Aesthetics and Environment: What is the Role of Beauty in Supporting Ageing Well?

Abstract

Abstract Access to beauty is intrinsic to psychological, social, and spiritual health. Aesthetic sensibility includes awareness initiated in both mind and emotion accessed through nurturing environments (Caspari, Eriksson, & Naden, 2011). While individual tastes vary and aesthetic preferences are culturally conditioned, an appreciation of natural and constructed beauty is fundamental to human meaning-making, creativity, and innovation (Hillman 1998). Beauty is thus an instrumental tool that may support ageing well. We investigated the question of what aesthetics/beauty meant to older adults in England, how they experienced it, and whether experiencing beauty sustained them. Three focus groups were conducted with community dwelling participants aged between 60 and 93 (median age 75) for a total N of 14. Five themes emerged related to experience: an unexpected recognition; an evolving openness to experience; a universal perception available in micro and macro environments; a force that can alleviate depression; and a relational quality of some interactions. The value of beauty was identified through all groups: participants found it difficult to imagine a world with no beauty in it. They wondered if age made discernment capacity greater. Appreciation of beauty in unexpected places like a cracked pot led participants to identify happiness and wellbeing as outcomes of perception. This study suggests that beauty is essential for wellbeing and human flourishing and can emerge in unlikely ways. Implications are that professionals should assist older people to consider the role of beauty in life and develop interventions to consciously keep beauty awakened in normal and aesthetically-deprived environments.