Predicting preference for familiar, everyday objects: An experimental confrontation between two theories of aesthetic behaviour

Whitfield, T. W. Allan

doi:10.1016/s0272-4944(83)80002-4

Cited by 98 publications

(89 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Purcell (1986) suggested that preference might be given to those environments which possess an optimal level of discrepancy from one's own scheme, in order to generate a mild form of psycho-physical arousal without activating negative feelings such as boredom or anxiety. Conversely, Whitfield (1983) stated that preference might be oriented to environmental stimuli that mostly resemble the subjective scheme. Here too, as argued for other cognitivist theories, the representation of the relationship between man and environment appears to be "cold", unable to account for the emotional complexity of everyday experience.…”

Section: Place As a Stimulusmentioning

confidence: 99%

6 Positive Change in Environment: Aesthetics, Environmental Flowability and Well-Being

Rainisio¹,

Boffi²,

Riva³

2015

Enabling Positive Change: Flow and Complexity in Daily Experience

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Environmental Psychology states that restoration and environmental preference could be explained by referring to our evolutionary past, or taking into account some of the universal features of the place. This contribution shows an alternative point of view, focusing on the concepts of flow. This chapter focuses on a new framework aiming to establish a link between optimal experiences, psychological well-being and aesthetic judgments, introducing the idea of Flowability as a subjective criterion to evaluate a place and consider it as potentially regenerative.

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Section: Place As a Stimulusmentioning

confidence: 99%

6 Positive Change in Environment: Aesthetics, Environmental Flowability and Well-Being

Rainisio¹,

Boffi²,

Riva³

2015

Enabling Positive Change: Flow and Complexity in Daily Experience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…This seems to be part of a broader -prototype preference‖ effect; people also prefer typical faces, animals, and objects (Halberstadt & Rhodes, 2000;Rhodes & Halberstadt, 2003). Several controversial experiments have compared typicality against complexity and novelty (e.g., Martindale et al, 1990;Martindale, Moore, & West, 1988;Whitfield, 1983) with the goal of determining which variables better explain aesthetic preference (see discussions by Boselie, 1991;Hekkert, Snelders, & van Wieringen, 2003;Konečni, 1996;North & Hargreaves, 2000).…”

Section: Prototypicality As a Theory Of Aesthetic Preferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Responses to Art: From Collation and Arousal to Cognition and Emotion

Silvia

2005

Review of General Psychology

316

263

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The study of emotional responses to art has remained curiously detached from the psychology of emotions. Historically, the leading tradition has been Daniel Berlyne's psychobiological model, embodied by the "new experimental aesthetics" movement of the 1970s. That theory explained hedonic qualities of art by referring to arousalmodifying "collative properties" of art, such as complexity, novelty, uncertainty, and conflict. Berlyne's influence on the experimental study of aesthetics has been enormous, largely for the better but also for the worse. Berlyne's suspicion of cognitive psychology led to an unproductive perseveration on arousal as the mechanism of "aesthetic responses." This article describes how appraisal theories of emotion inform the study of aesthetics. Appraisal theories make new predictions about emotional responses to art, expand the domain of aesthetic emotions beyond positive emotions such as interest and enjoyment, inform other theories (e.g., prototypicality models), and reinterpret past findings.

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“…Thus, design newness of a product increases as the product shares less visual attributes with other products in the same category (Whitfield, 1983). This is consistent with the notion that design newness is the inverse of typicality-the degree to which an object is considered to fit, resemble and be representative of a product category (Boster, 1988).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 80%

“…As exemplified by the beauty-in-averageness effect, humans always perceive an average and prototypical faces (i.e., a face morphed together with different faces) to be more attractive (Halberstadt, 2006). People also favor typical music (Smith & Melara, 1990), cubist paintings (Hekkert & Wieringen, 1990) and furniture (Whitfield, 1983) in comparison to atypical counterparts. Other research has replicated this effect on other stimuli such as typical exemplars of dogs, wristwatches, birds, and randomly dot patterns (Halberstadt & Rhodes, 2000;Winkielman, Halberstadt, Fazendeiro, & Catty, 2006).…”

Section: The Paradox Between Typicality and Incongruitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The neglected emotion of interest and its relevance to consumer psychology

Sung¹

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A main goal of marketing is to evoke a sense of familiarity that enhance consumers' psychological and behavioural responses. Yet, little is known about why consumers sometimes respond negatively toward familiarity and respond positively toward novelty. Specifically, the question of how affective motivation drives consumers to favor novelty is important in achieving enhanced marketing. Interest or curiosity is an emotion related to a strong approach motivation and exploratory behavior toward novelty. This thesis explores the relevance and implications of interest to consumer psychology and behavior. The investigation is grounded in emotion differentiation, appraisal theories of interest, and a functional account of emotion. It draws from literature on the exposure effect, differentiation of positive emotions, the emotion of interest, metacognitive experience of fluency, new product and innovation management, and advertising.The thesis begins with a review of the relevant literature that shows how consumers tend to paradoxically favor both familiarity and novelty (Chapter 1). In this conceptual review, I propose that the differentiation between liking and interest can explain this previously unresolved paradox.Specifically, familiarity appears to evoke liking, whereas novelty elicits interest. This chapter contributes to our understanding of how and why consumers gravitate toward novelty by providing an explanation: consumers' have dualistic tendency to favor familiarity and novelty simultaneously.The remaining chapters present three streams of research which show that consumers tend to favor novelty because it generates the emotion of interest. Chapter 2 contributes to the innovation management literature by showing that consumers' subjective perceptions of novelty toward a product design, instead of the deviation of design itself, can enhance product evaluation and behavior toward the product. Chapter 3 contributes to the advertising literature by applying appraisal theories to the elicitation of consumer interest and demonstrates that the simple advertising cue of novelty can evoke the emotion of interest. Chapter 4 contributes to the literature on consumer research by showing that disfluency (i.e., metacognitive difficulty) can serve as a cue for novelty -one that evokes interest and enhances product evaluation. This provides a potential explanation to the conflicting findings between the positive effects of fluency (through familiarity) and disfluency (through novelty) on product evaluation.Taken together, this set of studies is the first to demonstrate the relevance and implication of interest to consumer psychology and behavior. I show that product design can benefit from considering the appraisal structure of interest and, specifically, it accounts for consumers' subjective perception and affective response toward design newness. I also find that a consumer's novelty appraisal is a significant determinant of perceived interestingness of an advertisement and this can be evoked by simple advertising ...

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Predicting preference for familiar, everyday objects: An experimental confrontation between two theories of aesthetic behaviour

Cited by 98 publications

References 29 publications

6 Positive Change in Environment: Aesthetics, Environmental Flowability and Well-Being

6 Positive Change in Environment: Aesthetics, Environmental Flowability and Well-Being

Emotional Responses to Art: From Collation and Arousal to Cognition and Emotion

The neglected emotion of interest and its relevance to consumer psychology

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