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There is a stable relationship between the Openness/Intellect domain of personality and aesthetic engagement. However, neither of these are simple constructs and while the relationship exists, process based evidence explaining the relationship is still lacking. This research sought to clarify the relationship by evaluating the influence of the Openness and Intellect aspects on several different aesthetic emotions. Two studies looked at the between- and within-person differences in arousal and the emotions of interest, pleasure and confusion in response to visual art. The results suggest that Openness, as opposed to Intellect, was predictive of greater arousal, interest and pleasure, while both aspects explained less confusion. Differences in Openness were associated with within-person emotion appraisal contingencies, particularly greater novelty-interest and novelty-pleasure relationships. Those higher in Openness were particularly influenced by novelty in artworks. For pleasure this relationship suggested a different qualitative structure of appraisals. The appraisal of novelty is part of the experience of pleasure for those high in Openness, but not those low in Openness. This research supports the utility of studying Openness and Intellect as separate aspects of the broad domain and clarifies the relationship between Openness and aesthetic states in terms of within-person appraisal processes.
Open people show greater interest in situations that are complex, novel, and difficult to understandsituations that may also be experienced as confusing. Here we investigate the possibility that openness/ intellect is centrally characterized by more positive relations between interest and confusion. Interest and confusion are key states experienced during engagement with information and learning. However, little is known about the within-person relation between them, let alone individual differences in this relation. We tested our hypotheses by making use of different paradigms, stimuli, and participants. Across five studies (N ϭ 640) we tested the relation between openness/intellect and within-person interest-confusion relations in response to art (Study 1); science, philosophy, and art (Study 2); psychology lectures (Study 3); a poem (Study 4); and a complex problem solving task (Study 5). Average interest-confusion relations varied between different studies, but for all studies the distributions of the relations went from highly negative to highly positive-individual differences in direction rather than just degree. In all but 1 study we found consistent support for our hypotheses-openness/intellect is associated with more positive relations between interest and confusion. No other personality domain or intelligence was consistently related to interest-confusion relations. Together, these findings suggest a new phenomenological aspect of being open-curiosity toward confusing situations. Our findings support the link between openness/ intellect and sensitivity to the value of complex information, and are discussed with regards to their relevance for engagement with information and learning.
Music often makes people feel like crying (get a lump in their throat and tears in their eyes) or actually cry. Because crying can co-occur with so many emotions, the present study explored what feeling like crying feels like. A sample of 892 adults reported whether they could remember a time when they cried or felt like crying when listening to music; people who recalled an event then rated it on a wide range of emotional states. A latent class analysis identified 2 underlying clusters of experiences: a "sad" class defined by feeling sad, upset, and depressed, and an "awe" class defined by feeling euphoric, amazed, happy, and inspired. People high in openness to experience were more likely to recall an event in the "awe" class; people high in neuroticism were more likely to recall an event in the "sad" class. These findings illustrate that feeling like crying from music can reflect different underlying states, and it adds to the growing literature on the complexity of powerful and transcendent aesthetic experiences.
Autonomic nervous systems in the human body are named for their operation outside of conscious control. One rare exception is voluntarily generated piloerection (VGP)—the conscious ability to induce goosebumps—whose physiological study, to our knowledge, is confined to three single-individual case studies. Very little is known about the physiological nature and emotional correlates of this ability. The current manuscript assesses physiological, emotional, and personality phenomena associated with VGP in a sample of thirty-two individuals. Physiological descriptions obtained from the sample are consistent with previous reports, including stereotypical patterns of sensation and action. Most participants also reported that their VGP accompanies psychological states associated with affective states (e.g., awe) and experience (e.g., listening to music), and higher than typical openness to new experiences. These preliminary findings suggest that this rare and unusual physiological ability interacts with emotional and personality factors, and thus merits further study.
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