THURSDAY MORNING
INVITED ADDRESS
Chair: Gerald Cupchik, Division of Life Sciences, University
of Toronto
The Measurement of Affective and
Cognitive Factors in Art Appreciation
Robert Francès
Departement de Psychologie
Université de Paris-X
A retrospective look into four decades of research in experimental aesthetics, both visual and musical, leads to some conclusions which are challenging for contemporary researchers in art appreciation. Some of them assume that the level of non-apparent responses of the organism is the more valid because faking or hiding responses are impossible for the subjects. However, an overview of research on appreciation of music and painting shows that measures based on accessible responses are more frequent, more intercorrelated, and more suitable to experimentation.
Another trend is to consider cognitive factors as more important than affective ones (or only
relevant for up-to-date science). Here again exclusive cognitivism appear as a fashion with
negative consequences for the development of experimental aesthetics. In fact cognitive factors
may explain some categories or affective choices. But knowing firstly the affective level of
relationships is an unavoidable step into the insight of art experience. Examples of personal
research, both in perception of musical structure and meaning and in preferences for designs will
illustrate this argument.
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
SYMPOSIUM: NEO-FORMALISM/NEO-STRUCTURALISM
Chair: Will van Peer, Department of Literary Studies, Utrecht University
The Prague School and Poststructuralism
Ludomir Doleel
Department of Linguistics
University of Toronto
I will compare basic theses of Prague school poetics with several representative trends in
postructuralist literary study, especially: deconstruction, pragmatics, empirische
Literaturwissenschaft.
The Origins of Anti-Formalism
Will van Peer
Department of Literary Studies
Utrecht University
Formalism (and the related types of Structuralism) have not fared well in the second half of the twentieth century: it has been misinterpreted (by the Post-Structuralists), misunderstood (by the New Critics), and stigmatized (first by the Marxists, now by various schools of 'ideological' critique). It has been declared 'superseded', 'out of date', and 'dead'.
There are, however, two things that cannot adequately be explained by these many efforts to disqualify Formalism. One is the ongoing interest in Formalist models and methods throughout the second half of the twentieth century (a fact also witnessed by the present symposium). It would seem that Formalism is far from superseded and certainly not dead. The reason for this does not lie in some irrational belief on the part of its practitioners, but rather (and this is the second explicandum for the anti-Formalists) in the fact that Formalist theories and methods have generated research data that cannot be explained by any 'historicized' or contextualized' theory, nor indeed by an appeal to 'power' or 'ideology'. It is the nature of these research data and the results of their analyses that (I venture) form the basis of the ongoing attraction that Formalism has for many scholars.
That leaves us with the question why it nevertheless is the case that many (most) scholars in the
Humanities are reluctant to look at these results. In the second part of my paper I will attempt to
formulate an answer to this question. I propose that an adequate account of Formalism would do
well to probe the reasons for its rejection by a majority of scholars in the human sciences.
Form and Narrativity
Gerald Prince
Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
Formalist and structuralist students of narrative have paid considerable attention to elements
underlying narrativeness (what makes a text narrative, what all and only narratives have in
common) but they have been less explicitly concerned with the elements affecting narrativity (what
in a text underlines its narrative nature, what emphasizes the presence and semiotic role of
narrative structures in a textual economy). A partial characterization of these elements (e.g.,
positiveness, transactiveness, and transitiveness of depicted events) will be presented and a number
of different narrativities (e.g., figural or instrumental) will be explored.
Narratology in the 1990s: Phoenix or Dodo?
Uri Margolin
Department of English
University of Alberta
Writing in 1925, Boris Eikhenbaum juxtaposed an invalid view of literary science as a static, closed set of schemas and classifications, a ready-made doctrine incapable of evolution, with a view of literary science and theory as a set of working hypotheses--formulated for establishing regularities in data--whose nature constantly evolves in the course of elaboration and application, often under the pressure of new kinds of data. If we regard narratology not as a fixed doctrine or set of postulates laid down between 1965-75, but as a dynamic intersubjective collective enterprise whose initial stage harkens back to this period and whose changes are steered by literary developments as well as by the inner logic of enquiry, then the narratological project is far from dead. Rather, it has been both greatly transformed and expanded since its initial classical structuralist phase. The classical, form-oriented models of the initial stage have since been further elaborated, modified, refined, expanded, but not invalidated or rejected out of hand, and have continued to serve as a constant foil and point of departure for later developments. Subsequent phases manifest in addition a constant expansion of the horizon of enquiry, and a correlative shift of emphasis from the initial concentration on the syntactic dimension (sign-sign relations, intrinsic textual structures) to the semantic (signs and what they stand for: Fictional worlds) and the pragmatic (narrative and its individual and communal reception, functioning and use). An initial mono-disciplinary orientation on structural linguistics has been replaced by a multi-disciplinary awareness and openness. But all of the new areas of enquiry or problem systems just listed still employ the classical narratological models and categories (story vs. plot, point of view, focalisation, levels of narration, embedding, narrator's and characters' discourses) as background theories, presupposed knowledge or building blocks in their own theoretical constructs.
In the rest of the paper I shall seek to trace major developments in narratology since the mid
1970s along the above three semiotic dimensions, primarily in their relation to the initial phase.
A Scoundrel or "Ein Bloeder Kerl": The Good
Soldier Svejk from the Gricean Perspective
Peter Steiner
Department of Slavic Languages
University of Pennsylvania
J.P. Stern's recent comparison of Hasek's novel with Heller's Catch-22 asks the following: why did "the Prague Circle linguistique, famous for its concerns with all sorts of out-of-the-way literary matters, totally ignore Svejk?" The reason for this lacuna rests in the fact that the Prague Structuralists paid attention above all to the grammatical aspect of language from the perspective of which Svejk's verbal behavior is quite ordinary. But it can be analyzed profitably from the standpoint of the "linguistic of use" which focuses not on grammatical forms per se but rather how these are exploited in an actual speech situation.
In my paper I will focus on Svejk's uses of language by utilizing H.P. Grice's "maxims of
felicitous conversations": those of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. In this way I will
illustrate how the flouting and/or violating of these maxims enables our here to block any
meaningful communication with the state institutions which attempt to manipulate him for their
own ends. To explain Svejk's success in doing so I will argue that his non-fulfillment of
conversational maxims cannot be identified by the authorities either as deliberate violations
intended to mislead or as simple unintentional failures of a feeble minded idiot.
Forms of Reading: Recovering the Self-as-Reader
David S. Miall
Department of English
University of Alberta
and
Don Kuiken
Department of Psychology
University of Alberta
Isn't this the most elusive and private of all conditions, that of the self suspended
in the medium of language, the particles of identity wavering in the magnetic current of
another's expression? How are we to talk about it? Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies
(1994), p. 78.
While literary scholars continue to produce readings of texts at an increasing rate, this industry
is directed almost exclusively at fellow scholars and senior students. Almost no professional
attention is being paid to the ordinary reader, who continues to read for the pleasure of
understanding the world of the text rather than for the development of a deconstructive or
historicist perspective. Almost no attention is paid to the concerns that an ordinary reader seems
likely to have about a literary text, such as its style, its narrative structure, or the reader's relation to
the author, or the impact of literary reading on the reader's understanding or feelings. This
disjunction between professional concerns and the interests of the ordinary reader seems profound.
If the gap is to be narrowed, it will be by focusing once again on the formal aspects of the literary
text through which, we will propose, the ordinary reader's concerns can primarily be located.
However, in contrast to earlier, now discredited versions of formalism that eschewed concern for
the reader, we argue that the formalist dimension of reading can be examined effectively only in
cooperation with actual readers. By studying readers' experiences of literary reading and its
outcomes, we will begin to map the structures of interaction between reader and text and discover
what formal structures are created in common among readers of a given text.
Defining the Characteristics of Literary Discourse:
A Goal New Available
Paul A. Fortier
Department of French
University of Manitoba
A number of the Russian Formalists called for empirical work defining the precise characteristics of literary discourse, much as one would define the characteristics of a separate language. In his Structure du language poétique (1966) Jean Cohen set out to do just that for the language of French poetry. Some of the most important French structuralists (notable Genette and Todorov) severely criticized Cohen's attempt, mainly on the grounds of flaws in research design and of the small size of the samples he analyzed. To a large extent Cohen was hostage to the materials at his disposal in the early 1960s.
The wide availability of the Tsésor de la langue francaise database of more than 1700 literary
texts published between 1789 and 1960 means that the goal of defining the characteristics of
literary language in French is now attainable. Ongoing empirical work on the characteristics of
novelistic prose illustrates this thesis. Examples focus on the author's use of rare versus common
vocabulary to introduce literary themes, and on the status of solitude as a theme open to
interpretation or as a formal characteristic of the first-person narrator in the novel.
Real Literary Theory
Donald C. Freeman
Department of English
University of Southern California
Reports of literary formalism's death are greatly exaggerated. Kiparsky's succinct formulation of the formalist project--that poetry consists in "the repetition of linguistic sames"--has informed a large body of continuing if unsung literary research. While the larger scintillations of so-called literary "theory" have attracted the most attention, there is a harbinger of change in Stanley Fish's recent confession that he "like(s) savouring the physical 'taste' of language at the same time that [he] work(s) to lay bare its physics."
Accordingly, the time may be ripe for a recuperation of structuralist and formalist principles with the new theoretical tools now at our disposal. A body of theory, cognitive metaphor, retains the rigor of formalism in a new paradigm that finds the source of figurative language in what it means to be human. Where formalist literary theory found significant patterning only in the surface structure of a literary artwork's language, the cognitive-metaphoric approach provides a unified account of significant patterning in both the linguistic and extralinguistic substance of literature. This achievement is possible because, cognitivists argue, metaphor is a primary mode of thinking prior to and not restricted to language, and is constructed by the projection of meaning from schematized bodily and cultural experience into abstractions.
Accordingly, a cognitive-metaphoric account of Macbeth, for example, finds not only that the play's crucial metaphors are projections from the well-attested CONTAINER and PATH schemata, but that these schemata also encompass the play's settings (Duncan's deathbed is a room contained in a castle contained within a wall; each of these elements is, in formalist terminology, strongly foregrounded) and even its props (the phrase "light thickens" and the witches' cauldron whose contents boil down to a "gruel thick and slab" are related dramatic elements). The explanatory power of this approach in macrostructures applies as well to fine-grained analysis: in the "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, Shakespeare takes the light, time, path, and goal elements of "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death" and rotates them 90 degrees into the same metaphorical complex in a different plane, "Out, out, brief candle." Similarly powerful accounts can be given for the SEEING IS KNOWING metaphorical in the language, plot, and dramatic action of Othello, the BALANCE and LINKS schemata in King Lear, and the interaction of CONTAINER, LINKS, and PATH schemata in Antony and Cleopatra.
Cognitive metaphor thus can help move literary scholarship toward a new formalism that is rigorous, falsifiable, and humanized--toward real literary theory.
MUSIC PERCEPTION
Chair: Emmanual Bigand, Department of Psychology, University of
Bourgogne
Influence of Global and Local Structures in Music Perception
Barbara Tilmman and Emmanuel Bigand
Department of Psychology
University of Bourgogne
This study investigated the importance of global and local structures for listeners of different
degrees of musical expertise. Short minuets of Bach, Mozart and Haydn were segmented into two
parts, played in several more or less distant keys, which were presented to participants on a
computer screen in the form of a musical jigsaw puzzle. Participants had to construct a coherent
piece. They were assumed to link two parts in the same key and in the correct chronological
order. The importance played by global and local structures was investigated by considering the
correct responses obtained for two groups of minuets. In the first group, the first part of the
minuets finished on a half cadence in the main key. In the second group, the first part finished on
a half cadence preceded by a borrowing to the dominant key. In this case, the half cadence
functions as a definitive ending if it is considered locally, but as a temporary ending if it is
considered globally, (i.e., with respect to the overall harmonic structure of the minuet). A phrase
completion task was also used to further investigate this issue. It appeared that solving musical
puzzles composed of two elements was generally not an easy task, that was performed with more
difficulty and with more time for the minuets with a borrowing to the dominant key. This effect of
the minuet's structure suggest that listeners locally (i.e., as a definitive ending) rather than globally
(i.e., as a temporary ending) understood half cadences preceded by a borrowing to the dominant
key. Data from the phrase completion task confirmed such an interpretation. Irrespectively of the
extent of musical expertise, harmonic cadences were essentially perceived at a local level. The
present data contradict the main assumptions of several theories in music cognition, but are in
accordance with several other empirical studies which reveal that local structures seem to be more
important for listeners than global ones. Cognitive implications are discussed in the last section
and several suggestions are developed in order to further understood this discrepancy.
Aesthetic Appreciation of Contrasting Musical
Structures in Relation to Personality Features
Valeria Pannuni, Paolo Bonaiuto, and Valeria Biasi
Department of Psychology
1st University of Rome ("La Sapienza")
In the history of music, certain compositions are characterized by repetitive structures generally
called "ostinato". Interesting psychological effects are obtained from listening to these brief
articulated cycles, having little variety in the foundation of the harmonic construction, and that
could seemingly go on forever. One effect is a strong solicitation to carry out repetitious, rather
simple body movements strictly consonant with respect to the musical rhythm. Effects also include
feelings of suspension and unlimitedness, fascination and even trance. Some of these
compositions have no distinguishable final part, the conclusion reaches the listener brusquely: and
he/she has the impression of unexpected, unprepared cessation. Typical examples include dances
such as "Passacaglie" and "Ciaccone" from the XVI, XVII and XVIII centuries, but there are also
older as well as more recent examples, such as the well-known "Bolero" by Ravel. We examined
recordings of many of the above-mentioned types of musical sequences, composed by Händel,
Storace, Frescobaldi and others, and performed on the harpsichord. For the sake of comparison,
we also chose pieces performed with the same instrument but taken from compositions with the
opposite structure, that is, sequences clearly directed toward a conclusion. In this case, the listener
is gradually prepared through a development that induces specific expectations of the final
cadence. Subsequent research with adults (both genders) outlined the corresponding contrasting
semantic profiles and identified relevant cognitive styles and personality traits that favor the
aesthetic experience with one rather than the other musical form described.
"What Music Means To Me" - Research On
Sensorialy Disabled Children
Ewa Klimas-Kuchtowa
Institute of Psychology
Jagiellonian University
An inspiration for this research was the important study by G. Kleinen concerned with an analysis of music-related pictures and, on the other hand, the assumption about holistic and active character of cognitive systems. Sensorialy disabled children have different cognitive schemata of many objects than other children. It influences their imagination, too. In current research the question was what has the imagination of music done by children with disabled senses (eyes and ears); is it similar or different than done by others.
G. Kleinen analysed 1075 pictures, painted on the theme "Music communication" by average German children aged 6 to 16. The most important characteristics, describing the content of the pictures were: musical instruments, technical media, writings, notes or graphical signs, persons, nature, rooms, or some forms of musical activity (e.g., playing, dancing, singing, listening).
In the present study Kleinen's task was repeated with children in Cracow, average ones and
sensorialy disabled ones. The various aged children drew pictures and also wrote essays
concerning their imagination of music and the role of music in their life. The comparison of the
collected data will be discussed.
Dimensions of Rhythm
Csaba László Danczi
Department of Experimental Psychology
Eötvös Loránd University
Characteristics of rhythm perception were studied. Firstly, associations were collected from 5
musicians and 5 non-musicians during listening to 5 rhythms. A list of 97 associations was gained.
These associations were presented to 10 naive subjects asking them to select the appropriate ones
to other 5 rhythms. Using Chi-square distances, cluster analysis was performed on the frequency
matrix of the associations. Four clusters were identified, and on the basis of the content of the
respective associations, four scales were elaborated: dynamic-static, impetuous-calm, integrated-disintegrated, and regular-irregular. Then, 10 naive subjects were asked to scale 10 new rhythms
along the four previous 7-point scales. Factor analysis was performed on the scaling data, which
resulted in two factors labelled as lively and orderly. The respective 10 rhythms were positioned in
the factor space in a funnel-shaped fashion, indicating small variability in respect of the orderly
factor in the negative part of the lively factor, and large variability in the positive. Results can be
explained in a model of rhythm perception, where the perception is based on an internal sense of
movement in the listener via the central vestibular system.
Test for Measuring Emotional Experiences Under Music Impact
Leonid Ya. Dorfman
State Institute of Arts and Culture
Perm
Emotional experiences (EE) are a system that is characterized by multidimensionality. The following dimensions of EE are found: modality, energy, intentionality (L. Ya. Dorfman, 1983, 1994, 1996; B. A. Vyatkin, L. Ya. Dorfman, 1987, 1988). The purpose of the present work was to devise Test of EE as an instrument for measuring EE induced by music (TEE-M). An important reason for developing the TEE-M as a multifactorial, multiscalar test was the task of measuring variables of modality (joy, anger, fear, sorrow), energy (activity, passivity; stress, relaxation), intentionality (outerdirectedness, innerdirectedness) of EE, in total 10 variables.
Subjects were 288 students of Choreographical College, Institute of Arts and Culture, and Teaching Training Institute, male and female, aged ranged from 16 to 24. In the pilot study the sample was composed of 163 subjects. The TEE-M consisted of 100 items that were divided into 10 scales and related to 10 variables, respectively. For each item, subjects indicated the extent to which each item was related to a given musical piece. 4 classical instrumental musical pieces (on different days) were designed to induce various EE.
We computed reliability coefficients indicating the degree of correspondence among items referred to the same scales. In all, 30 items made up the final version of TEE-M, each of the scales consisted of 3 items. Correlations among items included in the same scales were significant (p < .05 -.001).
Further, 125 subjects participated in the study. The reliability of the final version of TEE-M was measured using alternate-form reliability. Correlations between the emotional values of music (the projective version) and self-estimates of EE in response to music (the reflective version) and self-estimates of EE in response to music (the reflective version) were computed by averaging the items which belonged to the same scales. Then Spearman correlations between the two forms (projective and reflective ones) scores were calculated. We established that apart from anger (induced by one musical piece) and stress (induced by another musical piece), scales of the projective and reflective versions of EET-M (belonging to the same variables) were significantly correlated (p < .05 -.001).
The construct validity of TEE-M was determined by correlating its scale scores with the scores of the electroencephalogram (EEG) (for all EE scales), Luscher's Color Test (the modality scales), psychomotor tasks (the energy scales), standardized pictograms (the intentionality scales). A basic finding was that Spearman correlations indicated that the modality scales were significantly associated with EEG (alpha, beta-1, beta-2 brain waves) and Luscher's Color Test. The activity and passivity scales were significantly related to EEG (beta-1 and beta-2 waves) and psychomotor tests (psychic rate, reaction time). The stress and relaxation scales were significantly related to EEG (beta-2 wave) and psychomotor tests (tapping test variance, tapping test changes during 90 sec.). The directedness scales were significantly associated with standardized pictograms.
The above findings constitute evidence in favor of the reliability and validity of the TEE-M.
The Phenomenon of Invariance in Style Identification Tasks
G. V. Ivanchenko
Institute for Human Research
Moscow
The purpose of the paper is to consider the way in which the phenomenon of invariance
contributes to style attribution. The hypothesis was that the recognition of an author's style relies
on the melodical and rhythmical invariants in his or her melodies. Experimental materials were
melodies by R. Schumann and S. Rachmaninoff and their rhythmical (RI) and melodical (MI)
invariants. The subjects were 12 males and 15 females aged 14 to 21, the students of the first
course of musical college. The difference between the probabilities of correct attribution for
original melodies and their MI and RI were nonsignificant. The second problem of the experiment
was the question: what is the basis of subjects' capacity to catch the stylistic properties of original
melodies. We used besides MI's and RI's also melodies, stylistically identical with the latter. The
subjects were also musical college students, 11 males, 13 females aged 14 to 20. The significant
differences between the percentage of correct attribution of invariants and melodies stylistically
identical with them allows us to conclude that in such as experimental situation it is the invariance
that serves as the basis for the attribution processes.
Towards a Visual Aesthetic of Music
Patricia Herzog
Bunting Institute
Radcliffe College
A visual aesthetic of music, as I understand it, concerns the relevance of what is seen to the appreciation and understanding of music. That music is a thing for the ear no one will deny. That it is a thing for the eye, or for the eye and ear together, is less clear and perhaps even unintelligible in light of prevailing assumptions about the nature of music and its status as art. Contrary to these assumptions, I argue that music, and in particular "classical" or art music, frequently and importantly consists of what is seen as well as heard. My strategy is to show: 1) that even at the level of pure sound (tonally moving forms) music is already visually informed; 2) that seeing, as opposed simply to hearing, music performed is or can be aesthetically central; and 3) that "absolute" music (divorced from all extramusical meaning) often is fully appreciated and understood only in conjunction with the visual imagination. Support for my three-pronged thesis involves discussion of musical examples drawn from a wide range of sources: philosophical, musicological, and personal (both as performer and as listener/beholder).
PROTOTYPICALITY
Chair: Andrew Winston, Department of Psychology, University of
Guelph
Expert Judgments of Typicality in Art:
An Exploratory Study
Andrew S. Winston and Douglas Young
Department of Psychology
University of Guelph
We report a method for studying expert judgments of "typicality" of a painting. Museum
curators, gallery directors, art historians, conservators, and art educators (N=21) in the Toronto
area were shown reproductions of works by Tom Thomson, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Van Gogh.
They sorted 12 works of the most and least familiar artist according to "how typical" each image
was of the artist's work. For experts who identified Van Gogh as most familiar, there was
significant agreement on rankings for typicality, but not for those who choose Thomson. Judges
picked the most and least typical image in each set, described the basis for judgment and marked
the relevant areas on a transparent overlay. Responses were categorized as: 1) subject or
representational content, 2) composition or organization, 3) techniques, e.g., for application of
paint, 4) degree of abstraction, and 5) expression or nonliteral meanings and emotional qualities.
When the artist was most familiar, judgments of typicality were most frequently based on
technique, less frequently on subject and composition, and rarely on degree of abstraction or
expression. When the artist was less familiar, then subject and composition were as important as
technique in making judgments of typicality. The relationship between the concept of "typicality"
used here and "typicality" as studied by Martindale, Hekkert and others is discussed. We argue
that the present use of "typicality" mirrors the traditional use of this term in the Artworld,
particularly in the arena of monetary value, i.e., the auction house.
Typicality, Originality, and Aesthetic Preference
Paul Hekkert, Kaj Morel, and Dirk Snelders
Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering
Delft University of Technology
A suggested relationship between aesthetic preference and typicality has currently been the
subject of much debate (Boselie, 1991, 1996; Hekkert and Snelders, 1995). One point at issue
concerns the notion that this relationship seems incompatible with a preference for originality, a
relationship often found for expert observers (e.g., Hekkert and van Wieringen, in press). Hekkert
and van Wieringen, in press). Hekkert and van Wieringen (1990), however, demonstrated that
experts' appraisal of cubist paintings is linearly related to (style) typicality. When, as one would
intuitively guess, typicality is in a negative fashion related to originality, then how can these
contradictory findings be explained? One possibility is that typicality and originality are not
(negatively) correlated, but rather represent two independent constructs. An experiment was
conducted in order to explore the specific nature of the relationship between typicality and
originality. To this end, measures of typicality and its major determinants, i.e., central tendency
and frequency and frequency of instantiation, as well as ratings of originality and aesthetic
preference, are obtained for a set of telephones. Evaluations were performed by both non-experts
and experts.
Bad Taste: Why It's Here, and Why It Won't Go Away
Bruce Katz
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
I will argue that as a working definition, inappropriate improvement covers most instances of
what is conventionally called 'bad taste'. This definition may be further divided into two main
categories, the artificial, and the excessive. In the artificial, rather than form following function,
form is subjugated to function. For example, the appeal of aerosol cheese is convenience and that
it need not be refrigerated. This type of cheese does not taste as good as 'real' cheese, but
apparently this is of little concern to the consumer of this novelty. The excessive consists of either
large numbers of features, intense features, or often both. For example, for Liberace's audience,
the music of Beethoven, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky was clearly not sufficient as written. It had to
be improved by flashy and 'luscious' playing style, and augmented by candelabras, mirrored pianos,
and gold lame suits.
The next part of the talk will be concerned with why a system would prefer the excessive. It
will be argued that simple neural systems, that have not been exposed to many patterns, will be
more stimulus-bound, and will exhibit a monotonic relationship between sensory volume and
network activity. If it is assumed that hedonic tone is a monotonic function of network activity,
then by transitivity hedonic tone will be a monotonic function of sensory volume. In contrast,
systems that have been exposed to large numbers of patterns will tend to respond categorically, and
will therefore not exhibit such a simple relationship between hedonic tone and sensory volume.
Simulation results will be presented that support these claims. Finally, in light of the preceding
discussion, I will speculate about the explosion of bad taste after World War II, and why it is likely
to decline somewhat but never return to pre-war levels.
Complexity and Figurativity as Determinants
of Aesthetic Appraisal of Artistic Scribbles
András Farkas
Institute for Psychology
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
To test Berlyne's arousal potential and Martindale's prototype models, Hekkert and van
Wieringen (1990) performed an experiment with black-and-white reproductions of cubist paintings
depicting human figures. Their experimental results in connection with the functions between
complexity and beauty, and photographic likeness and beauty were consistent with the predictions
of either this or that model depending on the categorizability of the stimuli. Repeating this
experiment with six groups differing in expertness in fine arts, using 62 black-and-white artistic
scribbles possessing different levels of complexity and figurativity, we got a more differentiated
picture from the effect of the previous two factors on aesthetic appraisal. In the case of 11-12 and
13-14 year-old general school pupils living in a little village in Hungary, there was an inverted U-shaped function between complexity and beauty, and a monotonic increasing function between
figurativity and beauty in accordance with the predictions of both models. In the case of expert
groups containing artists and students in art history, a U-shaped function could be found between
complexity and beauty, and a monotonic decreasing function between figurativity and beauty.
Students belonging to the other two groups could be considered as a transition between the
previous groups regarding expertness. In their case we got a mixture of the previous results.
According to our experimental data expertness seems to be a relevant factor in aesthetic appraisal,
as it is determined by subjective complexity and figurativity of aesthetic stimuli.
Applicability of the Cognitive Network Model
To Appreciation of Scandinavian Paintings
Anikó Illés
Department of Experimental Psychology
Eötvös Loránd University
According to Martindale's cognitive network model, more typical elements of aesthetic stimuli
are generally more preferred, taking into consideration the complex effect of excitation and
inhibition we can also expect a J-shaped or a U-shaped relationship between preference and
prototypicality. As to the other principle statement of the model, more typical elements tend to be
similar to each other, while atypical elements are often dissimilar. Drawing together the previous
two statements, we can expect a J-shaped or a U-shaped relationship between similarity and
preference. Using simple measurement of similarity instead of the methodologically complicated
measurement of prototypicality, we can test Martindale's model in an implicit manner. In our
experiment, 64 Scandinavian paintings were used as stimulus material. 27 Hungarian university
students grouped them according to similarity. A frequency matrix of the common appearance of
the elements in the respective groups was cluster analysed. Cluster amalgamation distances were
ordered to each element of the set of stimuli as a measure of similarity regarding the whole set.
Preference values were obtained from the subjects on a five-point scale for each stimulus.
Performing polynomial regression between similarity and preference we got an inverted U-shaped
function, i.e., the most preferred stimuli had middle values in respect to similarity. This
experimental finding cannot be explained in the framework of the original network model. We
suppose that not only the most prototypical stimuli can activate large areas in the network.
Responses to Music in the Real World
Adrian C. North and David J. Hargreaves
Department of Psychology
University of Leicester
This paper will outline three recent experimental studies concerning the link between theories
of musical preference and everyday listening situations. The studies centre on Berlyne's (e.g.,
1971) psychobiological theory, what has been termed the 'preference for prototypes' model (e.g.,
Martindale and Moore, 1989), and their relationship with the listening environment.
These two theories were investigated in three naturalistic settings, using a variety of verbal and
behavioural responses to the music and the environment. Moderately complex music was
preferred by participants in both aerobics and yoga classes, although subjects showed an equally
strong preference for music that was 'appropriate' for the classes (defined in terms of its typicality
of that usually employed). A second study showed that when exercising or relaxing, subjects spent
longer listening to typical/appropriate music for those situations than music which would moderate
their level of arousal. A third study showed that moderately complex music led to the most
positive verbal responses (e.g., willingness to return) to the cafeteria in which it was played, the
greatest number of people actually approaching the environmental source of the music (a stall in
the cafeteria), and the greatest degree of co-operation with other people.
In conjunction, these studies show that these arousal- and typicality-based theories operate in
and are mediated by everyday listening situations, and that responses to musical stimuli are linked
strongly to the everyday contexts in which they are experienced.
SYMPOSIUM: ARTISTS ON THEIR ART
Chair: Pavel Machotka, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz
Image Variations in a Composition
Vera Domiteeva
Ars Publishing House
St. Petersburg
A general, eternal problem of art is contact of an author and public (an artist and spectators).
Each type, genre, style, image can be considered as the specific form of this contact. There is an
especially complex situation in the pictorial arts and graphic arts that have only spatial coordinates
and that don't determine in any way the period of contact of a spectator and art work.
How much time is required for full value perception of a picture or a drawing? The ideal is the
period that is equal to the creative act, the absolute is ages, the reality (in a museum or an
exhibition) is minutes or even seconds.
Problems of estrangement of the mute and static fine arts are decided differently: artists use
expression of symbols and lay bare a plastic structure, fanciers acquire pictures for contemplation
in private, the fine arts itself act in synthetic genres in common with words, music, theater, and etc.
It's offered one more mode to develop dialogue of the spectators and the author. This mode is
a pictorial way that is a combination of some variations of the graphic image on one sheet. Such a
way permits the spectator without attraction of additional resources "to tune up" an author's
composition in the register of personal emotional preferences.
Boiling Mud, Khufu in Mist
Vladimir J. Koneni
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego
An illustrative selection of color photographs will be shown (as slides) and discussed. Most
have been presented as prints in my seven solo exhibitions in galleries in La Jolla, West
Hollywood, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York, and at various
competitions (sometimes as slides), during the last 15 years or so. Exhibition titles are to some
extent descriptive of the kind of work I have done: "Of nuns, spices, and boiling mud"; "Abstract
landscapes"; "Khufu"; "Stories"; "Laundry"; "Simple transactions"; compositional style; effort and
"aha"; the golden section; why color?; but, most of all the social psychology and experimental
aesthetics of thematic selection and "inspiration".
The Aesthetic Dimensions of Interactive Computer Art
Patricia Search
Department of Language, Literature, and Communication
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
This paper discusses critical issues in the aesthetics of space and time in interactive computer
artwork. Hickory Dickory Dock is an art installation that highlights the conceptual and aesthetic
limitations of language and symbols in describing the process of human-computer interaction.
Research in the design of interactive programs has emphasized the perception of spatial references.
However, there has been very little research on the temporal dynamics of this medium. In
particular, researchers have ignored that fact that most computer interfaces use words and symbols
that represent a Western perspective of time which is not always appropriate for the non-narrative
structure of interactive programs. Hickory Dickory Dock is a three-dimensional layout of the
twenty-four screen designs in the storyboard for an interactive computer artwork. Walking
through the installation, the viewer must translate the abstract spatial and temporal references in
the screen designs into concrete logic. The storyboards as well as the documentation and
background music that accompany the installation show how Western temporal references that
label and categorize our interpretation of time create perceptual paradoxes that limit our cognitive
and aesthetic appreciation of interactive computer art.
Interaction and Creativity As Art
George K. Shortess
Department of Psychology
Lehigh University
As an artist, I use a variety of media to create interactive installations that are about the
relationships between the external environment and our inner experience. In these works there is a
fixed visual environment in which I place sensors that respond to the viewers' movements in the
space. The sensors feed a computer-based system that produces voices and other sounds in
response to the viewers' movements. The voices speak to issues of the inner/outer relationship. In
this way each viewer creates a unique environment and has some control over the experience by
changing his or her movements in the space. In addition to being fun, this technique highlights the
processes of interaction with the environment and encourages an active, creative approach to art.
The visual environment also contributes to the experience. I will discuss some implications of this
work for a psychology of aesthetics.
Derivations of Psixel Modes of Visual Expression
Thomas Slettehaugh
Slettehaugh Studio
Minneapolis
Psixels are derived from sequential events that occur during a specific life-time period when a
person is engaged in creative activity. This sequence is composed of six clustered variables I have
denoted as: TRANSITIONAL, COLOR, NEUTRAL, CONCEPT, HAPTIC, and PERCEPT.
These six clusters form a synthesis that produces a creative mode of visual imagery.
The individual can re-image visual statements from the past, present, and future to bring about
an aesthetic dimension that synthesizes into a psixel phenomenon. This is done with a "touch of
white-out" placed over the time element and replaced with a source of occurring events. The
extended level of aesthetic creativity includes the visual elements, as forms, subject matter,
symbols, etc. of the past, present and future in an emotional, intellectual and perceptual
relationship with the viewer to reach the VAQ (visual-aesthetic-quotient) as astronomy reveals past
millenniums in today's world. These Hubble images have eliminated the time element. If the
essence of time is analyzed, one can see that time does not exist, there is only a sequence of events
that take place during the life of an individual.
THE VISUAL ARTS: PERCEPTION
Chair: Paul Locher, Department of Psychology, Montclair State
University
The Holbein Madonna: Is Beauty the Superior Quality?
Holger Höge
Department of Psychology
University of Oldenburg
One of the unique trials to discriminate between original and copy is Fechner's attempt to have
an empirical basis to put this decision on. In the 1860s art historians had a big discussion on which
of two Madonna paintings was the true Holbein Madonna: the Darmstadt or the Dresden painting
(Bätschmann 1996). Fechner's idea was--following Batteux (1747)--that if artworks have a
common property (beauty) then this property should be greater in the case of an original compared
to a copy, hence, the Holbein painting should be superior to the copy with respect to its beauty.
For the first time in history a survey on the opinion of spectators was used to decide on this
question, but for several reasons it was a failure (e.g., too few reliable respondents). Marshall et
al. (1995) tried to get more detailed data but used only black and white reproductions of both
Madonnas. Hence, in this experiment coloured reproductions were used and Ss had to rate
beauty, artistic merit, and the feelings the paintings elicited in Ss when looking--results will be
compared to those reported by Marshall et al. (1995). Moreover, if the influence of beauty or
artistic merit is a valid impact on the general evaluation of a painting, detrimental information
(prestige suggestion: Bernberg 1953; Schmidt and Schmerl 1968) should influence the absolute
judgments but not alter the difference between the two paintings. Therefore, in a second
experiment every painting was viewed under two conditions (original vs. falsification). As
Fechner's study was carried out when a recent certificate made a plea for the Darmstadt Madonna,
the influence of such a plea can be specified by our data.
Graphic Language, Emotions and Aesthetic Value
Valeria Biasi and Paolo Bonaiuto
Department of Psychology
1st University of Rome ("La Sapienza")
We performed experiments with several hundred adults, asking them to remember stressful or
relaxing real life experiences and to represent them in coloured drawings. Each subject was seated
at a table in a well-lit closed environment, with light pieces of drawing cardboard, a black pencil,
an eraser, a black pen, 36 coloured pastels and 36 coloured pens. Subjects (19-39) years of age,
of both genders, were treated individually and each drawing session lasted 20 min. This non-intrusive procedure induced very effective short-term (reversible) states of stress or, alternatively,
comfort; they were checked through the use of pre- and post-treatment self-appraisal scales and
other tests of cognitive and motivational processes.
We found fifteen pairs of bipolar indicators able to differentiate the graphic languages used on
the average in the two contrasting types of drawings, when independent examiners systematically
evaluated their perceptual properties (colours, shapes, contours, structures, dispositions, style of
execution, etc.). Aesthetic evaluation of these drawings led to surprisingly high average scores and
interesting relations were found with the intensity of negative (stress) or positive (comfort)
emotions activated by treatments. These results underline the importance or emotional intensity in
favouring the creation of aesthetic patterns.
On the Perception of Simple Pictorial Compositions:
A Modeling Study of Individual Cases
Thomas Jacobsen
Max-Planck-Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Leipzig
Two experiments studying the topic of dynamic versus stable expression composition of a
painting or drawing were conducted. Two different propositions for determinants of this
expression were investigated: the orientation of the main 30 simple pictures was designed in order
to achieve high experimental control and to allow an independent manipulation of each factor.
Each stimulus picture consisted of a frame and a line, as the single main element, and were viewed
as stylized representations of pictorial compositions.
40 subjects were presented with the 30 pictures in an individually random order. They were
asked to rank order the pictures according to their dynamic versus stable composition. Their next
task was to rate the pictures on a 7-point scale ranging from stable (1) to dynamic (7).
The data were analyzed on an individual and a group level. Paramorphic space models of the
subjects' judgments were derived for every subject. A second experiment additionally investigated
the temporal stability of the judgments. Overall results showed a confirmation of both propositions
and good interindividual agreement. Subjects, however, individually put more emphasis on one or
the other factor.
The Modigliani Face Effect: Using the Inversion
Effect to Understand Alienation in Portraits
Helmut Leder
Department of Psychology
University of Fribourg
Portraits are not only an important subject in art they also are pictures of faces. The special
features used by artists to make portraits therefore can be investigated from the perspective of the
alienation they produce compared to 'normal' face processing. Using Modigliani portraits as an
empirical example for this approach is presented. Modigliani like many other painters, showed a
tendency in his portraits to exaggerate the length of the face compared to lengths normally found
with real faces. In the reported experiment "Modigliani-style-portraits" were compared with
photographic portraits that shared the same proportions. It was investigated how the "elongation"
affected the stimulus' apparent attractiveness. Moreover, the face-inversion effect ("turning faces
upside-down particularly disrupts their recognition") was used as an indicator for the realism of the
elonated versions, and to compare the paintings with the real faces. The effects in the recognition
test are discussed as a diagnostic method for any alienating effect in the visual arts of portraits.
Memory for Aesthetic Qualities
John P. McLaughlin and Jennifer E. Cramer
Department of Psychology
University of Delaware
Dextral, but often not sinistral, subjects prefer paintings containing cues that suggest or imply
left-to-right (LTR) motion over their mirror-reversed versions, suggesting that differential
lateralization of cerebral mechanisms affects aesthetic preference. When members of a pair are
presented successively, the effect is larger if the LTR version is seen first, indicating the additional
contribution of time-related effects such as novelty or violation of expectations. The present study
was conducted to attempt a duplication of the latter finding and to begin an investigation of the
range of intervals over which the effects can be observed.
Dextrals (N=90) chose the LTR version on 67% of trials when it was the first member of a pair
that was shown in immediate succession, but on 59% when second. This difference was
significant (p = .004) and confirms the essential features of the earlier findings. However, when 2
or 4 other pictures were interpolated between the two versions of a pair, dextrals chose the second
member. A somewhat similar pattern was found for pictures containing an asymmetric distribution
of compositional weight. Memory for the aesthetically-relevant stimulus qualities seems easily
disrupted by other images.
Oculomotor Research in Architecture: The Role of Formal
Properties during the Perception of Architectural
Ralf Weber
Faculty of Architecture
Technical University of Dresden
The paper has two principal foci, the first one giving a general description of a project studying
eye-movement patterns in the perception of architecture, the second one proposing a theory of
perceptual centers in architecture.
The project 'Oculomotor Research in Architecture' represented an initial attempt to record how
the visual formal-geometric characteristics are influenced by various formal-geometric
characteristics such as size, contrast, direction, symmetry, closure, etc., and how these factors may
alter individual visual scanpaths and affect awareness and appreciation of architectural designs.
The study was undertaken with the use of computer-controlled video equipment measuring the
scan-path of the human eye during the perception of three dimensional interior architectural
models and their two-dimensional representations. Results indicate that the eye does not trace
shapes completely, but focuses on the overall arrangement of visual centers, major masses, and on
objects with distinct formal differences from the overall set. Elements indicating spatial depth such
as vistas receive special attention. There is a clear preference for the left area of a space.
Redundant elements draw less attention than solitary shapes. Vertically and horizontally oriented
objects are explored less than obliquely oriented shapes.
The results of this first test series do not suffice to allow clear statements about which precise
geometric properties of form determine eye-movement sequences. The current results,
nevertheless, support a theory of visual centers in architecture, as described for two-dimensional
images by Arnheim, and proposed for spatial situations by Weber. Such a concept of visual or
compositional centers is well known in the arts, but to this point it has rested on common sense
rather than scientific evidence. Now, eye-movement studies allow us to determine which areas of
the visual field act as visual balancing centers on which the eye focuses repeatedly and with longer
duration of fixation, and how the centers and subcenters act as compositional centers in the overall
arrangement of shapes and masses of architectural compositions.
FRIDAY MORNING
THE VISUAL ARTS: PREFERENCE
Chair: Frans Boselie, NICI, University of Nijmegan
Influence of Incongruity Intolerance on Aesthetic
Evaluation of Devitalized or Realistic Portraits
Anna Maria Giannini and Paolo Banaiuto
Department of Psychology
1st University of Rome ("La Sapienza")
In the visual arts, the use of incongruous patterns increased greatly with the early works of
Giorgio De Chirico at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the specific area of the picture in
which the average observer would expect a normal, realistic human figure, an anthropomorphic,
but devitalized (or lifeless) and bizarre figure appeared, like a strange mannequin, a statue, an
assemblage of disparate objects, etc.
We hypothesized that the aesthetic appreciation of this type of configuration may be strongly
influenced by the personal index of intolerance of incongruity. To test this hypothesis, we first
chose three accurate color reproductions of De Chirico's "Mannequin", and three other
reproductions of normal portraits painted by the same artist. We also tested many University
students of both genders in Italy and in the United States with an instrument which makes it
possible to very rapidly measure degree of incongruity intolerance (Building Inclination Test, by
Vonaiuto, Giannini and Bonaiuto, 1987, 1989). Each subject was individually tested in "double
blind" conditions and he or she rated each reproduction in random order on an eleven-point
ugliness/beauty scale. Results show that subjects evaluated the paintings strictly according to their
attitudes toward incongruity. This personality feature overcomes every cross-cultural difference
and the levels of specific competence.
During recent expositions, this kind of investigation was replicated in Rome with incongruous
or normal portraits made by Carlo Carrà, and with paintings by Filippo De Pisis, and similar results
have been obtained.
Do We Prefer What We Can Categorize?
Anett Ragó
Department of Psychology
Eötvös Loránd University
and
András Farkas
Institute for Psychology
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
In an experiment 52 inexperienced and 22 experienced observers categorized and scored 64
coloured slides of paintings. The stimulus material was selected from 16 artistic styles covering
those from the Renaissance to the non-figuratives. Each style was represented by four paintings:
two of them depicted human figure/figures and the other two were landscapes. Two exposure
durations were applied: short (3 sec) and long (13 sec). The stimuli were projected in a
systematically randomized order. The observers had to rate the following for each stimulus:
novel-familiar, recognition of the artist, recognition of the artistic style, and scores on eight five-point rating scales: ugly-beautiful, simple-complex, ineffective-effective, uninteresting-interesting,
dislike-like, unpleasant-pleasant, like to see again, live together. The following questions were put:
how familiarity effects the preference scores and subjective complexity in the case of experienced
and inexperienced observers; what the effect of categorizability is (independently on its
correctness); what the relations between the preference scores are; and how these are influenced
by exposure duration. The most important results are as follows: (1) in the case of experienced
observers, the subjective complexity and the preference scores failed to show their usual relations
with the familiarity and exposure duration; they did not depend on these experimental variables;
(2) there was a direct connection between the categorizability of a stimulus and its preference
scores: if an observer (either inexperienced or experienced) believed in the recognition of the artist
and/or the artistic style) he or she gave higher preference scores to the respective stimulus.
Characteristics of Aesthetic Experience Suggested by
Linking Aesthetic Theory and Structural Features of Art Works
Antoinette L. Theron
Department of Industrial Psychology
University of South Africa
In a study of the aesthetic personality (N=253) preferences for abstract art raised the question
whether the preferences signify aesthetic experience as such and what this involves. Answers are
suggested by linking theory and some research findings to formal characteristics of paintings liked
by an aesthetic group.
Kant's view of disinterestedness in contemplating form suggests the responses to paintings,
constituting non-presentational form, are aesthetic. Bullough's idea of psychic distance is applied
to Picasso's and Braque's cubist constructions. Dewey's view of merging components is associated
with Kandinsky's and Pollock's articulations. Dionysian non-form and Appollonian form is also
associated with Pollock. Empathy and intuition is associated with Boccioni's futuristic processes
and the phenomenological views of interaction between self and object with Agam's geometric
interactions.
The liked works are structurally complex, suggesting that right-hemisphere functions,
facilitating space perception and integrating complex form, could be involved. Dislikes, shown for
works by Vasarely, Newman, and Stella that are structurally simple, suggest involvement of left-hemisphere functions, facilitating ordering of simple and discrete form. Likes suggest verifications
of Spranger's view (1914) that the aesthetic person's aesthetic experience is essentially a will-to-form.
The Aesthetic Value of Colours, Their
Meanings, and Experience
A. N. Kovaev
Department of General Psychology
University of Ljubljana
The aim of the present study was to determine the aesthetic values, symbolic meanings, and
experimental qualities of colours. Their aesthetic values were determined by ranking. The
subjects were given a paper band with nine coloured squares on it. Their measure was 1 cm2. The
presented colours were: the three basic chromatic colours (red, blue, and yellow), four composed
chromatic colours (orange, green, violet, and brown), and two achromatic colours (white and
black). After ranking, the subjects had to write down the meaning associations for each colour.
Then they had to estimate the colours on the following dimensions: excitement, dynamics,
pleasantness, symbolism, fantasy stimulation, thrillingness, modernity, optimism, perfection,
warmth, emotionality, significance, religiousness, pleasantness, playfulness, lightness, freedom,
depth, enthusiasm, power, health, morality, saturation, and relaxation.
The final rank was determined for all presented colours. Meaning association were categorized
and each meaning category was named according to the predominant meaning of the association.
The average values on the experience dimensions were found for each colour that was used in the
experiment.
Pattern Complexity and Aesthetic Preference
Kathleen Moore
Department of Student Affairs
Kennebec Technical College
and
Alan N. West
Department of Psychiatry
Dartmouth Medical School
Order and complexity have often been described as two of the major factors related to aesthetic
experience. G.D. Birkhoff (1933) attempted to quantify this relationship as M=O/C in which M
(aesthetic pleasure) is directly related O (order or unity) and inversely related to C (complexity or
variety).
Many experimenters have conducted empirical investigations on the predictive value of
Birkhoff's formula. In his investigations, Eysenck (1941) found that complexity was positively
correlated with preference, which led him to revise Birkhoff's formula to M=OxC. Berlyne (1971)
developed a psychobiological definition of aesthetic pleasingness that was essentially in agreement
with Eysenck. Boselie and Leeuwenberg (1985) proposed a reformulation of Birkhoff's formula
(M=R-P) in which M is positively correlated with "orderly complexity" (R), but negatively
correlated with random complexity (P).
In an experiment designed to further clarify this issue, 13 University of Maine students rated 24
designs from von Wersin's pattern classification system (Gombrich, 1984) on seven-point Likert
scales for preference, unity, and variety. There were 6 patterns, each with four levels: a basic
theme with 3 variations on each theme.
The results indicate that preference is positively correlated with Eysenck's formula (p<.01) and
not significantly correlated with Birkhoff's formula. However, there is also some support for
Boselie's formula.
Appreciation Using "Enactive Imagination"
Susan L. Feagin
Department of Philosophy
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Many paintings and sculptures (such as Christian altarpieces and Buddhist temple sculptures)
were originally used as part of ritual or devotional observances. The visual characteristics of these
paintings and sculptures--such as colors, forms, representational properties, and even style
characteristics--typically were designed to (and did) affect how one interacted with the objects, and
hence what one did. Many such objects, however, are now located in museums and function
simply as objects of visual attention. Virtually no one today would defend the psychologically
discredited view that aesthetic appreciation involves an "innocent eye." Nevertheless, the
traditional notion of aesthetic appreciation sees paintings and sculptures as objects of visual
attention.
I address two issues in this paper. The first concerns characteristics of imagination that make it
possible for a modern viewer to imagine using a painting or sculpture in accord with its original
function, where colors, forms, and other visual characteristic contribute to its fulfilling this
function. I identify this as a particular kind of imagination, called "enactive imagination," and
distinguish it from the sort of visual attention traditionally held to constitute aesthetic appreciation.
The second issue concerns whether this sort of experience--produced by enactive imagination--should also be considered to be a kind of aesthetic appreciation of a work. I offer some arguments
on behalf of the view that it should.
PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Chair: Peng Lixun, Shenzhen Social Science Research Center,
China
A Comparative Study of Confucius' and
Plato's Aesthetic Thinking
Peng Lixun
Shenzhen Social Science Research Centre
China
I. Confucius' aesthetic thinking is based on benevolence, which is the core of his ethical
thinking. His aesthetic thinking is richly characterized by ethics. It is from idealism that Plato
starts to understand and solve problems of beauty, aesthetics, literature and art. His aesthetic
thinking suggests religious mysticism.
II. Plato tries to seek the origin of beauty in the mystic world of ideas away from the
perceptual world and concrete objects. Confucius starts from benevolence and closely links the
perceptual existence of beauty and man to real life. If Plato stresses unity between the beautiful
and the true in his theory of "aesthetic idea" by asserting that beauty in its highest state is the true
("idea"), what Confucius emphasizes in his understanding of beauty if unity between the beautiful
and the good.
III. Plato sees the emotional features of aesthetics and art, while negating their rational effects.
Obviously, this also sets the emotional effects of aesthetics and art against their rational effects.
While paying much attention to the emotional appeal and amusing effects of aesthetics, literature,
and art, Confucius integrates them with the rationale requirements of ethics, thus achieving the
"beauty of neutralization" in the harmonious unity of the two opposite factors of emotion and
reason.
IV. Plato stresses observing and studying the relationship between art and the understanding of
the objective world when he comments on art from his theory of imitation. Confucius emphasizes
observing and studying the relationship between art and the emotions of the creative or
appreciative subject, this shows what importance he attaches to the appeal of literature and art to
human emotions.
A Good Place to Start: A Theory of Artworks
Peter Swirski
Department of English
McGill University
In my paper I compare two of the most recent accounts of the ontological status of works of
art. Both provide what, in a review of Jerrold Levinson's Music, Art, and Metaphysics, Gregory
Currie called contextualist theories of artworks. Levinson's views have originally been advanced in
"What a Musical Work Is", and revised in two subsequent versions. Currie's theory is outlined in
An Ontology of Art, mainly in the third chapter, "Art Works As Action Types". Both proposals
are considerably more attractive than any of the number of phenomenalist (i.e., anti-phenomenalist
and anti-structuralist) theories currently populating the marketplace. Although both have their
advantages, the conceptual, intuitive, and even argumentative evidence points strongly in favour of
accepting only one of them, albeit with significant emendations. I begin with a critique of Currie's
theses, followed by a review of Levinson's theories, which leads me to the formulation of a new
theory of artworks. At the end of my paper I also discuss its implications for our actual (empirical)
contacts with works of art.
Sensory Aspects of Beauty
Marie Golaszewska
Institute of Philosophy
Jagiellonian University in Cracow
We undertake here a research of sense functioning in aesthetic experiences. There is a large
program of research under the name of Aesthetics of Five Senses. But not only the senses usually
analysed--i.e., eyesight and hearing--are considered, but also others like smell, touch, kinetic sense
(impression), termic, experience of pain and lust, joy, tension, and senses functioning in dreams.
As a result of the analysis of various senses one can put forward a thesis that all of them contribute
to deepen and enlarge the scope of the aesthetic experience in different manners and ways.
Apart from the division of senses approved of by psychologists, we take into account the
Gheteanian ones, taken over and developed by Rudolf Steiner (12 senses).
Research on handicapped people (especially the blind and the deaf) shows the role of the
senses usually named as "lower" ones. Examination of ill people reveals different kinds of beauty
which contribute to lessen suffering, both physical and physic.
The Tactility of Taste: Kant's Notion of Mother Wit
Angelika Rauch
Department of Modern Languages
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
The body is what Kant had the most trouble with in his aesthetic theory of taste; and yet,
pleasure and pain provided him with the basis of aesthetic judgment. I will argue that in the
judgment of the beautiful and the sublime the feelings of pleasure and pain are memories that
constitute the aesthetic experience at large. Essential is the fact that these feelings or affects are at
first without any mental representation; the initial experience that triggered the primary affect of
pleasure or displeasure is no longer available in consciousness, only the affect is repeated in the
presence of the beautiful or the sublime.
The mental representations or, more generally, the images have to be constructed in the present
to match an affect that has its origin in the past. This turns aesthetic experience into a retroactive
mental process that impinges on what we nowadays call "historical sense", i.e., making sense of the
past as it impacts on the present experience. The affect might be a piece, a memory of the past,
but the understanding and representation is a matter of the cultural present. For we construct this
image or images from the cultural material and signs at hand.
Cultural images or fragments serve to compose the figura of experience that needs to be
completed visually in language. Visuality in language that both honors the cross-referential
structure of time, the consciousness of pastness or loss as well as the appeal of an image is an
allegorical representation. And Walter Benjamin has alerted us that allegory is not a sign but a
structure or, as I will call, a "figurative scenario" of experience for which the basis is the human
body in contact with an other. Hence I will eventually argue for the "tactility of taste" which is
related to what Kant mentioned in the Critique of Pure Reason as the talent of Mutterwitz, the
ability to compare and connect in fantasy two or more totally different things. This imaginative
connection in essence is a metaphoric connection between the subject's body and the culture of
signs. I will elaborate the psychoanalytic implications of the concept of mother wit in relation to
aesthetic experience.
Fechner's Prejudices and What to do With Them Today
Erich Mistrik
Faculty of Education
Comenius University
Fechner's experiments were based on some prejudices:
a) aesthetic pleasure can be related to mathematic proportions; b) verbal instruction is emotionally
and culturally neutral;
c) beautiful shape can be prescribed before concrete aesthetic activity starts; d) aesthetic qualities
are based on simple units. Fechner's main mistake: aesthetics can be built from below ON THE
CONTRARY to the philosophical aesthetics built from above. There are more faces of aesthetics
than these two--no one of them excludes the other one. They can meet each other. Their
respective co-operation is enabled by positioning aesthetics in the middle of Michel Foucault's
triangle. It is a triangle composed of three angles: 1. mathematical and natural sciences; 2. social
sciences; 3. philosophy. The humanities (aesthetics, too) are located IN THE MIDDLE.
Consequently, the humanities can work neither from above, nor from below. They work from the
middle heading both directions and from both directions heading toward the middle. Let us learn
from Fechner's prejudices and let us finally forget this wise but dead man.
Word and Image or Reason and Madness
Wojtek Chojna
School of Comparative Arts
Ohio University
In Madness and Civilization, Foucault views Erasmus' Praise of Folly as marking the beginning
of the tradition in which Reason has controlled and excluded the phenomena that it itself defined
and categorized under the category of 'madness'. Foucault contrasts Erasmus' view of madness
with the images presented by Hieronimus Bosch, Breughel, and Durer, to conclude that there
existed a gap between the discursive and pictorial representation, between word and image, one
that Reason has managed to close by wiping out and silencing the terrible truth about the madness
(that Foucault locates within 'Unreason', lying in the hidden registers of human consciousness) that
the images unveiled and the words annihilated. I argue that Erasmus' depiction of madness might
be viewed not as opposed to that of Bosch' and Breughel's but as complementary, in the sense in
which both the text and the paintings reveal a way through which Reason can understand itself and
its madness, the one that Foucault does not account for in his critique of the humanist tradition.
CREATIVITY
Chair: W. Ray Crozier, School of Education, University of Wales
The Contribution of Education to Literary Careers
W. Ray Crozier
School of Education
University of Wales, Cardiff
There have been several generalisations about the relationship between education and
creativity, but less research has examined the role of education in specific art forms. Art and
music education seem to be a prerequisite for practice in those fields and there is a long history of
ateliers and conservatoires. Lack of such education has often been cited as a reason for women's
relative under-achievement in those fields. This paper considers the contribution of university
education to literature. There are several reasons why the relationship here might be less direct--the public accessibility of models of excellence, the solitary nature of writing, the absence of need
for craft materials, facilities, or skills, the absence (or rarity) of training in creative writing, and so
on. The contributions of women to literature even when they were denied access to universities
reinforces this point. This paper offers an empirical examination of the contribution of university
education to literary careers. It takes first a nomothetic approach, drawing upon biographical
information to describe salient features of the education of a large sample of British 20th century
writers. It then concentrates on a smaller number of writers in a qualitative analysis of biographical
material in an attempt to identify some of the ways in which educational experience might have
contributed to their careers.
Aesthetic and Artistic Qualities of Contemporary Art Glass
Henry Frankel
Department of Philosophy
University of Missouri-Kansas City
With the tremendous growth of the studio glass movement during the last thirty years, glass has
become a medium for the making of serious works of art. However, because glass has often been
used to produce objects with little artistic or aesthetic merit, contemporary glass artists have had a
difficult time in having their work taken seriously. It is the aim of this essay to show that workers
in studio glass are artists, having learned how to exploit various properties of glass, which I will
describe, to produce works of significant artistic and aesthetic merit. Restricting my attention to
artists from the Czech Republic and the United States, perhaps the two most important centers for
the production of contemporary art glass, I shall consider works by Stanislav Libensky and
Jaroslava Brychtova, Frantisek Vizner, and Dana Zamecnikova from the Czech Republic, and
Dale Chihuly, Dan Dailey, Thomas Patti, and Mary Shaffer from the United States. Moreover, I
shall occasionally classify the work of the glass artist as fitting within established traditions such as
minimalism, constructivism, or abstract expressionism.
Directed and Non-Directed Thinking:
One Difference Between Cognition and Art
Predrag Cicovacki
Department of Philosophy
College of the Holy Cross
Our experience and activities in general are frequently regarded as forming a spectrum one end
of which consists of passive reaction and the other of which is pure invention or creation. It is also
maintained that cognitive experience comes close to the former end and that artistic experience
shifts toward the other end. This squares well with an image of the detached descriptive
objectivity associated with the scientific search for facts, as well as with an image of the fictitious
and irrational mysteriousness of art.
I argue that this view is untenable. Cognition is not a value-free collecting of facts, and art is
not an unrestrained combination of images. Cognition is not duplicating and art is not making.
These standards of comparison are inadequate. A better standard of comparison is based on the
proper understanding of the nature of thinking characteristic of cognition and art.
Following Carl Gustav Jung, I develop a distinction between directed and non-directed
thinking. Directed thinking is "reality" thinking, in a sense that it is thinking directed toward
adaptation to and practical orientation in reality. It consists in differentiating and classifying reality
into events and objects, genera and species. The foundation of our practical activities and
scientific enterprises is a stable classificatory system of nature by means of concepts and formulae.
Directional thinking invents conventions and signs by means of which we can easily identify and
reidentify various aspects of reality.
Although common and indispensable for our practical lives, directed thinking is not the only
kind of thinking. There is a kind of thinking which is more passive, a mere occurrence rather than
an act of will, and in which conceptual connections establish themselves in their own accord.
Unlike directed thinking, which is a rational function of the psyche because it arranges the material
of thought under concepts in accordance with a rational procedure of which we are normally
conscious, non-directed thinking is an irrational function. This is so because this kind of thinking
arranges the material of thinking by means of forms of patterns of which we are not conscious and
which cannot be controlled by reason.
Unlike directed thinking, which is usually highly eliminative and focused on the "quantifiable"
aspects of reality, non-directional thinking is more suitable for capturing both the richness of reality
as well as its unique "qualitative" aspects. Non-directed thinking is focused on self-enclosed,
discrete, and individual characteristics of things. It consists of (as if) letting reality open itself to us
and speak to us. All such experiences are essentially private and difficult to communicate. As a
rule, the communication of such experiences has to rely not so much on sharply and one-dimensionally defined concepts and signs, but on multiply meaningful and always fluid and open-structured symbols.
Directed thinking shifts away from the imaginary middle point of the spectrum toward
creativity. Non-directed thinking, on the contrary, leans toward receptivity. Since our ordinary
and scientific cognitive experience consists primarily of directed thinking, and our artistic
experience of non-directed thinking, we get a surprising result. It is surprising in comparison to the
initial assumption that cognition comes close to the paradigm case of passivity and art toward the
paradigm case of creativity. I argue that this conclusion is neither false nor paradoxical; it simply
reflects a better understanding of our cognitive and aesthetic experience.
Artistic Aptitudes, Intelligence, Cognitive
Styles and Creative Abilities
Wieskawa Limont
Institute of Pedagogy
Nicolas Copernicus University
The purpose of the conducted study was to find an answer to the question whether there exists
a connection between outstanding artistic aptitudes and intelligence, cognitive style, and creative
abilities. The selective study involved 1000 students, aged 7 - 34. As a result of this research, 100
people whom a panel of competent judges acknowledged to be outstandingly talented were
qualified for the next stage of the study. The group was divided into 4 age levels: 7-11, 11-15,
19-21, and 23-34, 25 persons from each age bracket. At the same time, 100 students of the same
age and sex that the students of the experimental group were selected to from the control group.
Methods: IQ was measured by means of two Raven Progressive Matrioes Tests, one of which
presented a higher degree of difficulty. Field independence was identified by means of the Hidden
Figures Test, whereas J.P. Guilford's tests, such as the Unusual Uses Test, Anagrams, and the
Sketches' Test were used to measure creative abilities. The statistical analysis of the results of the
study showed a positive connection between outstanding artistic aptitudes and perceptual field
independence, semantic fluency, spontaneous flexibility, and figural flexibility. No correlations
were observed as regards either IQ, or figural fluency, or the ability to restructure verbal material.
EVERYDAY AESTHETICS
Chair: Pavel Machotka, Department of Psychology, University of
California, Santa Cruz
Psychology vs. Aesthetics in Life and in Art
Pavel Machotka
Department of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Aesthetics and psychology differ not by the subject they inquire about--"art" in the one case
and "life" in the other--but by their attitude toward it. "Art" is often viewed psychologically, that
is, from the point of view of its subject matter, while "life" can be viewed aesthetically, from the
point of view of its form. Admittedly, the latter point of view is less common. It is, nevertheless,
reflected in subtle ways even in daily newspapers--in advice columns dealing with manners.
Manners, from this point of view, may be considered as the formal aspect of social
relationships. The emphasis in manners is on balance (reciprocity), elegance (economy of
expression), pleasure (from the use of one's craft), and the main goal of manners is to contribute to
the quality of social life; these are qualities shared with art. As in art, too, in manners every act no
matter how small contributes the quality--good or bad--of the whole.
The advice columns Miss Manners and Ann Landers respond to various social dilemmas, but
the one does it from an aesthetic point of view while the other does it from a psychological one.
By studying examples of similar dilemmas and dissimilar advice, or advice tendered on dissimilar
grounds, we can distinguish the aesthetic criteria for social life from the psychological ones. In
turn, we can use the distinctions drawn in the advice columns to sharpen our understanding of the
concept of form in art.
Psychological Aspects of Drinking Wine
Ursula Koelbel and Christian G. Allesch
Liberales Bildungsforum
Salzburg
Morphological market psychology has been derived from Wilhelm Salber's morphological
psychology. This market research theory represents a counterpart of traditional market research.
In traditional market research the product which has to be investigated is in the center. In
morphological market research, however, it is the process that is in the centre of interest. In other
words, the process is looked at, in which the consumation or the usage of a certain product is
decided. Depending on how the process is shaped the consument will or will not use a product or
a certain trade mark product.
In Morphological Psychology, the process in which product usage is performed is called
"Wirkungseinheit" (impact complex). It is assumed that motives are not person-bound but
influenced by cultural factors.
1) Individual Aspects of the "Wirkungseinheit" (impact complex) Wine Drinking:
In order to analyse the "Wirkungsgefüge" (impact structure), depth-interviews of one or two
hours have been performed. These interviews aimed at revealing the whole range of product
usage and have been evaluated by content analysis techniques.
The following aspects stood in the centre of interest:
- in which situation is wine generally consumed
- how is the social surrounding/atmosphere described
- which associations are made in the context with wine
- which characteristics are implied with this product
- what makes this product different from other products
- which meaning does this beverage have
2) Cultural aspects:
In this part of our research we analysed historical and artistic documents like music, literature
and historical descriptions dealing with wine drinking in order to reconstruct the underlying "imact
complexes". It can be shown that the motives which stimulate the use of this product have been
obviously the same during many centuries within a given culture.
Consequences:
It can be derived from our results that the complex motive structure connected with drinking
wine as an "impact complex" must be taken into consideration in order to efficiently promote this
process. Morphological Market Psychology proves to be an effective approach to overcome the
superficiality of traditional product-oriented market research.
The Aesthetization of Women: Clothes and Make-up Choices
A. N. Kovaev
Department of General Psychology
University of Ljubljana
The present study was planned to determine the predominant type of self-aesthetization in
Slovenia. It consistent of two experiments. The first was aimed to find out the dressing styles of
Slovenes, particularly the clothes' colour preferences. The study included women's clothes
because of the large variety of their colours. Female subjects had to choose their favorite clothes
that they would like to wear (because of their aesthetic value), while male subjects chose the cloth
colour that they considered the most appropriate (i.e., beautiful) for an attractive woman. Both
sexes had to evaluate the dresses on a scale that extended from -3 to 3 on the following
dimensions: excitement-calmness, perceivableness, symbolism, fantasy, elegance, modernity,
attractiveness, perfection, warmth, emotionality, sensuality-spirituality, luxury, lightness, and
morality. The second experiment included only women. They had to choose their favourite
lipstick and the appropriate eye shadow. They evaluated them on the following dimensions:
perceivableness-discreteness, extravagance, warmth, beauty, harmony, and modernity. By this
predominant makeup styles of Slovene women were determined.
Aesthetic Dimensions of Everyday Life:
The Case of Food
Carolyn Korsmeyer
Department of Philosophy
SUNY, Buffalo
Virtually all philosophies of art rule out or ignore food and eating as instances of art or
occasions for aesthetic experiences. Standard reasons justifying this exclusion include the practical
function of eating, which interrupts the disinterested attention long-established as a hallmark of the
aesthetic. Moreover, the "bodily" nature of gustatory enjoyment is invoked to disqualify taste as
an aesthetic sense.
Defenders of gastronomy have argued on behalf of the aesthetic importance of food by
pointing out the ability of an educated sense of taste to perceive fine distinctions and to develop
sophisticated preferences. While refined enjoyment can be an important aspect of eating, I argue
that food and eating are chiefly significant for their cognitive importance: the meanings they
convey and the structure they bestow upon both daily routines and ceremonial occasions.
While anthropologists such as Mary Douglas have sometimes approached food from this angle,
philosophers have not. In this paper, I adapt the theory of art developed by philosopher Nelson
Goodman. I stress the cognitive significance of food, by which I mean its symbolic, emotive,
expressive, representational, and exemplificational significance. Such a treatment not only expands
our understanding of food and its comparability with art, it illuminates an aesthetic dimension of
eating that goes beyond gourmet enjoyment.
GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER ADDRESS
Chair: Colin Martindale, Department of Psychology, University of
Maine
Beauty, Good Taste, and the Objectivity of Human Judgments
Hans J. Eysenck
Institute of Psychiatry
University of London
There is a curious ambivalence about the objectivity or subjectivity of aesthetic judgments
among artists, philosophers, and psychologists. On the one hand, it is argued that taste is entirely
subjective, and can't be argued about, and there is much agreement that all works of art are on the
same plane, and that a dead sheep immersed in formaldehyde inside a glass cage is the equivalent
of the Mona Lisa. Yet few people would actually agree that the immature daubings of an
untalented child are really to be classed with Michael Angelo or Cezanne. In this paper I review a
number of studies aiming to show that while agreement is not perfect, there is good evidence that
there is a strong basis of agreement on aesthetic values when irrelevant associations are removed
experimentally. This approach "von unten" is not favoured by philosophers who prefer to look at
things "von oben", but may in due course be extended to more complex aesthetic problems.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
SYMPOSIUM: D. E. BERLYNE (1924-1796)
AND THE THEORY OF COLLATIVE MOTIVATION
Chair: Vladimir J. Koneni, Department of Psychology, University
of California, San Diego
Arousal, Creativity, and Aesthetic Appreciation
Hans J. Eysenck
Institute of Psychiatry
University of London
The purely hypothetical concept embodied in the "Wundt Curve" has found physiological
embodiment in the notion of "arousal." As such, it has been linked with personality through the
extroverted-introverted typology. Based on this link, causal theories have been developed
regarding aesthetic preferences, particularly linked with collative properties (e.g., complexity-simplicity). Another link has been forged between these collative properties and creativity,
preference judgments for complex drawings being linked with creativity. Going further along
these lines has made possible a causal theory of creativity-genius, capitalizing on the personality
correlates of creative people, and the experimental study of creativity and intuition.
Dan in the Vltava
Vladimir J. Koneni
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego
Perhaps because he was at heart an incompletely reconstituded Hullian, Dan Berlyne's
theorizing on exploratory behavior and curiosity, on directed thought, on collative motivation, and
on psycho-aesthetics--innovative, integrative, influential, and inspiring as they were--did not
include a fully developed theory of emotion. And since good theories of emotion include social
and cognitive precursors, and facial-configuration, sympathetic-arousal, postural, and paralinguistic
concomitants, it follows that most of these elements, too, were missing from Berlyne's
experimentation and writing about psycho-aesthetics--and so was a comprehensive discussion of
man's interaction with art in the stream of daily life, in the course of emotional and psycho-aesthetic episodes. Experimental inclusion of emotional states, which necessitates a rethinking of
how psychophysical, ecological, and collative variables are related to each other, to sympathetic
arousal, and to the global concept of emotion, quickly renders the Wundt curve and some other
aspects of the collative motivation model inadequate. Also to be discussed are the methodological
shortcomings of Berlyne's experimental program, which, together with the merely suggestive and
allusive (as opposed to precise and rigorous) aspects of his theoretical framework, made his
position vulnerable.
How Would Berlyne Have Changed His
Theory of Aesthetic Preference?
Colin Martindale
Department of Psychology
University of Maine
Shortly after Dan Berlyne's death, my graduate students and I began a series of experiments
designed as a sort of memorial to him. That is, these were experiments that Berlyne himself
almost certainly would have conducted had he lived longer. They were undertaken to test obvious
predictions derived from his psychobiological theory and undertaken with the firm expectation of
easily confirming these predictions. This was to have been a case of wrapping up a few loose
ends. The first few experiments yielded highly significant results, but they were not the ones we
wanted. It was easy enough to blame this on experimenter 'incompetence'; but such an explanation
was no longer tenable after 25 experiments yielding consistent results contrary to the theory. To
our dismay, we had destroyed the theory we had set out to enshrine.
The experiments quite consistently showed that ecological variables--such as meaningfulness--rather than collative variables--such as novelty or complexity--are by far the most important
determinants of aesthetic preference. Preference is almost never related to its determinants in a
Wundt-curve fashion; when Wundt curves are found, they are usually artifactual. It is extremely
unlikely that the reticular arousal system is, as Berlyne believed, involved in aesthetic preference.
The trade-off among the determinants of preference--ecological, collative, and psychophysical
variables and extraneous stimulation--does not occur as predicted by Berlyne. Rather, the most
important determinant of preference present in a factorial experiment overshadows the others;
extraneous stimulation, regardless of its intensity, distracts rather than adds to the arousal potential
of a focal stimulus.
It is almost certain that Berlyne would have discovered most or all of these facts. It would be
presumptuous to say whether he would have revised his theory to account for them in the way that
I have.
MUSIC: GENERAL STUDIES
Chair: Dmitry Leontiev, Department of Psychology, Moscow State
University
The Two Triumvirates: The Parallel
Between Gestalt Psychology and the Second Viennese School
Peter Keller
School of Psychology
University of New South Wales
A parallel can be drawn between the Gestalt school of psychology and the second Viennese
school, who formulated a compositional method that involves serialising musical elements. Both
schools flourished between the first and second World Wars and had similar linguistic, cultural,
geographic, and ideological backgrounds (as well as both having three core members). More,
many of the organisational principles involved in the second Viennese school's brand of serialism
seem analogous to the organisational principles described by the Gestaltists in their conception of
the visual part/whole relationship. This similarity begs the question: Are the observations made by
the Gestaltists in the visual spatial domain generalisable to the auditory temporal domain of music?
An experiment was conducted where hypotheses based on the Gestalt part/whole relationship were
tested in the context of auditory temporal patterns. Findings indicate that the dynamics of the
part/whole relationship are different in visual spatial and auditory temporal dimensions. This
challenges some assumptions underlying the organisational principles adopted by the second
Viennese school. The questionable nature of these assumptions constitutes an alternative type of
explanation for the fact that audiences have typically rejected the music of the second Viennese
school, to explanations appealing to unfamiliar musical syntax, or to impoverishment in terms of
emotional or referential meaning.
Tendencies of Development of Scientific
Knowledge About "Musical Microworld"
Yury N. Rags
Moscow State Conservatory
A multilevel system of scientific knowledge is built to reveal the role of musical acoustics in
musical psychology. Now three levels exist in this field:
a) the musical microworld;
b) the world of each musical oeuvre;
c) the musical macroworld.
In the centre of the system the musical oeuvre itself is placed as an aesthetic phenomenon realized
by some acoustic means. The peripheria of the system is formed by:
--musical elements as "details", components of musical psychology;
--musical aesthetics in its historical and socio-cultural development.
Three phases are seen in the evolution of musical acoustics being applied to musical creativity:
syncretic, analytic, and synthetic. The first phase related to the primordial unity of musical
acoustics and musical art, the second phase is the necessary alienation of acoustics to study
different musical elements in the laboratory; finally, the synthetic phase means the merging of the
above fields. The last phase can be illustrated by works of the school of eminent Russian
researcher N. A. Garbuzov (1870-1955). Representatives of this school applied musical acoustics
in studies of rather different phenomena such as the good ear for music, potentialities of
performers, etc.
Music and Human Nature
Laird Addis
Department of Philosophy
University of Iowa
The fundamental question in the psychology of music is why sounds, especially as organized
into music and as contrasted with the materials of the other senses, should have the universal and
profound attraction they do have for human beings. An important part of the answer to this
question must come from evolutionary biology, but I propose another part of the answer by way of
identifying a deep affinity between the nature of sound and the nature of consciousness itself. This
affinity derives from the fact that both sounds and states of consciousness by their natures require
duration but not change in order to exist.
A New Approach to Music Simulation
M. A. Kapoustin
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Moscow
In this report a new approach to the simulation of musical compositions with the aid of
traditional-architecture computers and neurosystems is described. Here the simulation of music is
treated as its composition and analysis. In such a way, there are two fundamental problems in
music simulation: creation of an "electronic composer" and an "electronic musical critic".
Some steps towards the creation of an "electronic musical critic" are made in this report.
Particularly, new conceptions of "beauty of the melody note", "importance of the note" and
"sensibility of the melody" are introduced. The methods of determining the appropriate values for
the particular melody, and relations, by which these values are associated, are proposed.
But all the ways towards the estimation of numerical values of a melody's emotional
characteristics are based on binary valuation ("good" - "bad") of melodic fragments. The "device",
which supplies such a valuation can be either human or neural network with special architecture,
which has been properly trained. (As the starting point the network with standard architecture of
backward propagation is proposed).
Realisation of such a neural network algorithm would allow to create an "electronic musical
critic", which would be the musical alter ego of the man who has trained the network.
Music and Man
Jiina Vacková
Department of Musicology
Charles University
Most substantial sign of music: movement in time and in space from a material base (flexuous
and regulary oscillating matter). Four acoustic qualities of tone--simple base of organized musical
structure as bearer of multiple beauty and of rich emotional communication. Six components of
musical expression: melody, harmony, metre-rhythm, dynamics, agogics, color. Their expressive
possibilities. Artifact, mentifact, sociofact. Development in common with language. In the
Aurignac period of younger paleolith there was a division into two streams of communication:
logical-conceptual (language) and aesthetical-imaginative (music). Still more deep common
ground: sounding manifestation of living creature in general. Sounding manifestation--important
factor of emotional deliverance of man. Two components: 1. emotional activity of manifestations,
2. realisation by the sound.
Another most important sign of music: imposing lawfulness of musical logic. Musical
architecture. Highest strata of most abstract way of thinking. Opposite pole: near to elementary
functions of human organism: pulsation, respiration, walking. Concentrated listening of music
influences deep oxidation of blood and better digestion. Music--magnificent manifestation of
psychosomatical unity of man. Music develops human psychism in all modalities of experience
and behavior. Important factor of peace in social micro- and macrostructures.
FILM AND TELEVISION
Chair: Gerald Cupchik, Division of Life Sciences, University of
Toronto
All's Well That Ends Well?
An Empirical Study About the Influence of Empathic Stress and
Film Outcome on Viewer's Feelings and on their Film Evaluation
Peter Vorderer
Department of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Music and Theater, Hannover
On the background of the excitation-transfer hypothesis, this study examined the influence of
film outcome and empathic stress on viewers' feelings and on their evaluation of the film. Sixty-six
subjects, including 39 females and 27 males, saw a seven minutes episode of "Explosive--Blown
Away", in which the outcome was experimentally manipulated. The level of empathic stress
during film viewing was operationalized by the degree to which subjects empathically suffered
from the protagonist's situation. In order to measure the subjects' feelings, they were asked to rate
their feelings of being activated, their emotional distress and their mood, both before and after film
reception, while film evaluation was measured only afterwards. Analysis of variance show that
film outcome had an influence on mood, while the combination of film outcome and empathic
stress effected primarily emotional distress. The evaluation of the film, however, correlated
positively with empathic stress. This shows the possibilities as well as the limitations of the
excitation-transfer hypothesis.
Perception of TV Personalities
Peter Vorderer and Silvia Knobloch
Department of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Music and Theater, Hannover
Based on a project of Koenig and Lessan (1986), our study provides data to compare the
perception of persons known from the media with the perception of real persons. Students of a
media research class at the Department of Journalism and Communication Research in Hannover
were asked to give a questionnaire to their room-mates, parents, or any other male or female adult
of their acquaintance. A total of 149 usable forms were obtained this way. The questionnaire
included a series of six-interval semantic differential scales with the bipolar terms of active-passive,
dependent-independent, soft-hard, self-assured-modest, devisive-deliberate, seeks protection-protective, bold-reserved, negative-positive, competitive, timid-aggressive. Using these scales, the
respondents were asked to rate the following persons: their best friend, an acquaintance,
themselves, their favorite personality on TV news/information programs, their favorite person in
TV situation programs, and their favorite host on talk/variety shows. In addition, the respondents
were asked to name the chosen media figure. These answers were classified according to gender
and to the question whether these persons are real or artificial.
Postmodern Idolatry:
The Media and Violent Acts of Ritual Participation
Dawn Perlmutter
Department of Fine Arts
Cheyney University of Pennsylvania
The subject of violence has become one of the most truculent debates in American media and
art. A significant issue centers around the question of whether violence in the media violence a
reflection of the prevalent chaos in society. Simply put, does art imitate life or does life imitate
art?
Building on the theories of Aristotle, Rene Girard, Edward Whitmont, and Konrad Lorenz, it
will be demonstrated that historically there is a direct correlation between violence and the sacred,
that participation in either actual or signified acts of violence are significant part of religious ritual,
that humans are by nature aggressive, that violence in art and the media serves as a catharsis for
human aggressive drives, and that religious ritual used to realize this function. Hence, the
paradoxical question of art imitating life or life imitating art becomes a moot point in terms of art
criticism.
I will argue that violence in the media is a theological problem of idolatry, and that censoring
representations of violence is actually serving to perpetuate rather than diminish crime in society.
The 1994 films 'Pulp Fiction' by film maker Quentin Tarantino and 'Natural Born Killers' by
director Oliver Stone will be discussed.
Using Different Methods to Discover Meaningful Aspects
in Jane Campion's Film The Piano
Monika Suckfüll and Antje Murdersbach
Hochschule der Künste
Berlin
Up until know, how and why films have an effect on their viewers has been unclear. Various
scientific disciplines have dealt with this question in different ways, and also within disciplines
there are different, often incompatible ways of interpretation. The complexities of this field of
study result in many methodological problems. Therefore, film impact research requires a careful
combination of methods.
Our intention is to provide an approach to film analysis using two psychological research
methods, quantitative and qualitative, in a discussion of the film The Piano by Jane Campion
(Australia, 1992). First quantitative measurement of variables that suggest significant meaning to
the viewers will be discussed, followed by an psychoanalytical interpretation of the primary reasons
why these aspects of the film are meaningful.
STYLE
Chair: Will van Peer, Department of Literary Studies, Utrecht
University
The Communicative Potential of Pictures:
Towards a Theoretical Framework
Hartmut Espe
Hochschule der Künste
Berlin
Although it is obvious that man uses pictures as a means of communication, our understanding
of the nature of pictorial communication still seems very limited. The purpose of this paper then,
is to develop a theoretical framework for the study of their communicative potential. An outline of
the development of the media of communication is given, using a differentiation between primary,
secondary, and tertiary media. The factors which constitute any communication process are
described. Various characteristics of pictorial communication are discussed, such as pictorial
mode versus verbal mode, and picture versus reality. The paper is organized around eleven theses:
1. Pictures are comprised of three components: matter, composition, and contents. 2. Pictures
represent the world, words describe it. 3. Pictures cannot completely be translated into text, and
vice versa. 4. Pictures differ from reality.
5. The potential of pictures to represent is limited, however. 6. Pictures render real the
impossible. 7. The artist has at his disposal considerable degrees of freedom for the production of
pictures. 8. The designing of a picture guides its intended perception. 9. Picture perception is
fast and direct but psychologically projective. 10. The beholder is inclined to take the picture for
reality. 11. Pictorial communication usually is mass communication.
The Mechanisms of Constructing the Poetical
Meanings of Literature by Literary Scholars
Reinhold Viehoff
Medien und Kommunikationswissenschaft
Martin-Luther University
The paper starts by modelling the literary scholars' activities as goal oriented actions. The social
regularities and especially the scientifical rules are reconstructed as the determining factors of these
activities. Dealing with the interpretations of Kafkas "Metamorphosis" since 1924 it is shown that
two homiletic conventions organize the construction of the poetical meaning by literary scholars.
About 112 interpretations which are published during the last 7 decades of the Kafka reception are
analysed with the help of modified quotation analysis. Finally, the aim of the paper is to make
clear that the determinable context of literary interpretations' activities form the result of this
activity, it is the construction of the poetical meaning of a certain literary text.
Style and the Epistemology of Styles
Baruch Blich
Department of Cinema Studies
Tel Aviv University
Two interwoven questions motivate me to write this paper. The first is the question as to the
nature of styles, and the second is how do we come to know and apprehend styles. The first and
main problem I want to discuss here has to do with the apparently obvious connection between
styles and their contents; between the form or the manner and the subject matter encapsulated in
or by styles. The question I debate in this section (after a short review of its history) examines the
nature of this bond as well as the means we undertake to justify it. To accomplish my goal I intend
to recruit for that matter a rule used successfully by several gestalt psychologists, who have nicely
demonstrated that gestalt figures are information loaded vehicles and hence are subject to
evaluation as to the amount of data necessary to apply them a meaning. Since styles are frequently
considered as the 'form' or the 'manner' of the expression, it would be justified to treat them as
vehicles by which the content (of a story, a painting, a film, etc.) is processed. A good style, i.e.:
a suitable style would require less information to decipher the content it contains, whereas a bad
style, an unsuitable form, would hinder its content and would require us to ask questions as to its
nature. In other words: a good style would contain no redundancies, whereas a bad style would
contain too many.
The second problem I want to raise in this paper is how do we come to know styles. Since
'style' is a class concept, i.e.: styles tend to cluster under groups or kinds, I find it wise to explicate
styles with the help of two renowned theories. The first was advocated by Quine - 'Natural kinds',
and the other is Wittgenstein's 'Family resemblance'. I intend to show the advantages of family
resemblance for the purpose of resolving the riddle of style. In the end of my paper I will show
how the two problems mentioned in brief above are connected to each other; that the one has no
sense without the other.
LITERATURE AND FILM: CASE STUDIES
Chair: Robert Hogenraad, Department of Psychology, Université
Catholique de Louvain
"The Bucket Rider" by Franz Kafka:
Psychological Reflections
Rosella Tomassoni
Department of Psychology
University of Cassino
The dominant psychological dimension in the cold and the social dimension is the impossibility
of being helped by other men. The paraoneiric language becomes the essential element of the
story and the bucket equal symbol of an impossible possibility rises in the air like an oriental carpet,
like those of the oriental tales, the Persian type in particular.
A lonely man, abandoned by everybody, rides the bucket in a clear configuration that
incorporates within itself a farcifal and tragical tone, thus resulting in "impotence" and "absurd"
which is the typical central knot of the traumatic in Kafka.
The rider reminds us of other Kafkian characters, in particular Gracchus the hunter, and his
disappearance into the mountains which marks the inevitable loss of another useless human being.
The final vision of the mountains assumes a maternal symbol which recalls Freudian concepts
and repeats another recurring theme in Kafka: the presence therefore of a possibility, on a pure
oneiric level, of seeking refuge in a world which is alienated and far from a human world.
Beyond the oneiric and paraoneiric world, there only remains a vagabond condemned like
Sysiphus to a useless and hopeless journey, disoriented in space, in time and within its own self
conscience, for which being alive means a consciousness of life.
Tourists with Typewriters:
Jew and Writer in Barton Fink
David Goldblatt
Department of Philosophy
Denison University
This paper will focus on certain aesthetic issues in the Coen brothers' film Barton Fink that are
generated by the misplaced, self-initiated dislocation of Fink, a Jewish playwright with proletarian
ideals, in the Babylon of Hollywood in 1941. It is a time when Hollywood has the
power/knowledge to perform Nationhood for the "average" citizen by the exhibition of American
identify. The Coens present what I call a two-Jew portrait: the Jew of the Page and the Jew of the
Picture, in Fink, the writer from New York and Lipnik, the Hollywood mogul. Each exemplifies a
double art goal: the highminded art of the struggles of the mind and the low art of physical action.
On my reading, the picture-driven Jew is a defection of the original nation of the written page, but
by abandoning Jewishness, has gained a connection with non-Jewish America. But as the
composite, cartooned figure of the Jewish artist, Fink occasions problems of the representation of
the Other.
The story of Fink in a strange land is heavily informed by another tale of Jews in exile--another
story of interpretation. Two explicit displays of The Book of Daniel in Fink are: a Hollywood
sell-out, presents Barton with his novel Nebuchadnezzar, the victorious king who took Daniel into
exile in Babylon. Later, when Fink randomly opens his hotel Gideon, we see the passage
describing an impossible request: Nebuchadnezzar demands not merely the interpretation of his
dream, but the dream as well--the penalty being dismemberment. The double sense of
'dismemberment' in Barton Fink, being set apart and being cut into parts, is another theme. (Fink's
hotel neighbor cuts off the heads of writers.) The emotional magic of Fink, is partly the result of
Fink's audience not knowing the Bible, having only "heard of it" as one of the characters say, as if
dim markings of a lost racial memory are playing with the cine-subject's religious indifference, the
text being both present and absent, its traces still containing an aesthetic power. Since Fink is
asked to write a B picture with a wrestling theme, both ideas also figure in my analysis. The
simple morality tale of the B picture (as it is conceived in Fink) where good and bad clash
irreducibly, is related to the stories of the Bible itself and to narrative forms of holocaust
explanation where accounts of intellectuals mislead by their sophistication.
To Know a Woman
Carol S. Gould
Department of Philosophy
Florida Atlantic University
In this paper I examine artistic creativity and critical insight through a philosophical study of
Amos Oz's novel To Know a Woman. On my analysis, Oz aesthetically depicts the artistic
experience as requiring an intellectual, emotional, and intuitive engagement with the world. The
novel indeed depicts the gradual, excruciating integration of the protagonist's battle-torn psyche. I
focus on the novel's cool, poised narrative presence and some of the author's intertextual
references, in particular to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and the stories of Chekhov. Having
drawn out Oz's notion of the integrated artistic consciousness, I then consider the implications of
his vision for the nature of interpretation and the cognitive status of art. Oz, unlike some authors
and theorists, uses intertextual references to support, rather than to subvert, the possibility of
determinate meaning and the existence of real aesthetic properties for the reader to discern.
Aesthetic properties, for Oz, are in the artwork for the reader to discover, not create; so the world
in all its ambiguity, is for the artist to represent artistically, not to invent. Finally, I offer some
reflections on the nature of Oz's enterprise.
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Chair: Holger Höge, Department of Psychology, University of
Oldenburg
Some Easy Answers to What Should be Easy Questions
Colin Martindale
Department of Psychology
University of Maine
The proper goal of scientific aesthetics must certainly be to formulate coherent and falsifiable
theories concerning art, beauty, and creativity. I have proposed such theories, but too many in the
audience have heard about these theories too many times before, so I shall speak of other things.
Those of us with a scientific bent of mind find completely meaningless most of the observations
made by those who approach aesthetics from a philosophical or humanistic point of view.
However, if one writes enough, he or she will almost invariably suggest some falsifiable
hypothesis. I shall describe a few examples of my own research in which I have done nothing
more than test in a simple scientific manner hypotheses proposed by those who approach the arts
in a qualitative manner.
Our colleagues in literary criticism have tended to promulgate the view that people do not agree
at all in their interpretations of literary works or other works of art. This view has allowed them to
write some rather incoherent books, but is it correct? It could not be. If there were no agreement
about works of art, then experimental aesthetics would not exist, because error variance would
swamp any experimental effects. In the 1920s, I. A. Richards conducted a so-called experiment in
which he had people read poems and write their opinions of them. In a book running to several
hundred pages, Richards tried to convince readers that people simply do not agree at all in their
interpretations of poems. I replicated Richards' experiments using both rating scales and essays.
Statistical analyses of both measures indicate that people agree perfectly well in their
interpretations of poems. The argument that people do not agree in their interpretations is simply
wrong. The case should be closed.
If people agree in their interpretations of individual art works, then perhaps they agree about
other things as well. Consider the issue of cross-media styles. Is there anything similar amongst
music, painting, poetry, and architecture labelled as baroque or romantic or neoclassic, or do we
simply use the same labels for unrelated works in different media? Philosophers have, since the
time of Lessing, bothered themselves with this issue for over 200 years and have come to no clear
conclusion. This is a purely empirical question that can easily be resolved. The obvious thing to
do is to present artistically naive people, who are very easy to find in rural America, with examples
of supposedly baroque, romantic, and classic works in the media mentioned above and see if they
can group them correctly. Such subjects do not group the examples perfectly, but they do very
well indeed at a level far above chance. For that matter, children can also sort such stimuli quite
well and correctly. The case should be closed.
I conclude with a discussion of the Homeric question: are the Iliad and the Odyssey each the
work of a single poet or are they patched-together lays from many singers; if each is the work of a
single poet, did the same person compose both? Now that most of us know little Latin and less
Greek, this question may seem to be of less than burning interest. However, it consumed the
attention of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars. It has recently been 'decided'
based upon qualitative considerations. Science does not solve problems but gives estimates and
probabilities that these estimates are correct. Using very simple and standard methods developed
mainly by others, I approached the Homeric question, as any scientist could have during the last 30
years. At the conference, I shall give my best guess as to the answer to the Homeric question. It
appears that the Homeric question has been answered and that this case, too, is essentially now
closed.
I give these examples for a purpose. Anyone who thinks in a scientific way could have found
these problems and solved them. Our humanistic colleagues occasionally give us very easy
problems that we can approach using normal science and common sense. Whether these
colleagues will listen to our solutions is quite another question.
SATURDAY MORNING
SYMPOSIUM: CURRENT RESEARCH AT THE CENTRO
RICERCHE ATTIVITA UMANO SUPERIORI
Chair: Carmelo Genovese, CRAUS, Bologna
Art, Technological Progress, and New Methods in Research
Carmelo Genovese
CRAUS
Bologna
I should thank my friends, present IAEA directors, to have mentioned me as one of the two
surviving founders. Thirty years have passed from the foundation of this Association, and we,
according to the trend of CRAUS (that I have directed since 1964) have conformed our research
to technological and methodological developments of art, particularly painting and graphics, but
including psychopathology of plastic expression too. However, our attention is still pointed to the
possibilities to find a practical use for our experimental results both in art production (i.e.,
advertising) and (within our own limits) in medical pathology. Cybernetics, Bionic, computer
science, have taken their contribution to the range of perception studies from their beginnings. We
want, now, to focalize our interests to the possibility of developing an "expert system" useful for
art criticism!
The Formal Model of International "Art
Research and Development" Competition
Libero Acerbi
CRAUS
Bologna
Each basic unit conducing "Art Research and Development" is called an Art-firm, but could
equally well be thought of as an Artist. I shall treat the total number X as a continuous variable.
While the competition is going on, each Art-firm has the probability of success, dt, in any small
interval of time, dt. Statistical theory refers to as the hazard rate. I assume that is constant over
time and the same for all Art-firms. With X firms the conditional probability that one of them
succeeds in a small interval of time, dt, is Xdt; the probability of a tie is of order (dt)2 and can be
ignored. The probability that the race is still going on by time t is found (by splitting this time into
a large number, N, of intervals of small length, t/N, each) to equal
lim (1 - Xt/N)N = e-X1
N ->
Art and Artificial Life
Roberto Terrosi
CRAUS
Bologna
Artificial life, beyond its interest as a new discipline, can be thought of as a symbol of the
technological mutation taking place nowadays. The subject can be therefore analyzed and
presented in itself but can also become a key to interpret different aspects of scientific and
expressive research of the present. The use of technology in art, as a matter of fact, is no more
linked to a cold imagery, and the artificial succeed in acquiring a certain ease and nimbleness in its
expression. Technology becomes a new field of thought, in which the artist experiments a new,
different and interactive relation with the media, so that he can feel himself as art material, loosing
boundaries between natural and artificial. Artificial life implies exactly the loss of this boundaries,
and therefore, connects itself to the developments of artificial intelligence, taking the characters of
fluency peculiar to natural thought by fuzzy logic, and acquires capacity of self-teaching with the
automatic learning and self-organizing neural nets. Robotics thinks, moreover, to be able to
include human intelligence too, according to the expectations of the scientist Moravec.
Mandala System and the Study of Perceptive Reactions
Carlo Terrosi
CRAUS
Bologna
The study of visual and sound perceptions in the range of art implies the use of machines that
must be suitable for stimulating and measuring the reactions that have been obtained this way.
Mandala system is now the best device of this kind for music and graphics. It is a system that is
able to interface the signal filmed by a camera with the graphical ambient of a computer, allowing
people using it to modify them in real time by their own movements. It is possible, for example, to
paint and play music at a distance using a computer. This system will be presented in two different
versions, the first one consisting in a real multimedia show, and the latter as an installation led to
the use of public, whose reactions could be recorded.
Information Computer Processes in Graphic
Systems: Projects for Architecture and 3D Models
Daniele Zerbini
CRAUS
Bologna
This paper is deepening just known subjects from earlier papers just as Computer Graphics in
Architecture - Landscape - Aesthetics (XII Congress of the IAEA in Berlin, 1992). In the model
for project analogous to "Cybernetic model" of feedback processes (Ideation - Sensorial Organs -
Environment - Information Processes - Apprehension - Production), is sub-classified a diverse
project system. In fact starting from a primary model you can modify the characteristics of
analysis and technical methods (TM) elaborating in this way further models of action.
These TM are branching to:
a) Software sectors using CAD programs, Computer Graphics (CG) programs (finding in CAD
and CG).
b) Hardware, specific for Personal Computer (PC) or Work Station (WS), for CAM and for
Videosystems connected to WS. These methods are creating in this way the Video Computer
Station (VCS).
In the Tridimensional pattern you can find increasingly qualitative evolution in management
and outcome. It's obvious that a good management of Tridimensional patterns allow not only to
get realistic final results, but even to improve the creative and project phases. Furthermore it's
opening a new chapter: the 3D digitals or reverse engineering, which is a very important part in
the geometrics process. The aim is to receive Tridimensional facts from a physical object and to
bring them inside the specific software (CAD/CAM, animation, visualizing). The 3D animation is
another important way for projecting, as analysis and Tridimensional visualizing are working not
only in static way but even dynamic way to improve visual and executive comprehension. It's
obvious that all these elements inside the TM are depending on each other and interacting in a
dynamic way inside the projecting system. This time we propose an example of application for
architecture--landscape projecting, using some of these suggested methods.
SYMPOSIUM: CURRENT ISSUES IN PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS
Chair: Ale Erjavec, Institute of Philosophy, Slovenian Academy
of Sciences and Arts
Philosophy and Aesthetics
Ale Erjavec
Institute of Philosophy
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Philosophical aesthetics consists today of a series of theories and approaches which vary from
culture to culture and from one philosophical tradition to another. In the last decade this aesthetics
has moreover shared the destiny of philosophy itself, the latter increasingly being influenced by
cultural theory, critical theory, psychoanalysis, etc. The legitimacy of its former two main topics,
namely art and beauty, has moreover become increasingly questioned. "Art," for example, has
thus been proclaimed to be a purely ideological category, devoid of scientific relevance, with the
same being, in this view, true of aesthetics, which should henceforth be transformed into the
theories of ideologies, semiotics, sociology, psychoanalysis, etc.
Although many aesthetic and philosophical traditions (or "empires") have not been subjected to
such a critique (the analytic tradition for example), they have in the recent past encountered a
different obstacle to their continued legitimate existence, for with the advent of postmodernism art,
as we have hitherto known, has in many respects changed. Although the importance ascribed to
this phenomenon varies from culture to culture and from one philosophical framework to another,
the continued attention it generates especially within continental philosophy, also influences
aesthetics and its subject-matter.
In my paper I intend to offer two opposing views concerning the contemporary status of
aesthetics: one, according to which aesthetics has disintegrated into a series of borderline
disciplines and has lost its philosophical relevance, and the other, according to which philosophical
aesthetics has again become a key theoretical area, but which--from this perspective--requires also
a different interpretation of philosophy and the humanities.
On the Aesthetic and Artistic Values of Art
Bohdan Dziemidok
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology
University of Gdánsk
The aim this paper is to show that aesthetic value is not the only inherent and constitutive value
of works of art and that aesthetic evaluation of art is not the only appropriate kind of evaluation,
i.e., the one which treats art as an autonomous correlate of man's cultural activity, (and not as a
means to other ends, which to be the focus of the political, religious, or moral judgments). There
is, also, different from the aesthetic, the artistic value, which is, likewise, an inherent and a
constitutive element of art.
The distinction between aesthetic and artistic values and evaluation is important for theorizing
art. It is especially important in the context of the avant-garde and experimental movements, and
for the consideration of purely theoretical problems the contemporary philosophy of art has to
cope with. The contemporary followers of the distinction between the artistic and the aesthetic
values of art justify their position by pointing to the presence of manifestations of anti-aesthetic or
de-aesthetic tendencies in contemporary avant-garde art (especially in painting and music), the
existence of which is confirmed explicitly by both critics and artists themselves.
Feminist Aesthetics and Chinese Philosophy
Eva Kit Wah Man
Department of Religion and Philosophy
Hong Kong Baptist University
The paper will first introduce the rise and the nature of the so called "Feminist Aesthetics",
explain and illustrate the feminist interventions in the theory of art. Second, the methodology and
the "mission" of this new aesthetics will be discussed. Some of its review and deconstruction of
the traditions in aesthetics will also be examined. The paper will then mention the attacks and
challenges this new aesthetics has received. Lastly, I discuss what both feminist aesthetics and
Chinese aesthetics have in common and how this comparison can contribute in compiling a
response to the challenges mentioned.
THE VISUAL ARTS: CASE STUDIES
Chair: Leonid Dorfman, State Institute of Arts and Culture, Perm
The Trinity of Andrey Rublev: Geometry and Philosophy
Alexander Voloshinov
Department of Cross-cultural Studies
Saratov State Technical University
The world-famous masterpiece of Old Russian art, the icon by Andrey Rublev "The Trinity"
(about 1420), is regarded from the point of view of empirical aesthetics. The correspondence
between the geometrical peculiarities of the structure of "The Trinity" and its inner aesthetic and
philosophical ideas is defined. First of all the combination of the two types of symmetry and two
fundamental ideas of "The Trinity" is marked: the idea of Revelation, the harmony of the Truth
found the horizontal mirror symmetry and the idea of the Transfiguration, the harmony of Truth,
which is being found the vertical dynamic symmetry of the golden section.
It is established that the vertical structural composition of "The Trinity" as well as the relation
of the squares of the light, dark and medium tones of the icon is determined by the 5 members of
the series of the golden section. The relative errors of the fulfillment of the golden section and
mirror symmetry laws are calculated.
The universal character of the system of horizontal and vertical proportions of "The Trinity" is
proved by way of its comparison with other works of art, for example, with the K. Malevitch
painting "The Suprematic Composition. Eight Red Squares". It is distant in time and quite
different in manner from "The Trinity", but it has a similar repetition of proportions.
Testing a Pathogenic Belief in the Art Work
of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec:
An Empirical Approach to Explain His Creativity
Beverley B. Conrad
San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group
San Francisco
The author will present a new explanation about some motivations for the creativity of the
artist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). Using case history material, including slides of his
art work, I will demonstrate empirical evidence for the hypothesis that he was testing certain
pathogenic beliefs in his art by looking for a subject's or viewer's response to it. (Given is the
notion that emotions and responses that are elicited in viewers, as they look at a piece of art,
contribute to its aesthetics). The presentation begins by introducing Control-Mastery theory, a 25-year-old cognitive psychoanalytic theory developed by Joseph Weiss and Harold Sampson and the
San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group (formerly known as the Mt. Zion Psychotherapy
Research Group). A brief history of Toulouse-Lautrec's life will next be followed by how
Control-Mastery's Plan Formulation Method (a means of reliably conceptualizing a psychotherapy
case) was then used to interpret his life and his oeuvre. Lastly, the hypothesis that he was partially
motivated to create, in order to put forth or "test" pathogenic beliefs to disconfirm them, is
explained with and supported by the use of empirical evidence. The means that one man used to
overcome adversity and master trauma, while presenting to the world artistic beauty, is
encompassed in this interdisciplinary approach.
Myth as Metaphor for the Artist's Creativity in
Picasso's Blind Minotaur Led By Girl With Wild Flowers
(1934, Vollard Suite)
Antoinette L. Theron
Department of Industrial Psychology
University of South Africa
Picasso depicts creativity via the myths of the minotaur, Dionysus, and Ariadne. The minotaur,
man/animal hybrid, represents evolutionary association in creativity. As Dionysus, god of
creativity, fertility and the vine, he is capable of metamorphosis. Erect, he changes from
horizontal animal to vertical human (Bataille), i.e., elevated perception. Blind, he personifies
Oedipus, who relinquished tradition, seeking deeper levels of consciousness. As Dionysian artist,
he relinquishes rationality. On the beach, where light destroys and generates form, he represents
decomposed form transformed by illumination.
The girl, Ariadne, symbolises anima and trickster. With his wine, she beguiles the minotaur
into facing his instincts and partaking in Dionysian rituals, involving wonderment, spontaneity and
merging of conscious and unconscious in intuition. Her flowers are intoxicating, symbolising
episodic appearance of forms with roots underground providing "fantastic" vision (Bataille).
Theseus, Ariadne's lover, is appropriately present as Dionysus' counterpart, Apollo, god of
light, reason and illusory form.
All enter the labyrinth, equivalent to creativity. Theseus kills the minotaur, symbolising death
of death (blindness), and regeneration of instinctive vision. The labyrinth is not linear, but
random, signifying the collective unconscious. Here the minotaur gives birth to a dancing star
(Nietzsche), signifying creativity constituting continual constructing and deconstructing of form.
LITERATURE: STYLISTIC ANALYSIS
Chair: Vladimir M. Petrov, State Institute for Art Studies,
Moscow
Deriving Document Descriptors From Data
Richard S. Forsyth
Department of Mathematical Sciences
University of the West of England
Recently there has been a burgeoning of interest in the problem of text categorization, e.g., of
newswire stories (Hayes and Weinstein, 1991; Apté et al., 1993). However, classifying documents
is not a new problem: workers in the field of stylometry have been grappling with it for over a
hundred years (Mendenhall, 1887). Typically, they have given most attention to authorship
attribution, while more modern research in text categorization, conducted from within the
paradigm of Artificial Intelligence, has concentrated on discriminations based on content or subject
matter. Nevertheless both fields share similar aims, and it is the contention of the present author
that they could profit from being more aware of each other. Accordingly, the present study
addresses an issue common to both approaches, the problem of finding an effective set of
attributes or features for text discrimination. Stylometers, in their quest to capture consistent and
distinctive features of linguistic style, have proposed and used a wide variety of textual features or
markers (Holmes, 1994), including measures of vocabulary richness (Yule, 1944), grammatical
transition frequencies (Wickmann, 1976), rates of usage of frequent function words (Mosteller and
Wallace, 1984), and preferences for words in certain semantic categories (Martindale and
McKenzie, 1995). In many text-categorization tasks the choice of textual features is a crucial
determinant of success, yet it is not usually treated as a major focus of attention. This is often true
of AI-based text-categorization studies as well. It would be desirable if this part of the process
were better understood. This paper, therefore, reports an empirical comparison of five different
methods of textual feature-finding that: (1) do not depend on subjective judgment; (2) do not
need background knowledge external to the texts being analyzed, such as a lexicon or thesaurus;
(3) do not presuppose that the texts being analyzed are in the English language; and (4) do not
presume that words (or word-based measures) are the only possible textual descriptors. Results of
a benchmark test on 10 representative text-classification problems suggest that one of these
techniques, here designated Monte-Carlo Feature-Finding, has certain advantages that merit
consideration by future workers seeking to characterize stylistic habits efficiently without imposing
many preconceptions.
Hemispherical Features in Poetry:
A Method of Measurement
Svetlana N. Shepeleva
Institute of Russian Language, Moscow
and
Vitaly I. Batov
Institute for Personal Development, Moscow
and
Vladimir M. Petrov
State Institute for Art Studies, Moscow
To measure the degree of hemispheric dominance in poetry, 10 hypothetically left-hemispherical (L) poems and 10 hypothetically right-hemispherical (R) ones were chosen from 50
works by 25 Russian poets of the XIX - XXth centuries on the basis of "gestalt" estimations given
by 5 experts. A group of 6 experts formulated a set of 24 parameters (binary oppositions)
hypothetically evidencing L- or R-prevalence. Then 7 experts estimated the chosen 20 poems on
24 parameters, and 8 "refined" parameters were selected, those ones having relatively high
distinctive abilities. The last 8 parameters were used to select 5 "genuine-L" and 5 "genuine-R"
poems. As a result, the final test (consisting of 8 parameters, 4 L-type poems and 4 R-type ones)
was derived, and an additional experiment showed its error of type identification to be 4%.
All the procedures were accompanied by principal component analysis. Below are presented
the loadings of each of 8 selected parameters on the first factor for two versions:
a) 20 poems, 24 parameters, averaging over 7 experts;
b) 10 poems, 8 parameters, averaging over 7 experts.
In both versions the main part of total variance (48% and 83% respectively) was accounted for by
the factor of asymmetry.
_________________________________________________________________
Parameter a b
_________________________________________________________________
Rationality - Intuitivity .91 .98
Optimism - Pessimism .63 .86
Building an objective image - Pronounced subjectivism
of an image .82 .89
Preference of definite picture of the world -
Preference of uncertain picture of the world .89 .98
Active position of the author - Neutral position of
the author .65 .88
Moralizing - Ethical neutrality .81 .98
Active civic position - Pronounced individualism .86 .96
Strict narrative logic - Spontaneous, improvisational
type of theme development .68 .73
_________________________________________________________________
Sound and Sense in the Recorded Poetry of Dylan Thomas
David L. Mosley
Department of Music
Goshen College
The paper will pursue the question of whether or not the poetry of Dylan Thomas is organized
according to certain acoustic principles which might be discovered and described by the process of
transcribing his recorded poetry into musical notation and analyzing its sonic content. This
radically interdisciplinary project will necessarily draw upon the fields of literary criticism,
musicology (in the broadest sense of the term), physics, and linguistics.
With the aid of a sound digitizer I will analyze the recorded poetry of Thomas for frequency,
amplitude, and timbre. This analysis will yield a musical transcription, or score, for each of the
poems whose sonic content may be subjected to any number of modes of musical analysis. These
musical analyses will then be compared with close-readings of the poetic texts to determine the
degree of correspondence between the sonic and the semantic content of the recorded poetry.
This study will also yield a more creative product, inasmuch as I plan to use the various
transcriptions as the basis for a series of musical compositions featuring various chamber
ensembles performing with tapes of Thomas reading his poetry. These compositions will amount
to a kind of aural and/or acoustic form of literary criticism and, as such, will occupy a unique
middle-ground between the domains of artistic creation and aesthetic criticism.
As an initial step in pursuing this question I have transcribed and analyzed Thomas' reading of
his sonnet "Altarwise by Owl-light" focusing upon the elements of rhythm and pitch. This
transcription foregrounds acoustic properties present in Thomas' recitation and employs them as
commentary on the poem and its possible meanings.
Trends in the Content of Beatles Music and Lyrics
Alan N. West
Department of Psychiatry
Dartmouth Medical School
and
Colin Martindale
Department of Psychology
University of Maine
The lyrics of the Beatles were content analyzed using objective, automated measures of
regressive content and arousal potential in natural language. Results agree with Martindale's
(1990) theory of artistic evolution, which predicts uptrends in these measures over time. The
theory fits Lennon's lyrics well, Harrison's weakly, but not McCartney's. The collaborative lyrics
of Lennon and McCartney written during the early period most closely mirror overall creative
trends. Analysis of the unpredictability of the music that the Beatles composed to accompany their
lyrics shows that, as predicted by the evolutionary theory, unpredictability increased across time.
Results support the application of the theory to "low-brow", popular artistic products.
Analogies Between Cross-Cultural and Mythical Travel
William A. McCormack
Department of Psychology
Santa Clara University
and
Colin Martindale
Department of Psychology
University of Maine
Martindale has shown that across the course of literary "night journey" narratives such as the
Odyssey or Divine Comedy that primary process content exhibits an inverted U-shaped pattern.
This pattern is interesting because these narratives of rejuvenation parallel Ernst Kris's model of
creativity. Kris proposed that the discovery of novel associations require regression in service of
the ego. The current study looked to see whether similar patterns would appear in biographical
travel narratives and/or contemporary fiction relating to travel.
Martindale's Regressive Imagery Dictionary was used to analyze Paul Theroux's Great Railway
Bazaar, Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and E. M. Forster's Passage to India. The results
were significant. However, a W-shaped trend in primary process content was found. The results
raise interesting questions. What is the potential impact of cross-cultural experience on cognition?
Why are there two U-shaped patterns? Why do they appear in a work of travel fiction such as
Passage to India? How do the surges of primary process relate to the books in question? Indeed,
what do these patterns mean in terms of the Night Journey and/or this particular form of the
creative writing?
Literary Creativity in Industrial Relations Journals:
"Last One Out Switch Off the Light"
Robert Hogenraad
Department of Psychology
Université Catholique de Louvain
and
René Boulard
Department of Industrial Relations
Laval University
and
Dean McKenzie
Department of Psychological Medicine
Monash University
The leading question of the present project is that of where industrial relations, as an academic
discipline, are coming from and heading to. A dramatic case in this respect is the evolution of
symbolic thought content in the Canadian Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations journal since
the last 50 years (Hogenraad, Boulard, and McKenzie, 1994). The analysis of all the titles of this
journal showed a dramatic slackening of the capacity for symbolic thought, indicating that some
limit has been reached.
Starting from a broader data base, we analyzed here all the titles and abstracts of four scientific
journals since their inception. These journals are the Sydney-based Journal of Industrial Relations
(1959-1995), the Berkeley-based Industrial Relations (1962-1994), the London-based British
Journal of Industrial Relations (1963-1995), and the Quebec-based Relations
Industrielles/Industrial Relations updated to 1995.
This body of data is analyzed with the help of Martindale's (1990) aesthetic model of literary
evolution. The analysis of these corpuses was carried out with the PROTAN system of computer-aided textual analysis. We used the Regressive Imagery Dictionary to assess the evolution of
creativity in the titles and abstracts of these journals.
Results confirm a slackening of symbolic thought contents in the titles of the journals since the
mid 70's. Such a decline is nothing short of alarming for the theoretical coherence of the discipline
and, beyond that, for the intellectual coherence of the Western industrial world (Searle, 1995).
Among the other uses of this project is also the idea that a scientific community aware of its own
communication is likely to change its scientific behavior (Garfield, 1979).
The project provides industrial relationists with a state of their discipline. This "state of
industrial relations" cuts both backward and forward: that is, it rests on memory (the past) to make
expectations (the future). It matters little that an aesthetic literary theory can only have a small role
in matters of labor relations. No clarification is to be ignored when the issue is the management of
the coming social tensions in Europe and North America (Locke, Kochan, and Piore, 1995).
The Mathematical Muse: Temporal Progression
in Poetry and Prose
Dean P. McKenzie
Department of Psychological Medicine
Monash University
and
Colin Martindale
Department of Psychology
University of Maine
and
Robert Hogenraad
Department of Psychology
Université Catholique de Louvain
Building upon empirical research into the progression of states in psychodynamic
psychotherapy, Badalamenti and his colleagues have recently proposed that the unfolding of new
words in poems and prose passages follows an Exponential distribution, the signature of a 'Poisson
process'. Badalamenti et al. explain their findings in psychodynamic terms--a creative or
expressive urge builds up tension in poets and writers to invoke 'new' words, or rather those words
that are used for the first time in a particular piece of writing.
Although Martindale has studied exponential changes in the use of new words in a large corpus
of British poetry, the Badalamenti study was concerned with pieces of text that were only a few
hundred words long. Herdan studied much longer individual texts and found that the use of new
words decreases across the length of a text, as the availability of words available to a writer
diminishes. We shall apply computer-modelling techniques in order to further investigate the
above findings. The resulting models will be tested on real, as well ad computer-generated random
text, in order to establish whether they can tell the difference!
INVITED ADDRESS
Chair: George K. Shortess, Department of Psychology, Lehigh
University
Creativity and Music Composition
Jan Jirasek
Prague
Czech Republic
Jan Jirasek is one of the leading composers of classical music in the new Czech Republic. He
recently completed a commission for Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and Bavarian Radio. The
commission was to finish the St. Luke Passion of J. S. Bach after the ideas of Carl Orff. He has
also composed chamber, vocal and symphonic works, which have been premiered and played
through Europe. For his talk he will play some of these works and discuss the processes involved
in creating them.
INTERIOR DESIGN
Chair: Martin Krampen, Department of Visual Communication,
Hochschule der Künste
On the Structure of Room Interiors: A Study Based
on a Comparison of Data From German and American Subjects
Martin Krampen
Department of Visual Communication
Hochschule der Künste
Berlin
How do people structure the domain of room interiors? To assess how general this structuring
of interiors might be an intercultural comparison between German and American subjects was
made.
We prepared pictures of interiors of different functions and styles in the form of a card game
trying to represent as great a variety as possible. Both German and American subjects were
instructed to sort the picture cards "according to similarity". The data were analyzed by Johnson's
(1967) Hierarchical Cluster Analysis and by Multidimensional Scaling. The dimensions found by
these procedures were taken to constitute the structure of room interiors.
The sorting of the interior pictures by the German subjects resulted in a functional structure of
"wet" (kitchen, bath) vs. "dry" rooms (living, sleeping, entrance hall). Even more than their
German peers, American subjects subdivided the rooms according to function. Style did not seem
to play an important role.
In conclusion, if subjects are given the task of ordering pictures of interiors "according to
similarity" they seem to do this first by function. It is expected, however, that given the task to sort
interior pictures according to preference, subjects will pay more attention to stylistic and aesthetical
features.
Social, Structural, and Atmospheric
Qualities of Interior Design
Ute Ritterfeld
FB Eltiehungswissenschaften I
Universität Hannover
An empirically based model for environmental preferences will be proposed, which implies a
continuum of judgmental processes. It takes different qualities of information into account:
Social, structural, and atmospheric. While the structural, formal, or syntactical properties (like
complexity, novelty) do not imply any meaning by definition, the character of social information
quality is basically semantical. They inform about life styles and the status of individuals
associated with an aesthetic object.
Data support the idea that especially this social information of environmental design enables
evaluations. This aspect is labelled 'social heuristic', because its status can only be preliminary.
Further impression formation is considered to be possible by using non-semantic stimulus
properties. Atmospheric qualities (like warm-cool), however, are perceived in a holistic way,
which allows to generalize valences. Structural properties, finally, require analytical processing.
A transactional perspective is used to explain which information qualities are taken into
consideration during the process of aesthetic judgment. It depends on personal intentions as well
as on the different kind of stimuli qualities.
SUNDAY MORNINGSOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ART
Chair: Vladimir Koneni, Department of Psychology, University of
California, San Diego
Moral Potential of Personality and the Need for Art
Vladimir M. Petrov
State Institute for Art Studies
Moscow
Some sociological and psychological problems require knowledge about relations between the
general development of an individual (and first of all his social and moral features) and the
intensity of his need for different kinds of art. Such an investigation was carried out using about
8000 respondents in 5 regions of Russia (20 cities and towns, 20 villages).
To measure social and moral features, a questionnaire was compiled containing 79 indicators
which describe various kinds of the respondent's behaviour and his psychological attitudes. The
data covering all these indicators were aggregated in an "index of moral potential" which was
based on the structural peculiarities of the system of features as well as on the theory of hyperbolic
distributions. This index uses a ratio scale, and it is not dependent on the concrete indicators used.
Thanks to this method, it became possible to pick the sample of respondents with the highest
values of this index, and to analyze their contacts with art (which were also present in the
questionnaire).
The results showed moral potential has a strong influence on the intensity of contacts with most
kinds of art (e.g., for 50% and 10% of the townspeople with higher values of the index, theatre-going was respectively 1.5 and 2.6 times more intensive than for all the townspeople). Meanwhile
other kinds of art (e.g., literature) are almost independent of moral potential. Such data were used
in cultural policy.
Perceived Change in Attitudes Towards Art
Elbert Temme, Paul Adriaanse, and Carl Rohde
Department of Mass Communication
Utrecht University
Analysis of media content has shown a less highbrow approach towards contemporary art over
the last ten years. There seems to have been a tendency to enhance public accessibility of the arts
by governmental institutions as well as by the press. Another aspect is the post-modernist
approach in the world of arts itself which led to more "tongue-in-cheek" way of presenting
products of art.
From these social-cultural observations the hypothesis was derived that, presumably as a result
of the change in public information, opinions about 'contemporary art' have changed over the last
ten years. In particular it was expected that art would be perceived nowadays as less elitist and
exalted than it was ten years ago. It was also expected that this would be accompanied by the
enhancement of attitude and aesthetic appreciation.
Two groups of sixty subjects (sexes equally divided) were investigated, representing two
generations, one had a mean age of about 50 years, the other of about 23 years. For both groups
the same direction of change in (self perceived) attitudes was expected, be it that a larger change
was expected for the latter group. Results confirmed these expectations.
Cyclic Processes in Art Culture:
Information Approach
Alexander Drikker
State Russian Museum
St. Petersburg
Within the framework of an information model, in which the art culture is considered as a
complex system characterized by aspiration to escalation of rate of specific information processing,
it can be found a common interpretation different cycles in art culture. (The "artist-spectator"
communication channel is described as Shannon's channel. The rate of specific information
transmission is evaluated according to Shannon-Taller's formula).
The tendency to increase information processing rate is realized first of all as periodic change
of intensification of the art effect. The alternation of the "barocco-like" and "renaissance-like"
styles (short wave cycles) reflects this information algorithm.
The change of large-scale intervals is defined by the changed general attitude which demands
not only the modernization the art modes (change of styles) but also new art types. Variations of
art languages are variations of information media and systems for recording of information. The
birth of new art types is inseparably linked with new, not known before information media and/or
systems for recording it.
Such a link can be traced distinctly on the border between the Middle Ages and modern times.
The mass appearance of new media, new systems for recording of information, and the change of
art types in the twentieth century let us define this century as the boundary of the New and the
Newest time.
The Institutional Approach to the Definition of
Poetry: Some Heretical Thoughts
David Fishelov
Department of Comparative Literature
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The emphasis on the social context of artistic activity has become a predominant paradigm in
aesthetic thought. One variation of this trend is the institutional approach to the definition of
poetry, according to which a text gains an aesthetic, poetic value, thanks to a decision taken by the
appropriate cultural institutions (poets, literary critics, educational systems, etc.). In my paper I
will challenge this approach as it is presented by philosophers of art (e.g., George Dickie) and,
more specifically, by some literary theorists (e.g., Stanley Fish). I will argue that readers identify
poetic qualities in texts prior to, and independently of, the institutional context in which these texts
are presented. Thus, readers tend to attribute poetic status to texts even when these texts are
presented to them in a non-poetic context, and, in a complementary manner, texts that are
presented as part of the institutionalized body of poetry may be described as lacking poetic traits,
and their inclusion in the institutionalized body of poetry would draw special, added explanation.
In order to corroborate my hypothesis that the poetic status of a text is not exclusively
determined by its institutional form of presentation, I will conduct a few empirical tests in which
students will be asked to identify poetic qualities in texts, and to categorize different types of texts
presented in various forms and contexts.
The British Avant-Garde: A Philosophical Analysis
Deborah J. Fitzgerald
Department of Philosophy
Furman University
The paper will explore the relationship between the British contemporary art scene, and cultural
and philosophical ideas. The September 1994 issue of Art News has an article entitled "Great
Britain '94. British Art Today" where it is maintained that "Britain is flirting with a cultural
renaissance as museums and established galleries take cues from a feisty avant-garde..." It
discusses grass roots initiatives such as the 1988 "Freeze" show organized by Damien Hurst, and
that of Simon Patterson, a conceptual artist, who warps diagrams, e.g., replacing the names of
train stops on London Underground maps with those of philosophers. Mona Hatoum's attempt to
create "Fundamental unease" is also discussed; as is Cornelia Parker's idea that visual appeal is not
the most important thing, but rather the questions that are set up in an attempt to create an art that
she describes as "almost invisible" is what is central. One of her works (which consists of rocks
hanging from the ceiling) is entitled "Neither From Nor Towards," a line taken from a poem by T.
S. Eliot. I wish to analyze such concepts as "almost invisible" and "fundamental unease," and
others used by the British avant-garde in several of the following ways: a) in terms of the context
of main stream British conservative art culture (Nicholos Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, has
said that on the whole Britain tends to look back rather than forward, b) in terms of a
comparison/contrast with the contemporary American artist Mark Tansey (who recently had a
traveling retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), who talks about creating
"parables in paint," and c) most importantly in terms of Wittgenstein's concept of "seeing-as."
I will use philosophical methodology in the research for the paper. My sources will be
philosophical books and articles, as well as articles in art journals. This paper will expand the
knowledge of this subject by being interdisciplinary in nature, as well as being cross-cultural.
Systemic or Institutional Approaches to Literature:
An Empirical Analysis of Ukrainian-Australian Literature
Sonia Mycak
School of English
University of New South Wales
In a single wave, Ukrainians immigrated to Australia as persons displaced by the second world
war and made political refugees through Soviet occupation of their homeland. Despite the difficult
conditions under which Ukrainians migrated, on arrival in Australia they immediately organised
themselves into a visible community, establishing an impressive body of infrastructure (churches,
meeting halls, schools, newspapers and presses, cultural and artistic associations and the like).
With this a literary life also flourished.
Now, some forty years later, there is a significant body of literature written by Ukrainians who
arrived during that period of Australian-born Ukrainians writing with a consciousness of their
ethnic ancestry. While some initial work has been done analysing the texts according to genre or
theme no one has yet chosen to document the ways in which this body of writing actually came
into being or the forces which have since secured its existence. In this paper I will attempt to do
just that: explore who is or was writing, the means of authorship and the infrastructures
responsible for productivity.
In short, in an approach which sees the body of texts as an identifiable literary system, I
propose to explore the emergence and development of Ukrainian writing in Australia. In
accordance with systems and institution-building theories, I will name the agents responsible for
the production, publication, distribution and reception of texts. In this I will not be concerned with
thematic content or meaning of the texts, but with the socio-historical conditions which have
allowed the texts to be produced. This will include the role played by cultural and literary
organisations, prominent individuals, academies, journals and newspapers, artistic association,
prizes and awards. I will also consider the part played by institutions outside the Ukrainian
community: the influence of other artistic or literary communities, links with other Ukrainian
diasporas, funding bodies of the Australian government, and the like.
It is my contention that Ukrainian-Australian literature is an excellent example of a literary
system: it is readily identifiable, contained, and an obvious effect of socio-historical conditions. It
is thus perfectly suited to empirical analysis, the results of which would markedly enhance
accepted accounts of Australian literary history. At this point in time the individuals concerned are
able to be consulted and the organisations which have had the most influence are still in existence;
however, the fact that the community is ageing makes this kind of analysis a pressing concern.
Whilst the aim of this paper is to explicate the development and nature of Ukrainian writing in
Australia, it should also provide a more general account of the ways in which institution-building
and systems theories may be used in literary analysis. In addition, in examining a minority
literature within a host country, this analysis should raise some interesting issues about the
usefulness of empirical models of literature in accounting for the growing body of 'new' or
multicultural literatures. I would also hope that it provide new insight as to how a national
literature is formed and maintained and how it relates to other national systems.
THE VISUAL ARTS: MEASUREMENT
Chair: Pavel Machotka, Department of Psychology, University of
California, Santa Cruz
A Taxonomy of Ambiguities in Decorative Band Patterns
Marius Hardonk and Frans Boselie
NICI
University of Nijmegan
Ambiguity plays a central role in the arts. It is ubiquitous in poetry (Empson), music (Meyer),
and in the visual arts (Gombrich). Although some distinctions - especially the one between
disjunctive and conjunctive ambiguity - have a rather established position in the literature
(Berlyne), a systematic taxonomy of types of ambiguities is still missing. Ambiguities are a
dominant feature of many decorative band patterns. In our research on cross-cultural aesthetic
universals in decorative band patterns we therefore are interested in the possible role of ambiguity
in the appreciation of these patterns. Therefore, we decided to develop a taxonomy of ambiguities
for this class of artworks. Our approach consists of two main phases. First, we enumerate and
classify different possible perceptual interpretations that can be made of band decorations.
Second, we examine which pairs of interpretations constitute ambiguities and we provide a
classification of these ambiguities. In doing so, we distinguish 8 classes and 26 types of
ambiguities for this class of decorative patterns. With this approach we hope to realize a useful
and complete overview and taxonomy of different types of ambiguities that can occur in band
patterns. We think this taxonomy can also be useful in other domains of visual perception
involved with equivocalities of interpretation. One of these domains certainly is the field of the
visual arts.
Expert Agreement - Myth or Reality?
Andrea Kárpáti
Department of Teacher Training
Eötvös Loránd University
Between 1993-1995, in the course of the Dutch-Hungarian Project for the Modernization of
Final Examinations, 500 students in 36 Hungarian secondary grammar schools completed art and
design assignments selected from 24 topics offered by the Dutch examination board, Cito. In the
course of three months, students worked for 28 hours individually and produced collections of
plans, sketches, a research logbook, variations and a final work in two- or three-dimensional form.
A 10-item set of criteria was developed by D. Schönau, Cito, and the author of this paper
according to which internal judges (the art teachers of the students) and external judges (a panel of
artists and educational researchers) judged the collections.
60 collections representing 2 two-dimensional tasks were selected for an international jury
session where 30 Hungarian and 6 foreign art teachers judged 20 randomly selected works each to
validate and optimize the assessment instrument developed for judging portfolios of art work. The
two tasks chosen for the validation of the instrument are labeled 'Gaze at infinity' and 'Wallpaper'.
In the first task, only the title was given for an expressive drawing or painting. The second task
contained a description: wallpapers had to be designed for a seaside hotel that represented both
the local environment and the function of the rooms: nursery, bedroom and restaurant. Thus, the
judgment of a free expression task could be compared with that of a design task. In this report the
'Gaze at infinity' data will be analyzed in more detail, and the differences between the judgment
results of the two tasks will be pointed out.
Four kinds of data are available in this project:
(i) Ratings by judges or raters with respect to ten different criteria;
(ii) Global judgments from the same raters who gave the ratings on the criteria. These global
judgments are marks on a ten-point scale (from 1 to 10), and were given after the ratings per
criterion were given. They might be viewed as a kind of summary of the detailed ratings per
criterion.
(iii) First impressions, given by different raters who did not judge the works using the criteria,
also on a ten-point scale, ranging from 1 to 10. In fact, the raters of the 'wallpaper' project gave
their first impressions on the 'Gaze at infinity' collections and vice versa. (This is why the two
projects are not completely independent.)
(iv) All the collections used in the present research are examination works of students and have
been judged in the context of the school examinations. The marks given at these examinations at
the schools by the respective classroom teachers are also available in the present project and will be
considered in the second report. The school marks consist of three ratings (on a ten-point scale
ranging from 1 to 10). The first is the mark given by the own teacher, the second is the mark
given by an external judge, and the third (which is the only mark that counts for the examinations)
is a compromise between the mark given by the own teacher and that given by the external judge.
This final mark results from the discussion between the teacher and the external judge in case of
disagreement.
The paper will introduce the list of criteria with illustrations of art work representing solutions
of different quality for each criterion, explain the mathematical procedure specifically developed to
analyze juror bias and criterion validity and show to what extend jurors are able to give an
objective judgment of student portfolios.
Two-Dimensional Space for Measuring
Subjective Emotional Response
Emery Schubert
School of Music and Music Education
University of New South Wales
A major problem in empirical aesthetics research is measuring emotional response. Methods of
attaining such data consist usually of physiological devices or verbal inventories. Among the more
novel approaches to measuring emotional response is the 2-Dimensional Emotion Space (2D-ES)
which, like verbal methods, measures a cognitive judgment. However, the 2D-ES has the distinct
advantage of not requiring the subject to respond verbally. Instead, the subject selects a point on
the 2D-ES that best represents the emotion expressed by the stimulus in question. A detailed
investigation of the literature and controlled pilot studies were used to refine the instrument. The
present configuration of the 2D-ES has a vertical axis which represents valence (negative-positive).
The results of a pilot study are discussed in which pictures of faces and words are used as test
stimuli.
The Influence of Ethnic Referents on
the Perceived Information Content of Pictures
Paul Locher and Katherine Kashmanian
Department of Psychology
Montclair State University
and
Calvin Nodine
Department of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania
This study examined the question: Does the presence of ethnic referents in art differentially
influence Blacks' and Caucasians' evaluations of the information content of pictures? Subjects, 50
male and female Blacks and 50 male and female Caucasians, rated each of twelve art stimuli on
the fourteen adjective pairs of Mehrabian and Russell's Information Rate Scale (IRS) and for
"pleasure." The IRS provides a measure of the information content of a visual display that reflects
both physical and statistical properties of a composition (e.g., simple-complex, redundant-varied)
and viewer familiarity with its content (e.g., familiar-novel, common-rare). Stimuli represented a
variety of picture styles both with and without Black and Nonblack figurative content. Analyses
revealed that while ethnic identify differentially influenced the aesthetic pleasure derived from the
stimuli, ethnic referents did not affect perceived information content of the works as measured by
the IRS. Factor analyses performed separately for ethnic groups on ratings for the fourteen IRS
items for each stimulus revealed very similar factor structures for Blacks and Caucasians for a
given composition. This finding demonstrates that the IRS provides a "clean" estimate of the
information content of art stimuli, that is, one not significantly influenced by viewer differences
due to ethnicity. As such, the IRS is a potentially useful tool for the quantification and analysis of
the information content of visual art stimuli for experimental aesthetics research involving stimulus
complexity.
The Scale "Catharsis - Anticatharsis"
for the Evaluation of Artistic Influence
Valentin E. Semenov
Department of Psychology
Saint Petersburg State University
Catharsis is the highest phenomenon of art's positive influence on the recipient. I consider
catharsis as a system in emotional, aesthetical, and ethical aspects. Anticathrsis (this word is the
author's neologism) is the extreme manifestation of art's negative influence. Different degrees of
positive and negative emotions and senses are placed on a continuum of the scale between its
positive and negative poles. The center of the scale is the space "zero" in which emotions and
senses are absent.
For qualitative evaluation and quantitative measure of art's influence, the scale "catharsis -
anticatharsis" (C.-A.) includes three special scales:
- the emotional scale (from the cathartic, and positive emotion to the negative, and gloomy
one);
- the aesthetic scale (from senses of beauty, and harmony to senses of ugliness, and
disharmony);
- the ethical scale (from senses of kindness, and truth to senses of evil, and lie).
These three scales can have 7 scores, as on the scale of the "semantic differential". They are
summarized in the general ranking scale "catharsis - anticatharsis".
Evidently, different artistic works, art forms, and art trends will receive different evaluations on
the scale "catharsis - anticatharsis". I suppose that contemporary literature and arts in Russia have
more anticathartic character than the cathartic one. This phenomenon is connected with the crisis
character of the social psychological climate in Russia in the late 1980s - 1990s, because art is a
subsystem of the general system of society. In my report I shall present the results of my empirical
findings.
THE PERFORMING ARTS
Chair: Paolo Bonaiuto, Department of Psychology, 1st University
of Rome
Individual and Professional Differences
in Perception of Theater Plays
D. A. Leontiev and L. V. Lagutina
Department of Psychology
Moscow State University
Experimental study was aimed at revealing individual differences in theater perception in
students of a theater institute and students of other specializations. The set of assessment methods
included a free description technique (revealing the character of involvement in art through
individual strategies of describing several plays), a value spectrum technique (revealing existential
values associated with given abstract notions or concrete objects), both of them elaborated by the
first author, a special enquiry to test subjects' competence in theater art, and some personality
inventories. Administration included factor analysis, cluster analysis, reliability estimation after
one-year retest, and analysis of correlations. The results showed substantial differences between
theater students and non-theater students, as well as stable individual patterns in non-theater
students. Emotionality-rationality proved to be the differentiating parameter. Some measures of
individual peculiarities of theater perception significantly correlate with personality variables
connected with personal maturity.
Aesthetic Attitudes to Sport and Dance:
The Construction of Seven Scales
Patricia Sanderson
School of Education
University of Manchester
There is a virtual absence of attitude research on an aesthetic dimension to either sport or
dance, including valid and reliable attitude scales, particularly with reference to adolescents.
Accordingly, aesthetic attitude scales were developed which were 'grounded' in high school
students' audiotaped responses to a videotape; 139 statements were selected and included, with the
addition of a 5-point Likert-type scale, in a questionnaire administered to a sample of 368 boys and
girls, aged 11-16 in four high schools in North West of England. Principal components analysis
revealed 7 valid and reliable scales, 4 concerned with dance and three with sport, accounting for a
total of 58 statements. These scales were subsequently administered to 1668 students supplied by
19 schools drawn from the main geographic areas of England. Scale reliabilities were established
by means of the alpha (internal consistency) coefficients obtained with each sample. Evidence of
scale validities was obtained from product-moment coefficients of correlation; construct validities
were established from a factor analyses of (i) the intercorrelations of all 58 items comprising the
scales and (ii) the individual sets of items constituting each scale; content and internal validities
were also obtained.
Emotional Imagery Vizualization in Ballet Performance
Leonid Ya. Dorfman, Vladislav G. Ivanov
and Tatjana A. Kazarinova
State Institute of Arts and Culture
Perm
The present study is part of a project aiming at examining emotional styles (L. Ya. Dorfman,
1988-1994) embedded in choreographical image vizualization production. Earlier we found that
extraversion and the operations of emotional imagery vizualization can jointly influence dancers'
performance (L. Ya. Dorfman, V. G. Ivanov, 1991). We now wanted to examine the evidence in
favor of the claim that the operations of emotional imagery vizualization (OEIV) can mediate the
performance and extraversion-introversion of dancers.
44 trained dancers (males and females) were asked to compose and perform 4 exercises, 'Joy',
'Sorrow', 'Fear', 'Anger' using appropriate musical pieces. In the first part, subjects performed
graphic actions on paper (pictograms) in explicating the vizualization of their emotional imagery.
In the second part, the subjects composed and performed the exercises on stage. Later, in a few
months, the subjects showed these plastic exercises to experts.
Extraversion-introversion was measured by Cattell's 'wideness of classification' and 'unstructed
pictures' validated as temperament traits in Merlin's school. The following OEIV were specified
and measured: (a) the number of singled out phases; (b) the number of drawn figures; (c) the
number of figures per phase. 3 experts estimated the plastic exercises in respect with 7 special
parameters: (1) vocabulary, (2) composition, (3) the correspondence between a plastic exercise
and the music emotiogenic content, (4) a deep of theme's experiencing, (5) expressiveness, (6)
emancipation, (7) general impression.
A between-subject design was used. In order to assess an intermediate function of OEIV, the
sample was divided into 2 extreme subgroups on subjects' OEIV. Then Spearman correlations
between the subjects' extraversion-introversion scores and experts' rating scores of subjects'
performance were computed in each subgroup separately. If significant correlations were in one
subgroup only or there were positive correlations in one subgroup but negative ones in the other,
then these results were seen as supporting the assumption about an intermediate function of OEIV
as these differentially shape associations between the performance and extraversion-introversion of
dancers.
READER RESPONSE STUDIES
Chair: Dean P. McKenzie, Department of Psychological Medicine,
Monash University
Aesthetic Attitude and Insight-oriented Reading:
the "Realization" of Personal Meanings in Literary Texts
Don Kuiken, David S. Miall, Ria Busink, Robert Cey
Department of Psychology and Department of English
University of Alberta
Items from the Insight scale of the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ) reflect an approach
to reading in which the literary text guides recognition of previously unrecognized aspects of the
reader's life-world (e.g., "Reading literature makes me sensitive to aspects of my life that I usually
ignore"). Prior studies (Miall and Kuiken, 1995) have indicated that the Insight scale is correlated
with personality measures of openness to experience (e.g., Absorption; Tellegen, 1982), making it
a potentially important dimension in discussions of how reading alters and enriches the reader's
sense of self.
In a construct validation study involving 251 students in a first-year undergraduate English
course, we found that the Insight scale was positively correlated with how frequently students read
poetry, as well as novels, as a leisure activity. However, unlike the Leisure Escape scale (also from
the LRQ), the Insight scale was not reliably associated with the reading of romances, fantasy, or
science fiction novels; and, unlike the Concern with Author scale, neither was it associated with the
reading of biographies. Also, when we asked these same students about reactions to the texts
assigned in their classes, we found that the Insight scale was predictive of personal engagement
during reading. For example, among 133 students who were asked to read "Obasan" by Joy
Kogawa, insight-oriented readers were more likely to (1) adopt the perspective of the main
character, (2) report that a character reminded them of someone that they knew, and, (3) say that
reading this novel made them sensitive to aspects of their lives that they typically ignored.
Also, in an experimental study involving 46 advanced undergraduate English students, we
examined the particular activities by which insight-oriented reading may have its effects. These
students read "The Trout", a short story by Sean O'Faolain, and marked six passages that they
found particularly "striking or evocative." After reading, they returned to those passages and
answered a series of specific questions. Also, two aspects of reader orientation were
experimentally varied: (1) prior instructions alerting readers to the affective and imaginal
connotations of style (style sensitization), and (2) instructions encouraging readers to disengage
from extrinsic or instrumental concerns (aesthetic attitude). Insight-oriented readers who did not
receive the style sensitization manipulation but who did receive the aesthetic attitude manipulation
were especially likely to report that the concluding passages of the story "increased awareness" of
feelings that they "typically ignore." Thus, experimental manipulation of the aesthetic attitude
indicates that a non-instrumental approach enables insight-oriented readers to more fully engage
the literary text and discern aspects of their lives that they typically ignore.
The Procedure of Prosaic Text's Rhythmical
Reconstruction as a Basis of Sense Comprehension
Rauf Karakozov
Ministry of Education
Baku, Azerbaijan
In my previous works (R. Karakozov, 1988, 1994) have been examined the process of sense
comprehension of texts with different types of temporal-spatial organization. For example, I have
examined texts with "classical" linear structuring, consequently developed plot and "time"
movement (Chekhov's "Fear" story); texts with nontraditional, nonlinear "reverted" structure
without movement of plot events and without "time" (Faulkner's "The Sound and The Fury"
novel); and texts with nonlinked, opened structure with the parallel "time" (Akutagava's "In the
Thicket" story).
My research has shown that in all three cases the process of disclosing the meaning and sense
plan of the text is mediated by the particular forms of reader's mental activity which included the
reader's procedures of reconstructing and variating the plot lines, detecting the rhythmical settings
and so on. These forms were defined as chronotopical schemas of reading activity. It has been
shown that the process of detecting meanings and discovering sense of the text requires not only
"passive" reading of the original story with the appropriate plot movement but "active" producing
and looking out for different possible variants of plot (events) movement.
In order to disclose the sense plan of the text the reader needs to "stretch" the plot structure,
unfolding the spatial-temporal organization of the text. Due to this activity, the subject becomes
able to reveal the rhythmical sets that allowed him to disclose the sense plan of the text.
Basing on these considerations I conclude that the process of rhythmical processing constitutes
the mechanism of sense comprehension and sense producing. Obviously, this phenomenon
derives from the specific function of the rhythmical set to join the part and the whole, as was
shown in my previous work.
Ethical Effects of Reading Stories
Jemeljan Hakemulder
Department of Literature
Utrecht University
This paper consists of three sections. In the first part it will be argued briefly that most of our
central conceptions of literary communication are related to psychological effects on readers, and
that these effects often have bearing on readers' attitudes, norms, and moral maturity. Secondly,
the results of a systematic survey will be presented. What evidence is available to support our
expectations regarding the effects of reading (literary) stories? Thirdly, this paper will look at an
experiment examining some contemporary hypotheses (by Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and
Frank Palmer). It was examined what effects reading stories may have on readers' moral self-concept (using Markus' theory of personality), and "human knowledge" (using Zillman's concept
of deliberate empathy). Furthermore, it was explored what role story perspective and story
outcome may play in all this.
D. E. BERLYNE MEMORIAL ADDRESS
Chair: Colin Martindale, Department of Psychology, University of
Maine
Going Beyond Berlyne: Is Pleasure and Emotion?
Gerald Cupchik
Life Sciences Division
University of Toronto
Daniel Berlyne made pleasure and interest a focus of his research programme, following in the
tradition of Gustav Fechner, the founder of our discipline. Pleasure and interest were tied to
stimulus uncertainty according to inverted-U and monotonic functions, respectively. He also wrote
about the ecological properties of stimuli which evoke emotions such as happiness and sadness
through association with pleasure and pain. How should we conceptualize relations between
pleasure and interest, on the one hand, and emotions such as happiness and sadness, on the other?
This question touches on fundamental issues in the area of emotion as well as in psychological
aesthetics. The argument will be made that pleasure and interest are feelings and as such are
governed by mechanisms that shape bodily states. Happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are
emotions that require the meaningful interpretation of social contexts in everyday life, literature, or
art.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
SIR FRANCIS GALTON ADDRESS
Chair: Hans J. Eysenck, Institute of Psychiatry, University of
London
Historiometric Methods in Empirical Aesthetics
Dean Keith Simonton
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis
What makes great art great? Are aesthetic judgments purely subjective, or do they have at least
some minimal grounding in the objective attributes of artistic creations? How much does a
creative product in art, literature, or music reflect the context in which it was composed, whether
the personal experiences of the creator or the impersonal conditions of the sociocultural milieu?
These are surely among the most profound questions that can be asked in empirical aesthetics. Yet
they are also issues that are not easily answered using traditional methodologies, such as the
laboratory studies of experimental aesthetics. I argue that historiometry provides a methodological
strategy that is uniquely designed for dealing with these eternal enigmas. This argument is
illustrated by presenting the highlights of my own applications of this technique to great literature
(especially drama and poetry) and to classical music (including symphonies and operas). I close
with discussion of the limitations of the approach.
SYMPOSIUM: PROPORTION IN EMPIRICAL AESTHETICS
Chair: Holger Höge, Department of Psychology, University of
Oldenburg
The Golden Section Phantom
Frans Boselie
NICI
University of Nijmegen
Recently, an extensive review of psychological research on the aesthetics of the golden section
has been published (Green, C. 'All that glitters...A review of psychological research on the
aesthetics of the golden section' Perception, 1995, 24, 937-968).
The author, after examining empirical studies dating from the mid-19th century up to now,
concludes that there is a real psychological effect associated with the golden section, but that it is
very sensitive to careless methodological practices.
Contrary to Green's conclusions, the experimental literature allows only one conclusion: the
golden section has no special perceptual aesthetic attractivity. I will adduce arguments in support
of this conclusion.
The Golden Section Revisited: Information as a Stimulus
Cathy Beyers and Vladimir M. Petrov
State Institute for Art Studies
Moscow
Some approaches explain estimations of different forms, but very rarely an approach is capable
of joining both basic theoretical concepts and fundamental psychological laws. A model based on
information theory describes the process of perception of any form as a comparison of its principal
dimensions. For instance, in the case of a rectangle with sides a and b its area (ab) is compared
with the square a2 formed by its lesser side. Then for the "unbalanced" (remaining" area, (ab-a2),
the probability p of a "point of visual fixation" being located here, equals p = (ab-a2)/ab = 1-x,
where x = a/b is the proportion of a rectangle. So, according to C. Shannon, the information
carried by such a form is I = p ld p = (x-1) ld (1-x). This function has its only maximum, at x = 1-1/e = .63, which is close to the golden section (.62).
It then becomes possible to compare empirical data concerning estimations of different
rectangles and the quantity of information they carry. When information I is a stimulus, then the
reaction R should be determined by S. S. Stevens' formula: R = kIn, where k and n are constants,
or log R = log k + n log I. So the psychophysical constant n is nothing else but a slope of the
appropriate linear dependence, this constant reflecting the "weight" of various stimuli of a different
nature, e.g., n = .33 for the intensity of light, n = 3.5 for the strength of electrical current. For the
quantity of information (carried by different forms) G. T. Fechner's experimental data fully
coincide with Stevens' formula, giving n = 21.2 for preferences of rectangles and n = 20.5 for their
rejections. Such high values of n point to a quite important role of information in the perception
of forms. As well the totality of empirical data (e.g., sizes of paintings) shows that they are in
agreement with the basic information model.
A New Experimental Look at the "Golden Section"
Vladimir J. Koneni and Robert Kodama
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego
The paper will discuss the results of four new experiments that address a classical, but elusive,
question of psycho-aesthetics--the hedonic appeal of the "golden section." Two sets of stimuli
were used, "Vases" (set V) and "Paintings" (set P). Members of set V were vase-shaped cutouts,
subdivided into golden-section and geometric-series mathematically-related subsets. In Experiment
1, the two series of vases were projected on a screen one by one and the subjects "placed" them on
a line in their booklets that represented an imaginary mantelpiece. Do the subjects divide the line
to obtain the golden section? Are members of the golden-section series placed differently than
controls? In Experiment 2, subjects physically placed the vase cutouts on a mantelpiece model "as
they would do it in their living-room." In Experiment 3, professional painters sketched both (a)
vase cutouts positioned at golden-section and non-golden-section spots on the mantelpiece, and (b)
"main features" of members of set P, paintings which either contained or did not contain golden-section elements (e.g., in window frames, house shapes, etc.). In Experiment 4, painters and
nonpainters evaluated the pleasingness and interestingness of renditions from Experiment 3 that
either did or did not incorporate the golden section. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects showed
systematic preferences, but they were not for the golden section. Experiments 3 and 4 are still in
progress.
The Shape of Things: But Not the Golden Section
J. Craig Clarke
Department of Psychology
Salisbury State University
and
George K. Shortess
Department of Psychology
Lehigh University
Contrary to predictions from the golden section hypothesis, previous work with high art has
found that with paintings, the median ratio of the distribution of long side/short side ratios is about
1.3. The present study extends these results to popular art and a variety of other two dimensional
objects in popular culture. Some discussion of the significance will be presented.
The Golden Section Hypothesis: Its Last Funeral
Holger Höge
Department of Psychology
University of Oldenburg
As there are so many results on the golden section hypothesis showing contradictory outcomes
it seemed recommendable to replicate Fechner's study. Most other studies trying to find support
for the hypothesis made some variations in experimental conditions or the material applied. Thus,
it was necessary to replicate Fechner's experiment as far as possible: giving the same proportions,
using white cards on black ground. Other specifics could not be kept constant (e.g., Ss for
obvious reasons) because Fechner's report on the experiment is not very precise. However, those
measures which most likely did influence the outcome but are regarded as flaws in experimental
procedures were replicated as exactly as Fechner reported them (demand characteristics). This is
true especially for the kind of instruction used: as he did not only ask for the personal preference
of the S but much more insisted that the S should indicate what proportion might be preferred 'in
general' this instruction was used throughout and not only in the case of a S that refused the task -
as in Fechner's study.
As a full replication is not possible, it will be discussed in detail what follows from the outcome
of our investigation, showing that the golden section is most likely not the preferred proportion -
under the conditions realized. Sure, this research is only quasi-experimental and, hence, inevitably
has some restrictions with respect to the strength of the conclusions to be drawn, however, the nice
peak of preference Fechner reported on the golden section seems to be an artifact.
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
Chair: Robert Francès, Department of Psychology, Universitè de
Paris-X
Expert Knowledge of Skilled Musical Performance
William Forde Thompson
Department of Psychology
York University
and
C. T. Patrick Diamond and Laura-Lee Balkwill
Joint Centre for Teacher Development
University of Toronto
The psychology of performance, with its focus on experimental control, often overlooks the
very nuances that are crucial to performing musicians. In particular, no psychological studies have
addressed the individual and shared processes by which expert musicians evaluate skilled musical
performances. In this study, professional musicians were asked to adjudicate six performances by
established concert pianists of a Chopin etude. Repertory grid was used to elicit five personal
constructs and one supplied construct of performances. Performances were rated on each
construct, and ratings subjected to cluster and principal-components analysis. Adjudicators
engaged several musical constructs not previously considered in psychological research on
performance. Results are discussed in view of the current gap between the psychology, and the
adjudication, of musical performance.
Childhood Experience and Musical Expertise:
A Serendipitous Finding
H. F. Gavin
School of Human Studies
University of Teesside
Musical prowess acquired skill or inherited talent? In recent years the nature/nurture debate
has been focused on musicianship. As with many aspects of psychology, the deliberations have
come to no conclusion. The democratic view is that everyone has the ability to be musical, it is
simply that practice makes perfect. What child, pressed to play scales every day, has not heard
that? The alternative view, that musical genius is born, not crafted, examines inherited traits to
determine any association with musicianship. This paper expresses no partisan position, but
describes research examining early experience of music amongst people exhibiting different levels
of musical expertise. The distinctions in early experience are described together with their
implications, and suggestions for further study.
Relationships Between 'Long' and 'Short'
Emotional Preferences in Musical Performance
Leonid Ya. Dorfman, Elene V. Barachkova,
Vladimir I. Detkov, and Tatjana I. Chebikyna
State Institute of Arts and Culture
Perm
The meaningful role of emotions in musical performance suggests that there must be some
emotional mechanisms for generating choice of music pieces by performers. As a point of
departure, we assume that emotional preferences (EP) can influence on selecting music pieces. EP
are not actual, but rather future emotional experiences that exist as emotional images at the present
and function as internal objectives of performer emotional styles (Dorfman, 1988-1994).
EP may be specified as 'long' and 'short' ones. Whereas 'long' EP face at a distant indefinite
future, 'short' EP face at the nearest one. Abzalova, Kolos, and Solovieva (1991) comparing
factor matrix data of different samples showed that there are some closeness and difference
between 'long' and 'short' EP. However, we now would like to revise these data on the same
sample.
51 musical performers-students were asked to select and range 10 musical pieces in their
repertoire with respect to their preferences. As for 'long' EP, the subjects ranged pieces as though
they have 'unrestricted' technical faculties. As for 'short' EP, the subjects ranged pieces in facing to
their musical practice during the last one or two years. In both cases, a sequence of preferred
artworks was obtained (a reference sequence). Later on, the subjects had to mark how they would
like to perform each of the preferred pieces in the emotional aspects by means of the Test of
emotional experiences induced by music (TEE-M) (Dorfman, and Shaiko, 1989, Dorfman, 1996).
The sequences of emotional variables were also obtained. EP ('long' and 'short' ones are
separately) were assessed by correlating reference sequence scores with the sequences of
emotional variables scores. Then a factor analysis was done on these data; EP were measured for
extroverts and introverts (R. B. Cattell's questionnaire was used) separately.
The general results we obtained are that 'long' and 'short' EP are associated, both in extroverts
and introverts subgroups. In an extroverts subgroup, 'long' and 'short' EP are close to one variable
but are opposite on others. In an introverts subgroup, 'long' and 'short' EP consist of alternate
contents. In both subgroups, the contribution of 'short' EP is more powerful than of 'long' EP in
'integral' EP.
Thus, 'long' and 'short' EP being linked one to another, both generate selecting musical pieces
by performers.
An Empirical Study of Musical Improvisation:
The Interrelations of Competition, Creativity,
Technical Goodness, and Overall Liking
Jacob Eisenberg and William Forde Thompson
Department of Psychology
York University
In the study, we explored the relationship between competition, creativity, complexity, technical
goodness, and overall liking in piano improvisations. Sixteen musicians created piano
improvisations under conditions of competition or noncompetition. Improvisations were evaluated
by expert judges using an adaption of Amabile's (1983) Consensual Assessment Technique. Using
multiple regression, ratings of overall liking were best modeled by a linear combination of
creativity ratings and technical goodness ratings, with a multiple R value of 0.72. The results
reveal that mean ratings for all four scales were higher for improvisations done in noncompetitive
conditions, especially for creativity and overall liking ratings. Results are discussed with respect to
both expert knowledge and the influence of competition on the creative process.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Chair: W. Ray Crozier, School of Education, University of Wales
Voyeurism and After: Photographers and "Freaks"
Halla Beloff
International Social Science Institute
University of Edinburgh
Photographers have always been fascinated by the appearance of out of the ordinary people,
whether they were individuals from exotic cultures, from another class, 'lunatics' or people who are
physically damaged. Theorists of photography have written extensively about voyeurism. We, as
the readers of photographs, are also involved. Snatched or posed, there must be an element of
intrusion. Some photographers, like Diane Arbus, have been brave enough to write about their
fascination and have even to admit that they were doing something 'naughty'. Developing the
argument visually, a survey of independent photographers' images from the C19 to today, will
focus on physical differences. These art images allow us to break the rule "Don't stare!" They
attract us but at the same time are difficult to confront, being literally fearful. Previously strong
category statements have been made, contrasting worthy people with 'the other'. If such
distinctions are rejected, we are startled. The work of the American George Dureau will be used
to illustrate both the embarrassment and fear experience by ordinary viewers. The interpretation
critically presents the work of contemporary British photographers like Jo Spence and Brian
Jenkins, who have made images of their own bodies, compelling us to experience their difficult
position on the terms they set. Then the power changes hands. They work to emancipate us all.
Lifestyle and Picture Preference
Burkard Michel
Department of Communication
HDK Berlin
1. Question
To characterize social structures, sociology and marketing often use lifestyle-concepts. Their
importance for the reception of pictures (e.g., in advertising) has hardly ever been empirically
examined. This study is concerned with this issue. The theoretical deliberations lead to
hypotheses which connect the "existential problem definition" (=EP) of social milieus (Gerhard
Schulze) with preferences for particular pictures.
2. Method
Starting out from existing lifestyle-typologies the author developed 7 self descriptions
(=lifestyles), which were answered by 573 respondents in a written multitopic survey of a panel.
The respondents were offered two photographs for each lifestyle-type, representing a lifestyle's
EP. The question was: "Which of these 14 photographs affects you most?"
3. Results
The self descriptions are - besides the age - the only variables correlating with picture
preference. Conclusions: 1. There are EP's. 2. They are distributed according to lifestyle-milieus. 3. They influence picture perception and picture interpretation. 4. Pictures have
different potentials to appeal to particular EP's. 5. When an EP on the viewer's side and a
corresponding potential of a picture intersect, a special preference for this picture may occur.
Thus, to correlate the lifestyle-concept and the reception of pictures has shown highly fruitful.
THE VISUAL ARTS: DEVELOPMENTAL STUDIES
Chair: Jean-Christophe Vilatte, Department of Sciences of
Education, University of Nancy II
A Child's Perception and Memorisation of Abstract Painting
Jean-Christophe Vilatte
Department of Sciences of Education
University of Nancy II
The indifference of a child towards abstract art is often put down to environmental factors:
child not being familiar with this style, lack of education in modern art, heavy influence of cultural
norms (conventional realism). Without denying the truth of some of these allegations, we think
this rejection can be explained from a cognitive viewpoint. It is difficult to find and memorise
significant indications in representations of abstract art (and particularly informal painting).
However recent research on image recognition shows that the more information and details that an
image contains, the better it is recognised.
Although abstract works contain as much, if not more, information than figurative works, the
child seems to have difficulties in identifying these, to give them a sense and to put them into a
coherent and organised form. Moreover, children's commentaries on abstract painting are often
quite poor. Other studies however show that verbal coding helps in image recognition. Long-term
memorisation of abstract art seems more of a problem than that of figurative art. This is not
unusual when one takes into account the importance of long term memory in perception, and the
fundamental role that the past knowledge plays in preferences. We have tested this hypothesis on
elementary school children, giving them different types of recognition tests (homogenous and
heterogenous style), with different latency periods and using figurative and non-figurative works.
In this study, we have paid particular attention to the analysis of the type of pictorial
information that the children selected and the different strategies that they develop in order to
memorise abstract art. The results of this on-going study will be presented and discussed during
our communication.
Symmetry and Creativity in Drawings
and Drawings and Constructions by Boys and Girls
Diane Humphrey and Denise Plante
Department of Psychology
King's College
Previously the first author had found that girls and women prefer and draw more vertical
reflective and complex symmetries than do boys and men. Two studies will be reported here
which look at contents, themes, and forms in children's drawings and in their creative
constructions. Judgments by both children and adults of the creativity and other ratings of the
drawings and constructions will also be reported. Preliminary analyses suggest that girls again use
more reflective symmetry than do boys. Thematic differences in their drawings were in keeping
with previously found sex differences, with girls more likely to draw plants, nature, skies, hearts,
and buildings, while boys were more likely to draw vehicles and use action or aggressive themes.
Constructions by girls were more likely to be two-dimensional or abstract than were those by boys.
Results will be discussed in terms of sex differences in creative cognition and preference.
Art Teacher's Practical Knowledge
Ireneusz Kawecki
Faculty of Theory of Visual Art Education
Strzeminski Academy of Fine Arts and Design
In my paper I explore the nature of practical knowledge of art education teachers. Through
analyses of teachers' stories I am going to reveal the teachers' perspectives toward her knowledge
and skills, and her students as artists, knowers, etc. I am also analysing sources and types of
knowledge which visual art teacher need to her/his work. On the other hand, I discussed the roles
of qualitative research methods (particularly ethnography) in investigation of art teachers work.
Early Childhood Drawing and Literary Development
Nikolaus Bezruczko
Chicago, Illinois
Researchers and philosophers speculate that visual arts experiences during early childhood has
implications for cognitive development. Few empirical studies, however, have investigated this
question, and none have looked at the relationships between drawing during early childhood and
literacy development. In this research, parents in an urban neighborhood were surveyed
concerning the extent of visual arts emphasis in their home, as well as their value on visual arts
achievement. Then two groups of children from this neighborhood were followed through their
preschool, kindergarten, and first grade classrooms. IQ scores were collected (Peabody Picture
Vocabulary Test) and a skills survey (Child Assessment Profile) administered to assess readiness
for preschool. In preschool, one group experienced drawing only as play activity occurring on a
haphazard basis, and little or no emphasis in kindergarten and first grade. The other group,
however, participated in daily drawing and talking sessions in preschool and in kindergarten
drawing was integrated into a daily writing exercise. At the end of first grade, a comparison of
writing samples, standardized reading test scores (Iowa Test of Basic Skills), and teacher ratings of
achievement for the groups showed significantly higher performance for the drawing group.
Developmental Analysis of Aesthetic Perception
Connie Newton
School of Visual Arts
University of North Texas
and
Nikolaus Bezruczko
Chicago, Illinois
This study examines children's perception of aesthetic information in art images. The purposes
are to (1) identify the ages that children first become sensitive to sensory and formal properties, (2)
identify changes in perception that occur developmentally, (3) describe the hierarchy of image
properties that dominate aesthetic perception during developmental and (4) examine the
relationship between aesthetic perception, socio-economic background, school achievement, pre-school experience and age. The sample was 180 children evenly distributed across Grades 1, 3,
and 5 in suburban school district representing middle to low socioeconomic groups. Visual images
were 20 sets of images (triads) of small art reproductions with only two images in a triad sharing a
common property. Children were individually tested and asked to match one image to either of the
alternatives and to verbally explain their choice. In addition to descriptive statistics, an analysis of
covariance was conducted. Results show young children capable of discriminating many subtle
aesthetic qualities, but they had difficulty with the verbal explanations. The analysis of covariance
will determine the relationship between age, achievement, socio-economic background, pre-school
experiences, and aesthetic perceptual abilities.