No abstract

The current study aimed to determine relationships between oculomotor behavior and aesthetical evaluation of paintings. We hypothesized that paintings evaluated as beautiful compared to nonbeautiful would be associated with different oculomotor behavior in terms of fixation duration, viewing time, and temporal and spatial distribution of attention. To verify these hypotheses, we examined forty participants that looked at and evaluated 140 figurative paintings while their eye movements were recorded. To analyze data, we used divergence point analysis (DPA) and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). The results of the DPA suggested that fixation durations longer than 229 ms are sensitive to the effect of aesthetical evaluation. We also found that the effect of aesthetical evaluation was significant in the time window between 2.3 s and 19.8 s of viewing a painting. The results of the RQA suggested that the participants viewed paintings evaluated as beautiful in a more structured manner compared to those evaluated as nonbeautiful, which suggests higher involvement of top-down processes while facing beautiful artwork. We discuss and refer these results to the literature on cognitive processes related to aesthetical evaluation of paintings.

On the basis of McAdams and Pals’ (2006) multilevel framework of personality and Leder and colleagues’ (Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin, 2004) model of aesthetic appreciation, we hypothesized that aesthetic judgment is predicted by the interaction between painting and selected person’s characteristics (i.e., temperament traits, level of expertise, and personal experiences evoked by the paintings). Nineteen experts and 21 nonexperts made aesthetic evaluations of 100 figurative paintings. Participants then told personal stories associated with 10 paintings they evaluated as the most and least appealing. First, we found that some formal elements of paintings, for example their luminance, saturation, and complexity, interact with temperament traits predicting aesthetic appreciation. Second, expertise was a moderator of the relationship between formal elements of painting and aesthetic evaluation. Third, the more congruence between the emotional climate of a painting and the individual pattern of ideal emotional experience, the more appealing participants rated a painting. This last relationship was mediated by congruence between the emotional climate of a personal story associated with a painting and the individual pattern of ideal emotional experience. The moderating role of temperament traits, expertise, and personal meanings in the relationship between a painting’s formal elements and aesthetic appreciation is discussed.

For many generations, works of art have been a source for experiencing beauty. They add to the wealth of our culture because they convey universal themes and values. In this study, we treat paintings as a stimulus for personal story-telling. The purpose was to explore the affective quality of personal meanings present in autobiographical narratives. Our findings show that subjective ratings of the beauty of figurative paintings are linked with the quality and theme of personal experiences recalled in response to viewing them, but not related to the length of the story. ‘Beautiful’ pictures elicit descriptions of desirable experiences associated with passive contemplation and satisfied self-enhancement motive. ‘Non-beautiful’ pictures call to mind difficult experiences linked with frustration. The experts formulated longer self-narratives inspired by paintings rated beautiful in comparison to laypersons, and laypersons formulated longer self-narratives inspired by paintings rated not beautiful in comparison to experts. The results are discussed in connection to the nature of the aesthetic experience and specificity of personal maenings.