Abstract
Despite an extensive history of serviceable analyses of behavior–environment conditions arranged by artists to elicit aesthetic experience, unforeseen transformational effects controlling aesthetic responses are often relegated to an unknowable dimension of mind or spirit. Francis Mechner demystifies aesthetic effects by describing their plausible relations to distal events in phylogeny and ontogeny in accord with principles of an experimentally derived, general process theory of behavior. In identifying a blending of temporally extended concept repertoires as the key generic component of aesthetic effects, Mechner’s approach provides a potential educational or treatment goal for individuals limited in aesthetic experience. The synergetic brews that might otherwise evoke a confluence of repertoires may not have sufficient positive reinforcing potency to ensure the requisite emission of the behaviors that produce them. Moreover, dynamically combinatorial events might even become aversive when acts are differentially punished in their presence. By creating operant chains in which the production, attendance to, or interaction with synergetic stimuli become a differential context of positive reinforcement, the frequency of occurrence of aesthetic appreciation might be multiplied.
Published Version
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