landscape paintings. Chinese participants exhibited greater neural activity in the medial and inferior occipital cortex and regions of the superior parietal lobule in response to Eastern compared to Western landscape paintings. On the behavioral level, the aesthetic judgments also differed between Western and Chinese participants when viewing landscape paintings from different cultures; Western participants showed for instance higher valence values when viewing Western landscapes, while Chinese participants did not show this effect when viewing Chinese landscapes. In general, our findings offer differentiated support for a cultural modulation at the behavioral level and in the neural architecture for high-level aesthetic appreciation.

The perception of faces correlates with activity in a number of brain areas, but only when a face is perceived as beautiful is the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) also engaged. Here, we enquire whether it is the emergence of a particular pattern of neural activity in face perceptive areas during the experience of a face as beautiful that determines whether there is, as a correlate, activity in mOFC. Seventeen subjects of both genders viewed and rated facial stimuli according to how beautiful they perceived them to be while the activity in their brains was imaged with functional magnetic resonance imaging. A univariate analysis revealed parametrically scaled activity within several areas, including the occipital face area (OFA), fusiform face area (FFA) and the cuneus; the strength of activity in these areas correlated with the declared intensity of the aesthetic experience of faces; multivariate analyses showed strong patterns of activation in the FFA and the cuneus and weaker patterns in the OFA and the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). The mOFC was only engaged when specific patterns of activity emerged in these areas. A psychophysiological interaction analysis with mOFC as the seed area revealed the involvement of the right FFA and the right OFA. We conjecture that it is the collective specific pattern‐based activity in these face perceptive areas, with activity in the mOFC as a correlate, that constitutes the neural basis for the experience of facial beauty, bringing us a step closer to understanding the neural determinants of aesthetic experience.

Recent ecological developments and in particular the risks of climate change have led to the emergence of new scientific challenges and fields. One field that has gained momentum over the past decades is environmental psychology. Researching and analyzing environmental phenomena it faces the challenges of connecting conceptual problems, the interdisciplinary use of languages and definitions, different understandings and the use of different methodologies, and the scientific explanation of such phenomena. This paper reflects on the challenges and also the opportunities for establishing a sustainable future from a psychological point of view. The topics addressed are a selection of criteria for adapting to changing environments, perspectives on how to harvest insights from different fields of scientific endeavor and ideas how to make use of the necessary interdisciplinarity. Furthermore, questions are raised concerning personal identity, cultural and spiritual values, the ethical aspects of decision‐making in a changing world, and the conceptual challenges facing sustainable ecological development.

What are the conditions that determine whether the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC), in which activity correlates with the experience of beauty derived from different sources, becomes co-active with sensory areas of the brain during the experience of sensory beauty? We addressed this question by studying the neural determinants of facial beauty. The perception of faces correlates with activity in a number of brain areas, but only when a face is perceived as beautiful is the mOFC also engaged. The enquiry thus revolved around the question of whether a particular pattern of activity, within or between areas implicated in face perception, emerges when a face is perceived as beautiful, and which determines that there is, as a correlate, activity in mOFC. 17 subjects of both genders viewed and rated facial stimuli according to how beautiful they perceived them to be while the activity in their brains was imaged with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A univariate analysis revealed parametrically scaled activity within several areas in which the strength of activity correlated with the declared intensity of the aesthetic experience of faces; the list included the mOFC and two core areas strongly implicated in the perception of faces - the occipital face area (OFA), fusiform face area (FFA)- and, additionally, the cuneus. Multivariate analyses, which reveal the more fine-grained distribution of activity in brain areas, revealed strong and distinctive patterns of activation in the FFA and the cuneus and weaker ones in the OFA and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). It is only when distinctive patterns emerged in these areas that there was co-activation of the mOFC, in which a strong pattern of activity also emerged during the experience of facial beauty. A psychophysiological interaction analysis with mOFC as the seed area revealed the involvement of the right FFA and the right OFA, but only when faces were experienced as beautiful. We conjecture that these collective patterns of activity constitute the neural basis for the experience of facial beauty, bringing us a step closer to understanding the neural determinants of aesthetic experience.

Seeing with the mind's eye" and "hearing with the mind's ear" are two common indicators of musical imagery, and they can be referred to as "visual" and "auditory" musical imagery. However, a question remains open, that is, whether visual and auditory imagery of the same musical composition share the same neural mechanisms. Moreover, how can neural mechanisms guarantee the temporal flow of "musical imagery"? To answer these questions, we report here a preliminary single case study using functional magnetic resonance imaging with an eminent composer who imagined one of his compositions in two states of mind as compared to his resting-state activity. In the visual imagery condition, he imagined visually the score of his composition in a continuous way. In the auditory imagery condition, he imagined auditorily the same musical composition with pauses. In spite of the modality and temporal differences, the two types of mental imagery showed similar temporal durations for the same musical composition. However, different patterns of neural activation were observed for visual and auditory imagery with one important exception, that is, a common activation pattern was observed in the left medial temporal gyrus in both visual and auditory imagery. We speculate that the left medial temporal gyrus may play an important role in the creation of apparent temporal continuity in musical imagery and perhaps even in conscious information processing in general.