Understanding aesthetic impressions: A conditioning approach to the causal roles of valence and arousal.

Theories of aesthetic experience suggest that aesthetic impressions of visual stimuli are fundamentally influenced by the emotions associated with the perceptual and cognitive processing of these stimuli. We tested this hypothesis in four experiments using a conditioning procedure via which the emotional content of stimuli can be transferred to others. In a conditioning phase, we simultaneously presented neutral pictures of chairs with pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), which varied in their valence and arousal potential (Experiment 1). Participants were instructed to look at the pictures and memorize them. Afterward, participants rated the aesthetic impression of the chairs. In Experiment 2, we investigated the isolated influence of arousal and did not vary valence, and in Experiment 3, we manipulated only the valence but kept the arousal of the pictures constant. In Experiment 4, we replaced the IAPS pictures with valenced words to test the generalizability of our results. The results of Experiments 1 and 3 showed that chairs presented together with positive IAPS pictures were judged to be more aesthetically pleasing than those presented with negative pictures. Arousal conditioning was unsuccessful in Experiments 1 and 2. Experiment 4 replicated the influence of conditioned valence on aesthetic judgement, indicating that the conditioning effect observed in Experiments 1 and 3 generalizes to other stimuli. Taken together, by showing that conditioned valence contributes to aesthetic impressions, the results of this research support the theoretical assumption that the emotional state during the processing of visual stimuli influences aesthetic impressions.