Graduation Year

2016

Date of Submission

1-2016

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Psychology

Reader 1

Piercarlo Valdesolo

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2015 Huakai Liao

Abstract

Aesthetic expressions have been seen as the manifest of human culture. The psychology of aesthetics have proposed various models, describing the various phenomena related to aesthetic experience, such as sensory pleasure derived from aesthetic stimuli, emotional response toward aesthetic depiction, cognitive mastering over aesthetic emotion, etc. However, further examination reveals current models have theoretical limits for the explanation of society-wide aesthetic preference due to limited scope of focus. Thus, the current project proposes a new theoretical framework to describe the process through which the society comes to converge on aesthetic preference. Examination of related theories and experimental evidence shows that the convergence process of our aesthetic preference is a function of several inter-related yet independent psychological mechanisms at the perceptual, affective, and cognitive stages of aesthetic processing. The proposed framework can inform future research in general psychology as well as other applications, such as the making of creative machines.Aesthetic expressions have been seen as the manifest of human culture. The psychology of aesthetics have proposed various models, describing the various phenomena related to aesthetic experience, such as sensory pleasure derived from aesthetic stimuli, emotional response toward aesthetic depiction, cognitive mastering over aesthetic emotion, etc. However, further examination reveals current models have theoretical limits for the explanation of society-wide aesthetic preference due to limited scope of focus. Thus, the current project proposes a new theoretical framework to describe the process through which the society comes to converge on aesthetic preference. Examination of related theories and experimental evidence shows that the convergence process of our aesthetic preference is a function of several inter-related yet independent psychological mechanisms at the perceptual, affective, and cognitive stages of aesthetic processing. The proposed framework can inform future research in general psychology as well as other applications, such as the making of creative machines.

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