Mechner Francis
1Columbia University, 116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027 USA.
The Mechner Foundation, 200 Central Park South #18e, New York, NY 10019 USA.
Psychol Rec. 2018;68(3):287-321. doi: 10.1007/s40732-017-0228-1. Epub 2017 Jun 19.
Seeking to identify the common and distinguishing attributes of effects one might call "aesthetic," I examined hundreds of examples in music, visual arts, poetry, literature, humor, performance arts, architecture, science, mathematics, games, and other disciplines. I observed that all involve quasi-emotional reactions to stimuli that are composites of multiple elements that ordinarily do not occur together and whose interaction, when appropriately potentiated, is transformative-different in kind from the effects of the separate constituent elements. Such effects, termed can evoke surprise-tinged emotional responses. Aesthetic reactions, unlike many other kinds of emotional reactions, are never evoked by biologically urgent action-demanding events, such as threats or opportunities. The examined effects were created by various concept manipulation devices: class expansion, identification of new relations, repetition, symmetry, parsimony, and emotional displays for the audience to mirror (I identified a total of 16 such devices). The effects would occur only for individuals with the necessary priming, in circumstances that include effective potentiating factors. Synergetic stimuli that evoke aesthetic responses tend to be reinforcing, via mechanisms related to their biological utility during our evolution. I offer a theory as to how aesthetics may have evolved from its primordial pre-aesthetic roots, with examples of how consideration of those roots often explains aesthetic and related effects. The article suggests that aesthetic phenomena are a special case of a more pervasive aspect of behavior and proposes research approaches involving laboratory models and fMRI technology.
为了识别那些可以被称为“美学”的效果的共同和独特属性，我研究了音乐、视觉艺术、诗歌、文学、幽默、表演艺术、建筑、科学、数学、游戏及其他学科中的数百个例子。我观察到，所有这些都涉及对刺激的准情感反应，这些刺激是由多个通常不会同时出现的元素组成的复合体，并且当它们的相互作用得到适当增强时，会具有变革性——在性质上不同于各个组成元素的效果。这种被称为“[此处原文缺失具体术语]”的效果能够引发带有惊讶情绪的反应。与许多其他类型的情感反应不同，美学反应绝不会由生物学上迫切需要采取行动的事件引发，比如威胁或机遇。所研究的这些效果是由各种概念操纵手段创造出来的：类别扩展、新关系的识别、重复、对称、简洁以及供观众模仿的情感展示（我总共识别出了16种这样的手段）。这些效果只会在有必要启动因素的个体身上，在包含有效增强因素的情况下出现。引发美学反应的协同刺激往往会通过与我们进化过程中的生物学效用相关的机制起到强化作用。我提出了一种关于美学如何从其原始的前美学根源演变而来的理论，并举例说明了对这些根源的思考如何常常能够解释美学及相关效果。本文表明，美学现象是行为中一个更普遍方面的特殊情况，并提出了涉及实验室模型和功能磁共振成像技术的研究方法。
