Berlyne Revisited: Evidence for the Multifaceted Nature of Hedonic Tone in the Appreciation of Paintings and Music

Abstract

In his seminal book on esthetics, Berlyne (1971) posited an inverted-U relationship between complexity and hedonic tone in arts appreciation, however, converging evidence for his theory is still missing. The disregard of the multidimensionality of complexity may explain some of the divergent results. Here, we argue that definitions of hedonic tone are manifold and systematically examined whether the nature of the relationship between complexity and hedonic tone is determined by the specific measure of hedonic tone. In Experiment 1, we studied three picture categories with similar affective and semantic contents: 96 affective environmental scenes, which were also converted into 96 cartoons, and 96 representational paintings. Complexity varied along the dimension of elements. In a between-subjects design, each stimulus was presented for 5 s to 206 female participants. Subjective ratings of hedonic tone (either beauty, pleasantness or liking), arousal, complexity and familiarity were collected in three conditions per stimulus set. Complexity and arousal were positively associated in all conditions, with the strongest association observed for paintings. For environmental scenes and cartoons, there was no significant association between complexity and hedonic tone, and the three measures of hedonic tone were highly correlated (all rs > 0.85). As predicted, in paintings the measures of hedonic tone were less strongly correlated (all rs > 0.73), and when controlling for familiarity, the association with complexity was significantly positive for beauty (rs = 0.26), weakly negative for pleasantness (rs = -0.16) and not present for liking. Experiment 2 followed a similar approach and 77 female participants, all non-musicians, rated 92 musical excerpts (15 s) in three conditions of hedonic tone (either beauty, pleasantness or liking). Results indicated a strong relationship between complexity and arousal (all rs > 0.85). When controlling for familiarity effects, the relationship between complexity and beauty followed an inverted-U curve, whereas the relationship between complexity and pleasantness was negative (rs = -0.26) and the one between complexity and liking positive (rs = 0.29). We relate our results to Berlyne’s theory and the latest findings in neuroaesthetics, proposing that future studies need to acknowledge the multifaceted nature of hedonic tone in esthetic experiences of artforms.

Psychophysiological Indices of Music-Evoked Emotions in Musicians

“…Pleasantness ratings were found to be less internally consistent than most of our other measures, which is in line with some previous work (Marin, Lampatz, Wandl, & Leder, 2016).…”

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

“…Liking and beauty ratings may be a complex context-dependent function of many variables, and so may be EADs (Güçlütürk et al, 2016; Marin et al, 2016), but perhaps in the end it always involves implicit associations with joyful or disgusting events triggered by the stimulus, the former taking a greater weight in the decision. Future studies on EADs should thus pay more attention to the underlying (asymmetric) affective-semantic structure (i.e., relating to discrete or embodied emotions) of the stimuli used, before a priori polarizing them symmetrically into “positive” or “negative” ones.…”

“…To say it in the words of Silvia (2009, p. 48): “The psychology of aesthetic experience is eerily close to the psychology of how much novices say they like something.” However, the heterogeneity of notions, e.g., aesthetic experience, aesthetic episode, aesthetic appraisal, aesthetic judgment, aesthetic feeling/emotion, aesthetic evaluation etc., methods and materials used to assess felt beauty make it difficult to draw more precise conclusions at this stage (cf. Güçlütürk et al, 2016; Marin et al, 2016; Pelowski et al, 2016). In the following sections, we examine methods used to measure EADs in the context of verbal materials of differing degrees of complexity.…”

Visual Complexity and Affect: Ratings Reflect More Than Meets the Eye

“…Many studies have observed a relationship between visual complexity and affect (e.g., pleasantness). This relationship has been observed dating back to the early 1970s (e.g., Kaplan et al, 1972 ; Aitken, 1974 ; Aitken and Hutt, 1974 ) and this idea has re-emerged more recently (e.g., Stamps, 2002 ; Marin and Leder, 2013 , 2016 ; Schlochtermeier et al, 2013 ; Machado et al, 2015 ; Marin et al, 2016 ). Importantly, these studies suggest that more complex pictures are perceived as more pleasant than less complex pictures, a hypothesis supported by earlier work where pleasantness and physiological arousal have been found to be higher for more complex abstract shapes (e.g., Berlyne et al, 1963 , 1968 ; Vitz, 1964 ; Day, 1967 ).…”