Aesthetic impact of anthropomorphic figures in art: The case of facial expressions

Abstract

The impact on beholders of anthropomorphic representations depicting facial expressions undoubtedly plays a prominent role in societies, given the special place granted to these images through space and time, and their cultural and social importance. Here, we investigate this impact in terms of the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms behind the aesthetic experience. Given that face processing is universal among humans, this is necessarily a cross-cultural issue, and we therefore chose to tackle it from an interdisciplinary perspective, reviewing the artistic, ethnographic, anthropological and cognitive literature on figuration and facial expression processing. This review was informed by the results of an experimental pilot study. Our findings shed light on the relationship between the three dimensions of the aesthetic experience (attention, emotion, and aesthetic judgement), and show that figures share a common property that modulates the aesthetic impact.