Abstract
At the beginning of psychology, Fechner (1876) claimed that beauty is immediate pleasure, and that an object’s pleasure determines its value. In our earlier work, we found that intense pleasure always results in intense beauty. Here, we focus on the inverse: Is intense pleasure necessary for intense beauty? If so, the inability to experience pleasure (anhedonia) should prevent the experience of intense beauty. We asked 757 online participants to rate how intensely they felt beauty from each image. We used 900 OASIS images along with their available valence (pleasure vs. displeasure) and arousal ratings. We then obtained self-reports of anhedonia (TEPS), mood, and depression (PHQ-9). Across images, beauty ratings were closely related to pleasure ratings (r = 0.75), yet unrelated to arousal ratings. Only images with an average pleasure rating above 4 (of a possible 7) often achieved (>10%) beauty averages exceeding the overall median beauty. For normally beautiful images (average rating > 4.5), the beauty ratings were correlated with anhedonia (r ∼−0.3) and mood (r ∼ 0.3), yet unrelated to depression. Comparing each participant’s average beauty rating to the overall median (5.0), none of the most anhedonic participants exceeded the median, whereas 50% of the remaining participants did. Thus, both general and anhedonic results support the claim that intense beauty requires intense pleasure. In addition, follow-up repeated measures showed that shared taste contributed 19% to beauty-rating variance, only one third as much as personal taste (58%). Addressing age-old questions, these results indicate that beauty is a kind of pleasure, and that beauty is more personal than universal, i.e., 1.7 times more correlated with individual than with shared taste.
Highlights
Beauty has fascinated humankind since ancient times, before Homer, and was one of the first phenomena investigated in experimental psychology (e.g., Fechner, 1876; Lipps, 1906)
High Beauty Ratings Generally Occur Only When Pleasure Is Intense To substantiate our claim that intense beauty requires intense pleasure, we looked at the proportion of above-median beauty ratings in relation to pleasure, mood, depression, and anhedonia
We find that 19% of the variance in OASIS beauty ratings is due to shared taste, 58% is due to idiosyncratic taste, and the remaining 23% is due to variable rating
Summary
Beauty has fascinated humankind since ancient times, before Homer (see e.g., Hofstader and Kuhns, 1976), and was one of the first phenomena investigated in experimental psychology (e.g., Fechner, 1876; Lipps, 1906). The one aspect of beauty that philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists agree on is that it fundamentally involves pleasure. Fechner (1876) claimed that “[t]he potential to immediately elicit liking and therewith pleasure always stays central for the term beauty in its narrowest conception. The fluency theory of aesthetic processing explicitly equates beauty with “aesthetic pleasure” (Reber et al, 2004). These approaches follow the philosophers in taking beauty to be a kind of pleasure (e.g., Plato, 390 BCE; Kant, 1790/2000; Hume, 1878; Santayana, 1896). Many philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have suggested that beauty is a kind of pleasure Plato tentatively defined beauty as pleasure through eye or ear, and Hume (1878) said that “pleasure and pain . . . are necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence.” many philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have suggested that beauty is a kind of pleasure
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