The aesthetic experience may be defined as a general process associated with an individual’s cognitive and affective response to an object belonging to a particular class of artifacts called art. Aesthetic experiences can take place while we observe works of art in museums, galleries, churches or other contexts. Most psychological perspectives on the aesthetic experience argue that it is the outcome of the coordinated action of different mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, imagination, thought and emotion (Cupchik, 1993; Locher et al., 2007). This is certainly true, but this idea is not the exclusive property of the aesthetic experience; this flow of psychic functions is also present when we look at simple objects in our world. According to cognitive psychology, the act of seeing is not merely a passive record of the external physical environment; it also involves active processing and analysis. The sensory input coming from the external environment undergoes a series of modifications before an object can be perceived: the input is transformed, reduced, processed, stored, retrieved and then used (Neisser, 1967). So even the simple task of distinguishing an object, such as a pen, from among several others objects haphazardly set on a desk, occurs through a comparison with the stored image that we came to know as a pen.

Mastandrea, S. (2014). How emotions shape aesthetic experiences. In Pablo P. L. Tinio & Jeffrey Smith (a cura di), The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Aesthetics and the Arts (pp. 500-518). Cambridge University Press [10.1017/CBO9781139207058.024].

How emotions shape aesthetic experiences

Mastandrea, Stefano
2014-01-01

Abstract

The aesthetic experience may be defined as a general process associated with an individual’s cognitive and affective response to an object belonging to a particular class of artifacts called art. Aesthetic experiences can take place while we observe works of art in museums, galleries, churches or other contexts. Most psychological perspectives on the aesthetic experience argue that it is the outcome of the coordinated action of different mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, imagination, thought and emotion (Cupchik, 1993; Locher et al., 2007). This is certainly true, but this idea is not the exclusive property of the aesthetic experience; this flow of psychic functions is also present when we look at simple objects in our world. According to cognitive psychology, the act of seeing is not merely a passive record of the external physical environment; it also involves active processing and analysis. The sensory input coming from the external environment undergoes a series of modifications before an object can be perceived: the input is transformed, reduced, processed, stored, retrieved and then used (Neisser, 1967). So even the simple task of distinguishing an object, such as a pen, from among several others objects haphazardly set on a desk, occurs through a comparison with the stored image that we came to know as a pen.
2014
9781139207058
Mastandrea, S. (2014). How emotions shape aesthetic experiences. In Pablo P. L. Tinio & Jeffrey Smith (a cura di), The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Aesthetics and the Arts (pp. 500-518). Cambridge University Press [10.1017/CBO9781139207058.024].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11590/333064
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