Associated and dissociated neural substrates of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic emotion during the appreciation of everyday designed products

Abstract

The aesthetics of designed products have become part of our life in modern society. This study explores the neural mechanisms of how aesthetic judgment and aesthetic emotion interplay during the appreciation of designed products that are commonly seen in daily life. Participants were 30 college students, and the stimuli were 90 pictures of everyday designed products. Based on an event-related paradigm, the findings of this study suggest that there are associative and dissociative neutral mechanisms underlying different types of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic emotion. The study identified the following main findings: (a) normative beauty and subjective beauty both involved the left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC); (b) subjective beauty and positive emotion both involved the right ACC; (c) subjective beauty and negative emotion both involved the precuneus; (d) subjective ugliness and negative emotion both involved the right inferior frontal gyrus; (e) subjective ugliness alone additionally activated the insula; and (f) subjective beauty alone additionally activated the caudate. The findings in this study shed light on complex but ordinary processes of aesthetic appreciation.