Going Beyond Beauty: Characterizing the Complexity of Aesthetic Experiences

Aesthetic experiences have traditionally been evaluated using judgments of beauty and liking. Prior research indicates greater agreement on aesthetic judgments of natural stimuli, such as landscapes and faces, than human-made artifacts like artworks. This variability underscores the subjectivity of art appraisals. This study leverages recent theoretical and methodological advances in empirical aesthetics to investigate the complexity of aesthetic experiences by evaluating individual agreement across impacts more nuanced than global beauty and liking judgments. We hypothesized that complex appraisals are more variable than simpler affective ones. To test this, we employed a comprehensive taxonomy of cognitive and emotional impacts-positive affect, negative affect, immersion/motivation, and epistemic transformation. We also examined how levels of agreement vary by viewing context: museum in-person versus digital online. Participants rated artworks presented in both gallery and digital contexts. Using the mean-minus-one method, we measured individual agreement across aesthetic impact categories. Agreement was highest for traditional preference assessments (liking and beauty), while higher-order impacts, particularly immersion/motivation and epistemic transformation, showed lower agreement. Viewing context did not significantly affect agreement, suggesting enduring aesthetic evaluations. This study highlights that traditional aesthetic evaluations show high agreement, while higher-order impacts are more variable.