Ambivalent Emotional Experiences of Everyday Visual and Musical Objects

Abstract

Art brings rich, pleasurable experiences to our daily lives. However, many theories of art and aesthetics focus on specific strong experiences-in the contexts of museums, galleries, and concert halls and the aesthetic perception of canonized arts-disregarding the impact of daily experiences. Furthermore, pleasure is often treated as a simplistic concept of merely positive affective character, yet recent psychological research has revealed the experience of pleasure is far more complicated. This study explored the nature of pleasure evoked by everyday aesthetic objects. A mixture of statistical and qualitative methods was applied in the analysis of the data collected through a semi-structured online survey (N = 464). The result asserts the experience of emotional ambivalence occurred and was composed of a variety of nuanced emotions and related association, rather than just a combination of contradicting emotions. Such paradoxical pleasure is defined as a self-conscious hedonic exposure to negative emotions in art reception. The study also depicted four types of attitudinal ambivalence: loss, diversity, socio-ideology, and distance, reflecting contextual elements intertwined into experience, and the connection between ambivalence and intense emotional experience.

The CODA Model: A Review and Skeptical Extension of the Constructionist Model of Emotional Episodes Induced by Music

“…Several criticisms of Russell's theory have emerged for one-dimensional valence such as an inability to explain mixed emotions (Hunter et al, 2008 ; Eerola and Peltola, 2016 ; Maksimainen et al, 2019 ); the lack of predictive power in one-dimensional valence for behavior (e.g., fear and anger may produce different approach/avoidance behaviors, Frijda, 2009 ) and the bivalenced conception of some affective lexis (Zeelenberg and Pieters, 2006 ). Russell ( 2012 ) counters this through the inclusion of multiple affective qualities (evaluations of a stimulus).…”

MA-EM: A neurocognitive model for understanding mixed and ambiguous emotions and morality

“…Mixed emotions are not unidimensionally interpretable (Berrios et al, 2015;Das et al, 2017;Hunter et al, 2010;Larsen & McGraw, 2014, 2014Maksimainen et al, 2019). The most prominently studied example is when people experience being happy and sad at the same time.…”

“…There is consensus about the fact that the term 'mixed emotions' is unable to capture the full spectrum of emotions, and that hence a more elaborate taxonomy is needed (Larsen & McGraw, 2014;Maksimainen et al, 2019). Conflicting emotions are emotions which are direct ('polar') opposites.…”