Introduction

Aesthetic appreciation is ubiquitous. We frequently value the aesthetic qualities of our surroundings and other people in terms of beauty, liking, or attractiveness. Psychological aesthetics aims to understand how these aesthetic responses arise from the interaction of object, person and context features [1]. However, influenced by formalist art theories, which conceive aesthetic appreciation fundamentally as a response to relations among formal features such as lines, forms, colors or spaces, psychologists have mostly focused on determining how object properties (e.g., complexity, symmetry, and proportion) impact aesthetic appreciation. A different and broader approach conceives the spectator not as a passive receiver of form, but as an active agent that contributes to shape aesthetic experiences into personal and unique events. Knowledge about an object, for instance, has a profound impact on people’s appreciation of it [2–4]. But people bring much more to the aesthetic experience than acquired knowledge. They engage with the objects of aesthetic experience in a certain mood, or after encountering other affective objects. This is the case, for instance, with museum visits, where many different artworks are viewed in succession. The goal of the present paper is to ascertain the extent to which previous affective states and experiences influence aesthetic appreciation.

Experimental psychologists have demonstrated that, in many contexts, the affective qualities of stimuli can influence the subsequent evaluation of other stimuli or situations, even when the initial processing is irrelevant to the task or lacks subjective awareness [5,6]. Affective states and processes can exert a strong influence on cognitive operations and, particularly, on high-level cognition, including interpretation, judgment, decision-making, and reasoning [7].

As an explanation for these effects, it has been suggested that affect biases the encoding, retrieval, and processing of information used to formulate evaluations and judgments, especially when demanding and constructive processing is required [8]. From the field of implicit social cognition, the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) has been devised in order to study how affect elicited by unaware primes influences subsequent evaluations [9]. The results of a number of studies using the AMP are congruent with the assumption that the affective response to suboptimal primes is transferred (unconsciously misattributed) to the evaluative judgment. Among the factors that modulate the effects of affective priming, the stimuli onset asynchrony (SOA) and the kind of stimulus used as prime have received most attention. Comparisons of the impact of different SOAs have increased our understanding of how evaluation is biased by emotional information processing at different levels of awareness [6,10]. It seems well established that SOAs under 300ms lead to the most robust affective priming effects [11]. However, studies using facial expressions as primes have reported conflicting results. For instance, it was found that when facial expressions were displayed with SOAs of 1000ms priming effects were weaker (or even non detectable) than when a SOA 5ms was used [6]. Such results suggest that the strength of the priming effects of facial expressions var with SOA duration, as other kinds of visual stimuli. Other studies, conversely, found strong priming effects both with brief (17ms) and extended (1000ms) SOAs [12]. The importance of this discrepancy resides in the fact that the SOA is a crucial moderator of affective priming effects, playing a determinant role in participants’ awareness of primes. In any case, a SOA of 30ms seems to be short enough to prevent awareness when backward masking is applied [13].

Various classes of prime stimuli seem to have the potential to transfer their affective valence to target stimuli, including facial expressions, as noted above [6,12]. Since emotionally loaded stimuli are processed thoroughly, and facial expressions of emotion are natural affective stimuli with a relevant evolutionary significance, it is not surprising that numerous experimental studies report that certain expressions are perceived faster and more accurately than others. Some results [14] suggest that negative facial expressions with a high adaptive value (e.g., fear) are more perceptually or emotionally salient than happiness or neutral expressions. In contrast, other studies, such as those using backward visual masking [15] lend support to the traditional notion of the happy face advantage.

This controversy has extended into the affective priming literature. Whereas some studies show that happy expressions are more easily and more readily processed, especially with brief SOAs [12,16,17], others show that negative stimuli, including facial expressions, elicit the fastest processing and the strongest response bias, even at different levels of perceptual awareness [18]. Because most of this work has focused on the emotional expressions of happiness, anger, sadness, and fear, little is known about the extent to which other kinds, such as expressions of disgust, have biasing effects on cognitive processes. Thus, despite recent interest in the emotion of disgust, sparked in part due to its distinctive underlying neural network, its affective priming effects, compared to those of other emotions, have hardly been investigated. Till our knowledge, only one recent study [19] contrasted subliminal processing of fear and disgust. Although noting that fear expressions lead to stronger subliminal priming effects than disgust, the results showed that expressions of disgust are capable of inducing priming effects, particularly when serving as alarms for social threat in a context of true interaction. In sum, there is a need to clearly ascertain whether facial expressions of happiness and disgust are capable of producing priming effects to the same extent, and whether there are differences depending on the SOAs (i.e., brief vs. extended).

On the basis of the foregoing, the objective of this study is to ascertain the extent to which previously activated affective processing influences aesthetic liking for abstract art. As the above reviewed literature has shown, affective priming is an ideal paradigm to test the impact of affect on valuation. Given that affective responses are a critical source for people’s aesthetic appraisals [1], it can be assumed that the affective quality of briefly presented primes will influence the aesthetic evaluations of subsequently presented targets. The empirical study of the effects of affect misattribution on aesthetic appreciation has the potential of increasing our understanding of the effect of affective processes, and their temporal dynamics, on aesthetic evaluations [20–22]. Moreover, although the interaction between emotion and cognition has been suggested to be especially relevant in aesthetic evaluation tasks [1], very few experimental studies have directly examined how this interaction takes place.

In addition to extending the analysis of affect’s bias on evaluation into a new domain, the present study addresses the issues outlined above by means of a similar task to those used in evaluative priming research, incorporating some recent adaptations of the affect misattribution procedure [23].

Specifically, this study contrasts two main hypotheses. First, since it is presumed that the affect elicited by facial expression primes (happiness, disgust or no emotion) is transferred to the targets, differences in aesthetic evaluation of the target stimuli (abstract artworks) are expected. The direction of the effect is hypothesized to depend on the type of prime (lower ratings for disgust primes, higher ratings for happiness primes). Second, in line with previous research [6,16], the affective priming effect, both for disgust and happiness primes, is expected to be stronger in the suboptimal condition (brief SOA)—thus influencing the subsequent aesthetic appreciation to a greater degree—than in the optimal condition (extended SOA). Additionally, we designed the experiment to allow an exploration of the time course of the predicted priming effects over blocks.

Methods

Results

Because ratings in the two first blocks had to be based on participants’ initial impression, and because we wished to exclude anticipated answers, responses with latencies over 2000ms or below 300ms were excluded prior to analysis (2.84% of all responses, 1.81% and 1.03% respectively). A 2 x 3 x 2 ANOVA was conducted, with SOA (20ms vs. 300ms), Type of Prime (happiness, disgust, or neutral) and Block (1st vs. 2nd) as factors, and ratings for aesthetic liking as dependent variable.

We found a main effect of Type of Prime, F(1.243, 74.59) = 16.168, MSE = .759, p < .001, ηp 2 = .212, and a significant interaction between SOA and Type of Prime, F(1.8,107.9) = 5.803, MSE = .099, p = .005, ηp 2 = .088. Within the extended SOA level aesthetic liking ratings for artworks were significantly higher when primed with happiness expressions than when primed with disgust expressions, F(1,60) = 20.255, MSE = .276, p < .001, ηp 2 = .252, and than when primed with neutral expressions, F(1,60) = 17.242, MSE = .172, p < .001, ηp 2 = .223. They were significantly lower when primed with disgust expressions than neutral ones, F(1,60) = 7.465, MSE = .056, p = .008, ηp 2 = .111. In contrast, within the brief SOA level, priming with happiness expressions also increased the liking ratings in comparison with the disgust expressions, F(1,60) = 10.664, MSE = .171, p = .002, ηp 2 = .151, and the neutral expressions, F(1,60) = 12.058, MSE = .115, p = .001, ηp 2 =.167, but liking for the artworks did not differ when primed with disgust or neutral expressions, F(1,60) = .600, MSE = .051, p = .442.

On the other hand, there were significant differences in aesthetic liking as a result of SOA only for the disgust prime, F(1,60) = 7.638, MSE = .063, p = .008, ηp 2 = .113. The aesthetic liking scores for targets preceded by primes expressing disgust were lower in the extended SOA condition than in the brief SOA condition.

With regards to the variations of the affective priming effect over time, although the SOA x Block interaction was not significant, F(1,60) = 3.742, MSE = .042, p = .058, ηp 2 = .059, the effect size reaches the usual standard value for a medium effect. Nevertheless, the simple effects analyses, taking into account the Type of Prime, show no significant effects between blocks, both for brief and extended SOAs. In addition, the comparison of the effects of the Type of Prime between SOAs for each block showed no differences in the Block 1, neither for disgust, F(1,60) = 1.761, MSE = .086, p = .190, nor for neutral primes, F(1,60) = .466, MSE = .068, p= .498. However, the difference for happiness primes showed a trend effect, F(1,60) = 2.983, MSE = .079, p = .089, ηp 2 = .047, suggesting a tendency in the aesthetic liking ratings to be greater for the optimal priming condition for this kind of prime. In the case of the Block 2, the results showed no differences for happiness, F(1,60) = .349, MSE = .091, p = .557, nor for neutral primes, F(1,60) = 1.272, MSE = .049, p = .264. Conversely, the difference for disgust primes was significant, F(1,60) = 8.915, MSE = .107, p = .004, ηp2 = .129, revealing that ratings were lower in the optimal priming condition. Inspection of the means suggests that this significant difference seems to be caused by the fact that the aesthetic ratings for artworks following disgust primes decrease over blocks, though only in the optimal priming condition. In fact, in the suboptimal priming condition they were slightly higher in the second block. In contrast, ratings for artworks primed with expressions of happiness decrease over blocks both for optimal and suboptimal conditions (see Table 1).

Regarding the level of awareness, both the self-report results and the forced choice task suggest that, for the brief SOA, the primes were hardly ever consciously perceived. Specifically, the conducted analysis show that participants’ choices did not differ from chance when discriminating the identity, t(60) = -.156, p = .877, r = -.02, or the expression of the faces presented as primes, t(60) = 1.809, p = .075, r = .22.

Discussion

The first of this study’s three main objectives was to ascertain whether the selected affective primes (disgust, happiness, and neutral) produced different effects on aesthetic liking for abstract artworks. Our analyses revealed that this was indeed the case. With the extended and brief SOAs, aesthetic liking scores were higher when the artworks were preceded by happiness primes than by either of the other two kinds. Additionally, aesthetic ratings for artworks primed with expressions of disgust were lower than when primed with neutral expressions, though only when using the extended SOA.

Our results, thus, support the happy face advantage hypothesis [17], showing that it holds under optimal and suboptimal conditions, and extend it to an aesthetic appreciation task. Following previous results not related with the aesthetics domain [9], it could be inferred that the affective transfer from the primes to the abstract artworks occurred to a greater extent for the happiness than for the disgust facial expressions. We found no evidence suggesting that the stronger evaluative bias elicited by negative primes observed in some previous studies [18] carries over into the domain of aesthetic evaluation.

Our second objective was to investigate whether happiness and disgust primes caused stronger effects on the aesthetic evaluation ratings for the brief SOA (suboptimal priming in which no evidence of prime awareness was found) than for the extended SOA (optimal priming with prime awareness). The results confirmed that SOA magnitude indeed modulated priming effects. Contrary to our hypothesis, although we found no differences between suboptimal and optimal priming condition for happiness facial expressions, the negative effect of disgust was weaker in the suboptimal priming condition. In fact, expressions of disgust in this condition had no greater impact on liking for the artworks than neutral expressions.

This evidence, on the one hand, questions previous work suggesting that facial expression primes exert little or no effect under high awareness conditions [6,25], but it is congruent with the results obtained by other authors [12,13,26]. The stronger effect of the expression of happiness, on the other hand, fits well with prior studies showing its greater effectiveness or “salience” in relation to other facial expressions [12,17]. The fact that the priming effect of facial expressions of disgust was limited to the optimal priming condition could be due to the expression of disgust having a lower evolutionary relevance than other negative expressions, such as anger or fear [12]. It could be also related with the absence of a context of potential threat, a factor that has been shown to be crucial for producing suboptimal affective priming effects by means of facial expressions of disgust [19]. Further research is needed to study the effect of additional negative facial expressions and other types of emotional primes or target stimuli (including artworks), as well as to contrast the effects of different prime exposures.

Our last objective was to ascertain the between-blocks time course of the effects. Although results related to the variation of the priming effects between blocks are not conclusive, they moderately suggest that the effectiveness of the affective transfer remains longer for expressions of disgust than for expressions of happiness in the extended SOA condition. The endurance of the effect of priming with expressions of disgust with extended SOAs seems to underscore the temporal robustness and resistance to repetition of the effects of optimal priming by means of disgust faces on aesthetic appreciation.

In sum, our results show that previously described priming effects on the evaluation of ambiguous stimuli extend to the evaluation of abstract art, and indicate that people’s prior affective state contributes significantly to the aesthetic appreciation of art. Positive affect increases liking for abstract art, while negative affect decreases it, especially when induced using longer exposure times, such as those that characterize a museum visit. Our results suggest that the affective state induced by one artwork could influence the aesthetic experience of the next, and thus challenge the view that emphasizes the role of object features in the aesthetic experience and relegates the contribution of personal experiences and states to a marginal role. Further studies should explore the effects of affective priming on other aesthetic assessments such as aesthetic preference, “beauty” evaluations and aesthetic quality judgments [20], enriching the theoretical discussions about the role of the emotions in the emergence of aesthetic experience [22].

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alejandro Gálvez for helpful comments and suggestions on a previous draft of this paper.