Lesson 6: What is Personality and Experimental Aesthetics?

Why study the link between personality and art?

Take a moment to think about the art on your walls, the movies in your Netflix queue, the music on your Google playlist, or the books on shelf and/or Kindle. Think about all the art that really moves you. What do you think informs those preferences?

Certainly to an extent your culture, or the attitudes and behaviors common to a particular group, plays a role. For example, a 14-year-old boy in Brooklyn would be immersed in a different cultural landscape compared to a 58-year-old woman in Mobile, Alabama compared to a 28-year-old grad student at Berkeley. Of course, personal background and society informs preferences. We will talk more about the influence of culture in the lesson on Social Psychology and Art.

In addition, your preferences may partly be informed by the enduring traits that make you - well, you. Traits are the enduring patterns of behaviors, emotions and thoughts for an individual. Traits are influenced by both environment (such as culture, family, education) and biology (genes, brain anatomy and chemistry). This lesson will discuss how those traits are associated with motivation to create art and preferences for artistic styles. 

Experimental Aesthetics is a branch of psychology that examines the various responses to art; for example, what properties provoke a sense of liking, beauty, or engagement? One part of experimental aesthetics concerns the properties of the art object itself that evokes an emotional response (Fechner, 1876). Studies in experimental aesthetics go back to the earliest experiments in modern Psychology and we will discuss this branch more when we discuss Perception. The other branch of experimental aesthetics concerns individual differences, or the ways in which individuals psychologically differ from one another that produce different aesthetic responses (Berlyne, 1971). Individual differences may include personality, intelligence, or social differences. How differences in personality influence creativity and aesthetic response is the subject of this lesson.

 

Take a minute to take some notes: What is Experimental Aesthetics? What are the 2 branches of experimental aesthetics? 

 

What is personality?

Personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving (American Psychological Association, 2017). In other words personality is an individual’s unique patterns of behavioral response that are stable across time and situations (Feist, 2017). For example, if someone has the personality trait of being outspoken, they should be relatively more outspoken compared to others (i.e. a unique pattern of being outspoken) and they should be outspoken pretty much all the time (i.e. generally outspoken the whole year round across the lifespan) and in every situation (i.e. outspoken at dinner parties, in classrooms, with friends, strangers, at the grocery store, gym, etc.).

Likewise, if another person is said to have the opposite personality, perhaps they are said to be soft-spoken, they should be relatively less outspoken compared to others and they would be like that all the time and in every situation.

This is the trait theory of personality that is prevalent today in studies of individual differences. Previous theories of personality have focused on unconscious motives and desires. We will briefly review some of these.