Abstract.We investigated the pleasurability of aggressive behavioral decisions. Four questionnaires (on hedonicity, decision making, justification of aggression, and impulsiveness) were given to 50 participants of both sexes, ranging from 16 to 80 years old. Most participants avoided unpleasant behaviors as part of a trend to maximize pleasure and to minimize displeasure. Mean hedonicity ratings followed a bell curve with increasing levels of aggressiveness (p < .0001). Thus, the participants chose neither passive nor highly aggressive responses to social conflicts, with both extremes receiving the most unpleasant ratings. The results offer empirical support for an interesting point: People may derive pleasure from aggression as long as it is exhibited on a low to medium level. More precisely, people associate pleasure with aggression up to a certain point: Aggressive responses of medium intensity were rated significantly less unpleasant than the most passive and most aggressive ones, which were associated with less pleasure. Conclusion: In social conflicts, behavior tends to maximize experienced pleasure; and impulsive aggression produces pleasure in the aggressor, except at extreme intensities. The point that mild to moderate aggression brings pleasure, whereas extreme or severe aggression does not, provides a perspective that may reconcile conflicting observations in the literature.

Heuristic decision making received wide attention due to the work of Tversky and Kahneman (1981) and inspired multiple studies of irrationality of the human mind and a fundamental disregard for knowledge. But what is the source of all human knowledge, including heuristics? We discuss the hypothesis that acquisition of knowledge is a deeply rooted psychological need, a motivational mechanism for perception as well as higher cognition. We report experimental results showing that acquisition of knowledge is emotionally pleasing. The satisfaction of curiosity through acquiring knowledge brings pleasure. This confirms the hypothesis that curiosity or need for knowledge is a fundamental and ancient motivation on a par with other basic needs, such as sex or food. This paper connects curiosity, knowledge, cognition, emotions, including aesthetic emotions of the beautiful, mechanisms of drives, high cognitive functions, minimization of cognitive effort through heuristics, and knowledge maximization. We anticipate our finding to be an important aspect for several classical fields including cognitive dissonance, personality, self, learning, and new directions in cognitive science studying emotions related to acquiring knowledge, personality types in relation to types of knowledge, relating higher cognitive abilities to knowledge-related emotions, and new directions in aesthetics revealing the cognitive nature of the beautiful and music.

We explore a possibility that the 'Mozart effect' points to a fundamental cognitive function of music. Would such an effect of music be due to the hedonicity, a fundamental dimension of mental experience? The present paper explores a recent hypothesis that music helps to tolerate cognitive dissonances and thus enabled accumulation of knowledge and human cultural evolution. We studied whether the influence of music is related to its hedonicity and whether pleasant or unpleasant music would influence scholarly test performance and cognitive dissonance. Specific hypotheses evaluated in this study are that during a test students experience contradictory cognitions that cause cognitive dissonances. If some music helps to tolerate cognitive dissonances, then first, this music should increase the duration during which participants can tolerate stressful conditions while evaluating test choices. Second, this should result in improved performance. These hypotheses are tentatively confirmed in the reported experiments as the agreeable music was correlated with longer duration of tests under stressful conditions and better performance above that under indifferent or unpleasant music. It follows that music likely performs a fundamental cognitive function explaining the origin and evolution of musical ability that have been considered a mystery.

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Three experiments studied the hedonicity of decision making. Participants rated their pleasure/ displeasure while reading item-sentences describing political and social problems followed by different decisions (Questionnaire 1). Questionnaire 2 was multiple-choice, grouping the items from Questionnaire 1. In Experiment 1, participants answered Questionnaire 2 rapidly or slowly.Both groups selected what they had rated as pleasant, but the 'leisurely' group maximized pleasure less. In Experiment 2, participants selected the most rational responses. The selected behaviors were pleasant but less than spontaneous behaviors. In Experiment 3, Questionnaire 2 was presented once with items grouped by theme, and once with items shuffled. Participants maximized the pleasure of their decisions, but the items selected on Questionnaires 2 were different when presented in different order. All groups maximized pleasure equally in their decisions.These results support that decisions are made predominantly in the hedonic dimension of consciousness.