Week 9: Experimental Aesthetics

I. ‘The field of experimental aesthetics attempts to produce laws governing responses to all art forms.’ (Influenced by zeitgeist of hehaviorism)
II. Gustav Fechner’s Vorschule der Aesthetik is arguably the 2nd oldest topic in experimental psychology
III. Fechner, Plato, and Aristotle all agreed on the idea of an ‘aesthetic mean,’ meaning that beauty is found in non-extremes
IV. Theses ideas matured with work of Daniel Berlyne, who adopted a psychobiological approach in ‘the new experimental aesthetics’ (Berlyne, 1971, 1972, 1974).
V. Berlyne ‘characterized research within this approach as possessing one or more of the following features:
a. It concentrates on collative properties of stimulus patterns. (Collative properties are ‘structural’ or ‘formal’ properties, such as variations along familiar-novel, simple-complex, etc.)
b. It concentrates on motivational questions.
c. It studies nonverbal behavior as well as verbally expressed judgements.
d. It strives to establish links between aesthetic phenomena and other psychological phenomena. (Seeks to also shed light on human psychology in general)
VI. Berlyne’s approach is based on ‘arousal potential,’ that is, the amount of activity that artistic stimuli produce in the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS)
VII. There is an inverted U relationship between preference and stimulus arousal potential.
VIII. Berlyne stated that the variable that mediate arousal potential fall into three categories:
a. Psychophysical variables, such as tempo or volume
b. Ecological variables, which signal value or ‘meaningfulness’ of a piece of music
c. ‘Collative variables’ – the most significant of the three – concerns the ‘informational variables of the music such as its level of complexity’
IX. Explanation of the psychobiological approach
a. ‘On its way to the cortex, the higher brain responsible for conscious thought, the auditory nerve passes through the ARAS, which is responsible for the degree of physiological arousal we experience.’
b. ‘In practical terms, this means that music with low degrees of arousal potential causes activity in pleasure centres but no activity in displeasure centres. Music of moderate degrees of arousal potential causes maximal activity in pleasure centres but also begins to aactivate displeasure centres’ and so forth
X. Though the psychobiological approach, particularly concerning the ARAS, is somewhat debatable, it is valuable because it is an effort toward understanding the neurological bases of aesthetic judgments, adaptive grounds of music preferences, the correspondence of the theory to Plato and Aristotle, and the U-shaped relationship asserted does seem to hold.
XI. Much research suggests that Berlyne’s theory holds true, though there is some conflicting research