Abstract
The sublime–the mixed aesthetic experience of uplift and elevation in response to a powerful or vast object that otherwise is experienced as menacing–has nurtured philosophical discourse for centuries. One of the major philosophical issues concerns whether the sublime is best thought of as a subjective response or as a stimulus. Recently, psychology has conceived of the sublime as an emotion, often referred to as awe, arising from natural or artistic stimuli that are great, rare, and/or vast. However, it has not yet been empirically demonstrated whether two major elicitors of the sublime–nature and art–differ in inducing this state. In order to experimentally compare nature and art, we exposed 50 participants to sublimity-inducing content in two different formats (nature-based and art-based) using 360° videos. We compared Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night with a photorealistic version of the actual place depicted in the painting, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. We measured participants’ emotional responses before and after each exposure, as well as the sense of presence. The nature-based format induced higher intensity emotional responses than the art-based format. This study compares different sublime stimuli (nature vs. art) for eliciting the sublime.
Highlights
Imagine first the most awe-inspiring natural scenery that you have ever seen, generally involving a grand and sweeping panorama
We examined differences between a nature-based or an art-based sublime-eliciting stimulus by means of Virtual Reality 360 ̊ videos, which provides a high level of ecological validity even in a constrained space
We have recently demonstrated that participants exposed to the same naturalistic content displayed through 360 ̊ videos and in reality, showed the same emotional profile related to the experience
Summary
Imagine first the most awe-inspiring natural scenery that you have ever seen, generally involving a grand and sweeping panorama. One can imagine similarities and differences between one’s reactions to these two scenes Both the real natural scenery and the painting of it would likely display similar physical properties, such as apparent vastness, rarity, and novelty. These features are crucial for the emergence of a particular mental process traditionally called the sublime or (equivalently) sublimity [e.g., 1–3] or, in more recent years, awe [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Does this distinction between ‘real’ and ‘representation’ matter when it comes to experiencing the sublime?
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