Abstract
This chapter discusses the affective aspects of aesthetic communication. Aesthetics is a prime example of an area receiving much less attention than it warrants. Experimental aesthetics, the application of experimental psychology to the arts and other aesthetic phenomena, is now a little over 100 years old. Psychological aesthetics presents two main difficulties faced by students studying psychology for the first time. First, they discover themselves to be saddled with presuppositions that must be examined and called in question before they can make progress. These are implicit in the very language used to talk about psychological phenomena, and, more likely than not, they are vestiges of technical psychological theories of bygone eras. Second, students find themselves obliged to work their way through interminable methodological thickets. They come to psychology hoping to receive answers to questions, but, for much of the time, their courses discuss what questions ought to be asked and how the answers should be sought. Experimental aesthetics stirs up with particular sharpness common dissatisfactions with contemporary psychology in general and with other disciplines that investigate human life empirically. Psychologists are often expected to provide penetrating analyses of emotional experience, wisdom to face life's perplexities, and insightful commentaries on the human condition.
Published Version
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