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Empathy, Einfühlung, and aesthetic experience: the effect of emotion contagion on appreciation of representational and abstract art using fEMG and SCR

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An Erratum to this article was published on 12 April 2017

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Abstract

Since the advent of the concept of empathy in the scientific literature, it has been hypothesized, although not necessarily empirically verified, that empathic processes are essential to aesthetic experiences of visual art. We tested how the ability to “feel into” (“Einfühlung”) emotional content—a central aspect of art empathy theories—affects the bodily responses to and the subjective judgments of representational and abstract paintings. The ability to feel into was measured by a standardized pre-survey on “emotional contagion”—the ability to pick up and mirror, or in short to “feel into”, emotions, which often overlaps with higher general or interpersonal empathetic abilities. Participants evaluated the artworks on several aesthetic dimensions (liking, valence, moving, and interest), while their bodily reactions indicative of empathetic engagement (facial electromyography—EMG, and skin conductance responses—SCR) were recorded. High compared to low emotion contagion participants showed both more congruent and more intense bodily reactions (EMG and SCR) and aesthetic evaluations (higher being moved, valence, and interest) and also liked the art more. This was largely the case for both representational and abstract art, although stronger with the representational category. Our findings provide tentative evidence for recent arguments by art theorists for a close “empathic” mirroring of emotional content. We discuss this interpretation, as well as a potential tie between emotion contagion and a general increase in emotion intensity, both of which may impact, in tandem, the experience and evaluation of art.

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  • 12 April 2017

    An erratum to this article has been published.

Notes

  1. Please note that due to a server problem, the data of two participants for the QCAE and SEE were missing. Thus, degrees of freedom are reduced.

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Acknowledgements

This article was supported by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship awarded to Matthew Pelowski (MSCA-IF-2014-EF: Individual Fellowships, 655379). We would like to especially thank Christina Hirschbiegel and Elizabeth Noble for their big support in recruiting participants and collecting the data for this project as part of their master thesis appointment. We would also like thank the two reviewers for their insightful suggestions on a previous version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Gerger Gernot.

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This article is part of the Special Section titled “From ‘Einfühlung’ to empathy: Exploring the relationship between aesthetic and interpersonal experience”. Handling editor: Joanna Ganczarek (Pedagogical University of Cracow); Reviewers: Thomas Jacobsen (Helmut-Schmidt-University, Hamburg), Sato Wataru (Kyoto University).

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Gernot, G., Pelowski, M. & Leder, H. Empathy, Einfühlung, and aesthetic experience: the effect of emotion contagion on appreciation of representational and abstract art using fEMG and SCR. Cogn Process 19, 147–165 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0800-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0800-2

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