The Relationship Between Aesthetic Experience And Postivie Emotion And The Impact On Change Detection

Traditional researchs on cognitive processing order to more accurately present the human information processing stage, usually stripped out value judgments and emotional factors.In fact, emotion and cognition interact and complement each other anytime,anywhere. Futhermore, "everyone love beauty","beauty exist everywhere".Aesthetic experience is the importmant and unique experice of human being. The subjects' aesthetic emotion and judgments always put influence on their cognitive processing. Aesthetic cognition is a superior processing that accompanied by the value of aesthetic experience and judgments.With the development of cognitive psychology and the awareness of beauty, It will become the import way to integrationally explore the relationship between emotion, value judgment and cognition.In our daily life, people often fail to detect changes, known as change blindness, and if successfully detect changes, which known as change detection. Research on this subject is not only closely related with our life but also has important theoretical significance, and it has made positive impact on many fields such as attention, visual processing and memory processes. Traditional study on cognitive processing usually stripped of value judgments and emotional factors during their researches, in order to show more accurately on every single information processing stages. But in fact, the emotional and cognitive impact on each other all the time. In addition, positive emotions not yet have a unified definition. Some researchers believe that aesthetic is the most typical and most representative positive affect. Are all kinds of aesthetic styles including the sense of tragedy are positive emotion? What is the relationship between positive emotion and aesthetic experience? What kind of unity is positive emotion? Does aesthetic feeling impact the cognitive progress? Does it impact people to detect the changes? These questions are worth to be researched.Aesthetic experience is complex feeling that generated by the object and effecting persons'sense organ. Psychological characteristics of the aesthetic experience are defined as a pleasurable experience, will promote people to closer to the aesthetic object. Overall, the spirit joy brought by aesthetic feeling have positive effect on human life, work and human relationships; From the local view of cognitive processing, aesthetic as a category of positive emotion, it is likely to have different impact on cognitive processing, it might facilitate, or perhaps inhibited. Which is consistent with the "Broaden and build" theory of positive emotion. But there is little empirical research to support it. Therefore, the study will take aesthetic experience, a type of positive emotion, as the main variable, to examine if it would promote people's ability of change detection. This study does not only support the "Broaden and build" theory from a new angle, but also find a new member of the forecast model of change detection.This study includes three main researches. Aesthetic experience as an emotional feeling, it must have three kinds of response:subjective experience, facial expressions and physiological responses, so if want to make empirical study on aesthetic experience, firstly may explore the emotional characteristics and physiological responses of it. The purposes of research I(chapter 3) and research II(chapter 4) are to measure the emotional characteristics and autonomous physiological responses of aesthetic experience, then makes sure the relationship between aesthetic experience and positive emotion. The research III is to explore the aesthetic impact on change detection, basing on the research I and II, using the paradigm and background of positive emotion.In chapter 2(research I), Using IAPS (International Affective Pictures System) and CAPS (Chinese Affective Pictures System) as tools, we assume that there is corresponding relationship between positive emotion and aesthetic experience and identification emotional characteristics of four aesthetic features. Experiment 1 show that the some pictures from affective picture systems did arouse subjects'different aesthetic experiences and the pictures which are categorized into concinnity, comedy, magnificence and tragedy also trigger subjects corresponding aesthetic experiences. In the second experiment, pictures selected from the first experiment are used to investigate the emotional characteristics of the four aesthetic styles.The results show that experiences of concinnity, comedy, magnificence are types of positive emotions according to emotional valence. Valence score of tragedy falls within the scope of the negative emotions, but it is different from the negative emotions. Correlation test and regression analysis show that it is much closer to positive feelings. The conclusion is that aesthetic experience is a positive emotional type, but not equivalent to a positive mood, it contains unpleasant factor.In Chapter 3(research II), took HR and GSR as indexes, music and visual pictures as stimulus to measured subjects' autonomous physiological reactions under four different styles of aesthetic. In experiment 1, let subjects listen to four different kinds of music, let them certain the aesthetic style of these music. The results show that these four different music really induced subjects corresponding aesthetic experiences, which selected the materials in auditory channel for the experiment 2. Experiment 2 used 2(visual and auditory channel)×4 (four aesthetic styles) experimental design to measure autonomous physiological responses. The result is whether in auditory or visual channel, stimulus of four aesthetic styles all makes the heart rate and skin conductance decrease, which indicate that aesthetic does have very relaxed function; Different aesthetic styles do induce different physiological responses and they have cross-channel consistency. Physiological responses of concinnity, magnificence, tragedy, comedy aesthetic experience are different from negative emotion, but more similar to the positive sentiment, proving once again that aesthetic experience is belong to positive emotion.Chapter 4(research III) includes four experiments. Experiment 1 found that reaction of change detection was no significant difference under different affective priming conditions. Experiment 2 showed than subjects change detection responses were faster under aesthetic state than ugly state. Experiment 3 proved that the color processing is automatically processed without the impact of the cue. In experiment 4 we compared the reaction time of color change detection; the color change detection was independent to aesthetic state. So we can infer that the aesthetic impact on the change detection is likely to occur in the attention phase, which is consistent with conclusion from study on the neural cognitive mechanisms of aesthetic, they have proved the aesthetic was a conscious cognitive activities.In a word, the study's general conclusion is as follows:1. The four types of aesthetic experience have their individual features on the three emotional dimensions,and which meet the law of emotion.2.Pleasure of positive emotion and the four types of aesthetic experience are significantly correlated and the coefficient are the highest, but not significantly with the negative emotion, and pleasure of four types of aesthetic experience are significantly different from the negative emotion; Rregression analysis show only positive emotional valence can predict the aesthetic experience, which illustrate all kinds of aesthetic expericence including comedy, tragedy, concinnity, magnificence should be positive affective.3. A part pictures from the affective systems (IAPS & CAPS) do have the function to induce the aesthetic experience。4. Different styles of aesthetic experience have its specific physiological mechanism, and the different channel has no simple effect, which indicatie their physiological autonomous responses are consistent cross visual-auditory channel.5. physiological responses of the four aesthetic styles are similar to the positive affectinve, HR and GSR evoked by the aesthetic experience and the positive affevtive are significantly lower than negative affective, which indicatie that aesthetic experience is belong to positive emotion too.6. The change detection RT aren't significant difference in positive, neutral, negative affective, but change detection RT under aesthetic state is significantly faster than under the ugly state. we can infer that only some special types of positive affective have impact on the change detection, for example aesthetic experience. The differentence between the aesthetic and ugly state only be significant in the bigger attention scope, but no in the small scope, which indicate that the aesthetic experience impact on the change detection depending on the attention scope.7. In the bigger attention scope, the professional group's RT is faster than the normal group's, but they aren't different in the small scope, which show the expertise impact the reaction time of change detection through changing attention scope.8. The cue have no effect on the color change detection RT, it shows that the color processing is automatic; The change detection RT in the aesthetic and ugly isn't significantly different, which indicate that aesthetic impact on the change detection is likely to occur in the attention phase, but no in the pre-phase.The theoretical significance of this study is:to provide an empirical basis for "broaden and build" theory in a new view; to develop measurement indicators and tools for aesthetic experience; to deepen the relationship between emotion and cognition. The practical of the study is: to give reference for arts education, art therapy, art and design training; to provide theoretical and empirical evidence for the traffic environment settings and advertising design.But there are limitations in our study:we didn't ascertain the mechanism of aesthetic impact on the change detection; The aesthetic feeling would have influence on the cognitive activity through aesthetic judgment, but we didn't go deep into value judgments; The experiment materials are static images from the systems of affective pictures; The subjects are only university students, so it will be limit to promote the conclusion; Aesthetic experience are the subjective responses to aesthetic stimuli, we did not explore the interaction between the aesthetic experience and the aesthetic attributes of stimulus.