Philosophers of aesthetics universally agree that visual and auditory stimuli may be considered beautiful. Divergently, controversy greets the question "Can olfactory or gustatory experiences be ...conceptualized as beautiful?" In Study 1 participants inhaled Joy® perfume applied to a cotton pad for 30 s and immediately completed the AESTHEMOS (Schindler et al., 2017), a scale measuring aesthetic emotions. Results indicated stronger prototypical (feeling of beauty and liking, fascination, being moved, and awe), pleasing (joy, humor, vitality, energy, and relaxation), and epistemic (surprise, interest, intellectual challenge, and insight) aesthetic emotions, and fewer negative aesthetic emotions (feeling of ugliness, boredom, confusion, anger, uneasiness, and sadness), were elicited by the perfume compared with a no-scent control condition. Results showed 36% of participants found some beauty in the perfume experience. Study 2 showed significantly higher prototypical and pleasing aesthetic emotions, and less negative aesthetic emotions were stimulated by a Werther's caramel candy compared with a control condition (an unflavored sugar cube); and 45% of participants found some beauty in the taste. In both studies the findings were unrelated to participants' levels of trait appreciation of beauty, as measured by the Engagement with Beauty Scale-Revised (EBS-R; Diessner, Pohling, Stacy, & Güsewell, 2018). In Study 3 we found that when the EBS-R predicted the response to an artwork, it did not predict gustatory beauty; and when the EBS-R predicted olfactory beauty, it did not predict the beauty of an artwork. Thus, the general trait of appreciating beauty, as measured by the EBS-R, may not extend to olfactory or gustatory beauty. The results are discussed in the context of philosophical approaches and empirical aesthetic research.
Cody Marrs, Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics of All Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 148, ISBN: 9780192871725. Reviewedby Pilar Martínez Benedí
Our past studies have led us to divide sensory experiences, including aesthetic ones derived from sensory sources, into two broad categories: biological and artifactual. The aesthetic experience of ...biological beauty is dictated by inherited brain concepts, which are resistant to change even in spite of extensive experience. The experience of artifactual beauty on the other hand is determined by post-natally acquired concepts, which are modifiable throughout life by exposure to different experiences (Zeki, 2009; Zeki and Chén, 2016). Hence, in terms of aesthetic rating, biological beauty (in which we include the experience of beautiful faces or human bodies) is characterized by less variability between individuals belonging to different ethnic origins and cultural backgrounds or the same individual at different times. Artifactual beauty (in which we include the aesthetic experience of human artifacts, such as buildings and cars) is characterized by greater variability between individuals belonging to different ethnic and cultural groupings and by the same individual at different times. In this paper, we present results to show that the experience of mathematical beauty (Zeki et al., 2014), even though it constitutes an extreme example of beauty that is dependent upon (mathematical) culture and learning, is consistent with one of the characteristics of the biological categories, namely a lesser variability in terms of the aesthetic ratings given to mathematical formulae experienced as beautiful.
In this work we study the interrelation between, on the one hand, subjective perception of female facial aesthetics, and on the other hand, selected objective parameters that include facial features, ...photo-quality, as well as non-permanent facial characteristics. This study seeks to provide insight on the role of this specific set of features in affecting the way humans perceive facial images. The approach is novel in that it jointly considers both previous results on photo quality and beauty assessment, as well as non-permanent facial characteristics and expressions. Based on 37 such objective parameters, we construct a metric that aims to quantify modifiable parameters for aesthetics enhancement, as well as tunes systems that would seek to predict the way humans perceive facial aesthetics. The proposed metric is evaluated on a face dataset, that includes images with variations in illumination, image quality, as well as age, ethnicity and expression. We show that our approach outperforms two state of the art beauty estimation metrics. In addition we apply the designed metric in three interesting datasets, where we assess beauty in images of females before and after plastic surgery, of females across time, as well as of females famous for their beauty. We conclude by giving insight towards beauty prediction.
Dress and Personal Appearance in Late Antiquity. The Clothing of the Middle and Lower Classes examines written, art historical and archaeological evidence to understand the way that cloth and ...clothing was made, embellished, cared for and recycled during this period.
Affective responses can influence evaluative judgments, but how are subjective beauty ratings affected by references to morally contentious elements in aesthetic stimuli? In an online experiment ...(N = 460), we investigated the relationship between two types of descriptive texts (Neutral vs. Negative) and the beauty ratings of 25 photographs that depict sources of environmental pollution. For each photograph, the neutral descriptive text contained general information, whereas the negative descriptive text addressed the pollution source. Further, we explored whether this relationship is mediated by changes in positive and negative affect, and how it interacts with the biospheric values of participants. Our results showed that (1) participants in the Negative Condition rated the photographs as less beautiful than in the Neutral Condition, (2) this relationship was partially mediated by changes in negative affect, and (3) in the Negative Condition, participants with higher levels of biospheric values rated the photographs as less beautiful. Our results indicate that individual values, as well as affective responses induced by aesthetic stimuli, directly influence subjective beauty. This aligns with current theoretical frameworks and fills a gap in experimental research. Finally, we discuss limitations and directions for future studies.
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•Descriptive texts affect the perceived beauty of morally charged photographs.•Photographs with negative descriptive texts are rated as less beautiful.•This effect is partially mediated by negative affect induced by descriptions.•Affective responses to aesthetic stimuli directly influence their perceived beauty.
Empirical evidence shows that the often‐made positive correlation between human physical and moral beauty is tenuous. In this study, we aimed to learn whether facial and moral beauty can be ...psychophysically separated. Participants (n = 95) provided beauty and goodness (i.e., trustworthiness) ratings for pictures of faces, after which they were presented with a fictitious peer rating for the same face and asked to re‐rate the face. We used the difference between the initial and final ratings to quantify the degree of resistance to external influence. We found that judgments of facial beauty were more resistant to external influence than judgments of facial “goodness”; in addition, there was significantly higher agreement within beauty ratings than within goodness ratings. These findings are discussed in light of our Bayesian–Laplacian classification of priors, from which we conclude that moral beauty relies more upon acquired “artifactual” priors and facial beauty more on inherited biological priors.
While a slender body is a prerequisite for beauty today, plump women were considered ideal in Tang Dynasty China and Heian-period Japan. Starting around the Southern Song period in China, bound feet ...symbolized the attractiveness of women. But in Japan, shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth long were markers of loveliness. For centuries, Japanese culture was profoundly shaped by China, but in complex ways that are only now becoming apparent. In this first full comparative history of the subject, Cho Kyo explores changing standards of feminine beauty in China and Japan over the past two millennia. Drawing on a rich array of literary and artistic sources gathered over a decade of research, he considers which Chinese representations were rejected or accepted and transformed in Japan. He then traces the introduction of Western aesthetics into Japan starting in the Meiji era, leading to slowly developing but radical changes in representations of beauty. Through fiction, poetry, art, advertisements, and photographs, the author vividly demonstrates how criteria of beauty differ greatly by era and culture and how aesthetic sense changed in the course of extended cultural transformations that were influenced by both China and the West.
Does physical appearance significantly influence hiring decisions and customer service effectiveness? This article presents evidence of an early phase of discrimination in the recruitment process in ...the tourism and hospitality sectors, particularly in Jakarta City. In addition to providing evidence on the extent of the early discrimination phase in the tourism and hospitality labor markets, data from online job postings was collected from the job portal jobstreet.co.id. This study used a digital sociology approach to collect the data. The data were collected through web screening using filter tools in the tourism and hospitality sectors. The findings show that beauty or physical attractiveness as a specific requirement for job positions in the tourism and hospitality industries is an early phase of discrimination. The results also support the idea that physically attractive individuals have more opportunities in the tourism and hospitality fields.
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