An Empirical Aesthetics of the Sublime and Beautiful Young-Jin Hur Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology Primary Supervisor: Professor I. Chris McManus The thesis is submitted to University College London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2019 1 Declaration and Ethics I, Young-Jin Hur confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Unless noted otherwise, all studies in the thesis have been approved by the Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology Research Department’s Ethics Chair [Project ID No.: CEHP/2015/541]. 2 Acknowledgement It is so easy to speak at length about why and how things happened in hindsight. Yet I am certain that this thesis would not have taken shape as it current is without Professor Chris McManus and my family. I am hugely indebted to their support and kindness. To attempt for an explanation of their importance would border rudeness, since by doing so I would most certainly leave out something. I can only be thankful. If this thesis can mean something to someone, I would also like to thank those readers. 3 Abstract The sublime and the beautiful are two of the oldest, most discussed categories of aesthetic experience. In their most basic of descriptions, the sublime refers to an aesthetic experience of fear and delight, and the beautiful refers to an aesthetic experience of pure pleasure. This thesis explores them empirically, theoretically informed by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1759. Three questions are asked: (1) What are the physical characteristics of objects considered sublime, particularly size, height, colour, brightness, and contrast in photographs, and modality, style, and tempo in piano music? (2) What are the emotional characteristics of sublime experiences, especially in relation to fear? and (3) What is the relationship between judgements of the sublime and beautiful in various contexts? In 15 separate studies involving 768 participants, sublimity and beauty are related but separate experiences with distinct visual and auditory mechanisms. For images, although subjective sublimity and beauty ratings of images often show moderate correlations, sublimity is more influenced by presentation size than is beauty, while beauty is relatively more sensitive towards the presence of colour, and sublimity and beauty are both increased by higher presentation of images. Although subjective sublimity often correlates with subjective fear – a finding replicated in various studies and tasks – there is no evidence that physiological correlates of fear measured by skin conductance responses (SCR) and facial electromyography (fEMG) are activated at the same time as subjective sublimity. Together, these findings show that the associations of sublimity with size, height, and fear which are found in various cultures and languages, and especially in Burke’s text, are realistic. Methodologically, the studies’s use of large number of stimuli and participants makes the findings generalisable, which is often not always the case in the literature of empirical aesthetics. In conclusion, sublimity is an important and separate component of aesthetic experience, beyond the mere study of beauty alone, which merits further study in aesthetic science. 4 Impact Statement Aesthetic experiences are common and perhaps even inevitable in life. Judgements such as good/bad, like/dislike, or pleasant/unpleasant are surprisingly interchangeable with judgements of beautiful/ugly. Yet it would be an oversimplification to assume that all such judgements signify the same underlying psychological process. To explore the possibilities of different forms of aesthetic judgements, the present thesis examined a historically well-informed (and likely universal) pair of aesthetic experiences, namely the sublime and the beautiful, or a distinction between aesthetic experiences deriving from pleasure and from something more overwhelming and terrifying. The research adopted a wide spectrum of psychological research methodologies, ranging from psychophysics to psychophysiology, and from qualitative studies to controlled lab experiments. Academically, the research informs past and ongoing philosophical debates on how the mind processes the sublime and the beautiful. Because the research explores ideas of deriving delight from negative emotions in both photographs and music, the research also shows close affinities to existing psychological frameworks including mixed emotions, empirical aesthetics, music psychology, and cross-modal interactions. An underlying examination throughout the thesis, whether people are similar to each other in their judgements of the sublime and the beautiful, also indicates an identification of the research with the psychology of individual differences. The commonplace nature of aesthetic experiences provides opportunities for a wide range of real life applications of the research. Industries where aesthetic appeal lies at the core of their output may find immediate relevance to the thesis’s findings on how the manipulations of an object’s size, height, and colour, may influence aesthetic responses. For example, interior designers or architects may find it useful to understand how the size and height of an environment may influence the psychologies of those inside the room, especially if the environment is to be used for specific purposes (social gathering vs. an important announcement). Museum or gallery organisers may find value in how the lighting, viewing distance, or presentation height of an installation may interact with the content of the work to improve its impressions on viewers. Lastly, cosmetics companies may look into how different colours of makeup may produce different, yet still aesthetically appealing, impressions. Finally, setting where aesthetic experiences are seemingly secondary to other functions, such as student accommodations, or restaurants, may find it useful in how, for example, setting the right type of background music may create the right type of mood, since music interacts with other modalities to create an overall aesthetic experience. Again, it is difficult to detach aesthetic experiences from everyday life, and it would be difficult to find a situation where aesthetic matters are categorically irrelevant. Insofar as people make judgements of their surroundings, those judgements also include an aesthetic component. That aesthetic judgements 5 can be consistently subdivided into different types, and their different characterisations analysed scientifically, is the message of the present thesis. 6 Publications, Presentations, and Awards Works in this thesis gave rise to the following publications: Hur, Y.-J., Gerger, G., Leder, H., & McManus, I. C. (2018). Facing the sublime: Physiological correlates of the relationship between fear and the sublime. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Hur, Y.-J., & McManus, I. C. (2017). Representing the sublime in the VIMAP and empirical aesthetics: Reviving Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: Comment on" Move me, astonish me... delight my eyes and brain: The Vienna Integrated Model of top-down and bottom-up processes in Art Perception (VIMAP) and corresponding affective, evaluative, and neurophysiological correlates" by Matthew Pelowski et al. Physics of Life Reviews, 21, 135-137. Pelowski, M., Hur, Y.-J., Cotter, K. N., Ishizu, T., Christensen, A. P., Leder, H., & McManus, I. C. (2019). Quantifying the if, the when, and the what of the sublime: A survey and latent class analysis of incidence, emotions, and distinct varieties of personal sublime experiences. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. The Times, Edmund Burke goes from the sublime to the ridiculous by Tom Whipple, 19.11.2018 Works in this thesis were presented the following meetings/workshops: Visual Properties Driving Visual Preference Liverpool workshop (2019) Interdisciplinary Workshop "The Sublime: Philosophical and Cognitive Approaches" at Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris (2018) Perspectives in Neuroaesthetics Summer School (organised by the University of Vienna) (2018) New York University Department of Psychology presentation (2018) Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics lab meeting (2018) International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA) Toronto meeting (2018) Visual Properties Driving Visual Preference Liverpool workshop (2018) UCL Postgraduate Peer Support Group Cumberland Lodge Conference (2018) Experimental Psychology Society London meeting (2018) UCL Postgraduate Peer Support Group Cumberland Lodge Conference (2017) International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA) Vienna meeting (2016) University of Vienna Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research Methods presentation (2016) Works in this thesis received the following awards: UCL Overseas Research Scholarship (2016 - 2018) 7 UCL School of Life and Medical Sciences Graduate Conference Fund (2018) UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences Postgraduate Research Symposium Prize (2018) UCL Cecily de Monchaux Research Prize (2018) UCL Global Engagement Funds (2017) Tuition stipend for the uivie: summer school in Cognitive Science: "Cognition, Art, and Culture" (2016) 8 Table of Contents An Empirical Aesthetics of the Sublime and Beautiful ................................................................ 1 Acknowledgement