Berlyne Revisited: Evidence for the Multifaceted Nature of Hedonic Tone in the Appreciation of Paintings and Music.
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Level 4 by design analogy (cross-sectional experimental laboratory study with human volunteers; non-clinical).
PubMed 27867350 · doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00536
What was done
Two experiments tested whether the relationship between complexity and hedonic tone depends on the specific aesthetic dimension measured (beauty, pleasantness, or liking). In Experiment 1, 206 female participants viewed three sets of 96 images (affective environmental scenes, cartoons of the same scenes, and representational paintings) for 5 seconds each in a between-subjects design, rating complexity, arousal, familiarity, and one assigned hedonic dimension. In Experiment 2, 77 female non-musicians rated 92 musical excerpts (15 seconds each) on the same dimensions.
What was found
Complexity and arousal were positively associated across all conditions (music r_s > 0.85; visual stimuli strongest for paintings). For environmental scenes and cartoons, complexity was not significantly associated with hedonic tone, and the three hedonic measures correlated strongly (all r_s > 0.85). For paintings, hedonic measures were less tightly correlated (all r_s > 0.73); controlling for familiarity, complexity correlated positively with beauty (r_s = 0.26), negatively with pleasantness (r_s = -0.16), and had no association with liking. For musical excerpts, controlling for familiarity, complexity had an inverted-U relationship with beauty, a negative relationship with pleasantness (r_s = -0.26), and a positive relationship with liking (r_s = 0.29).
Why it matters
This study demonstrates that hedonic tone in empirical aesthetics is multifaceted rather than unitary. Berlyne's proposed inverted-U curve between complexity and aesthetic appreciation varies substantially depending on whether appreciation is operationalized as beauty, pleasantness, or liking.
Limits
Both experiments recruited exclusively female participants, and the music experiment was restricted to non-musicians, limiting generalizability across sexes and levels of expertise. The findings rely entirely on brief, subjective ratings without objective physiological or neural measures.
Cited by
- context Aesthetic preference and liking for stimuli such as music follow an inverted-U curve relative to exposure, increasing with familiarity before declining when exposure becomes excessive.