Abstract

Despite the importance of the arts in human life, psychologists still know relatively little about what characterises their experience for the recipient. The current research approaches this problem by studying people's word usage in aesthetics, with a focus on three important art forms: visual art, film, and music. The starting point was a list of 77 words known to be useful to describe aesthetic impressions of visual art (Augustin et al 2012, Acta Psychologica 139 187–201). Focusing on ratings of likelihood of use, we examined to what extent word usage in aesthetic descriptions of visual art can be generalised to film and music. The results support the claim of an interplay of generality and specificity in aesthetic word usage. Terms with equal likelihood of use for all art forms included beautiful, wonderful, and terms denoting originality. Importantly, emotion-related words received higher ratings for film and music than for visual art. To our knowledge this is direct evidence that aesthetic experiences of visual art may be less affectively loaded than, for example, experiences of music. The results render important information about aesthetic word usage in the realm of the arts and may serve as a starting point to develop tailored measurement instruments for different art forms.

Highlights

  • Aesthetic activities in a broad sense, and the arts in particular, constitute an important part of many people’s lives (McManus and Furnham 2006)

  • The current study focused on aesthetic word usage for three different art forms that make an important part of many people’s lives—visual art, film, and music

  • In the present research we tested a different sample of participants to find out with which likelihood each of these words is used to describe aesthetic impressions of visual art and to what extent such a pattern of aesthetic word usage can be transferred to two other art forms, namely film and music

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Summary

Introduction

Aesthetic activities in a broad sense, and the arts in particular, constitute an important part of many people’s lives (McManus and Furnham 2006). Even though not offering a clear advantage at first sight, going to a museum or the opera, listening to music, or watching a film are pastimes that seem to provide reward in themselves, as many people seek them over and over again (eg, Leder et al 2004). In view of such ubiquity and importance of different kinds of art it is astonishing that we still know relatively little about the characteristics of recipients’ experiences of different art forms.

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