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2001; Cacioppo & Gardner, 1999; Frijda, 1988; R. J. Larsen & Prizmic, 2008; Musch
& Klauer, 2003; Rozin & Royzman, 2001; Vaish, Grossmann, & Woodward, 2008).
Individuals even seem to be more motivated to explore, seek, and maintain negative emotions if they are accompanied by positive emotions or engaged with mixed emotions (Riediger, Schmiedek, Wagner, & Lindenberger, 2009). Therefore, researchers believe that in the process of art appreciation, sadness does not simply work as a negative emotion, but instead, sadness contributes in great proportion to the evolution of aesthetic experience (Berenbaum, 2002; Dubé & Le Bel, 2003;
Menninghaus et al., 2017; Menninghaus et al., 2015). It is also argued that the art with sadness may ultimately be enjoyed due to other emotional responses that must be extended through negative emotions (Menninghaus et al., 2017).
In sum, DEM provides sufficient evidence of how psychological distancing provides the necessary atmosphere of proper reasons for the need of negative emotions in arts to produce enough positive enjoyment in aesthetic appreciation.
Issues of current findings
The current study focused on the relationship between basic emotions, especially negative emotion, and aesthetic emotion in the process of art appreciation. The interaction between the two emotions and the effect of psychological distancing were
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also investigated, which were not greatly discussed in the past. In the literatures, DEM has provided elegant solutions for these questions. However, it is not a component-process model but more a more resemblance of a theoretical framework. As a result, the influential factors proposed by this model may need to be further tested by empirical research (Menninghaus et al., 2017). Additionally, the relationship between the basic and aesthetic emotion in the course of time was also a topic rarely discussed. Previous research on aesthetic experience relied more on self-evaluation as the measurement tool.
The current study would further incorporate objective physiological measure with high temporal resolution as a tool to understand the relationship between different emotions and how psychological distancing could yield different results in the art experience.
To understand the inconsistent valence of emotions experienced in aesthetic appreciation and its underlying mechanism, EMG would be an appropriate tool in the study. Aesthetic emotions are usually complicated and difficult to detect or distinguish, that they can be simply an indistinct feeling on the subconscious level or impossible to separate from other types of emotion. Therefore, an appropriate tool to clearly distinguish the valence of produced emotion is of course necessary. The current measurement tools, such as EEG and MRI, still have many limitations on measuring emotional valence and distinguishing different emotions. However, fEMG is specialized in distinguishing between positive and negative emotion, that it is certainly
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the choice of tool to distinguish such incongruent and inconspicuous emotion like aesthetic emotion.
Studies with fEMG showed that people would spontaneously imitate with proper facial muscles while observing other emotional facial expressions, as they were
“contagious” (Lundqvist & Dimberg, 1995). Studies revealed that when people see emotions expressed, not only their emotional state was affected but also, they would change facial muscles to synchronize with smiling, frowning or any other behaviors in imitation. Also, how strong the participants would respond to the emotional faces depends on the arousal level of the stimuli. For a stronger emotion, the participant would act stronger, too, yielding bigger EMG signal waves (Achaibou, Pourtois, Schwartz, & Vuilleumier, 2008; Aguado et al., 2013; Fujimura, Sato, & Suzuki, 2010;
Hess et al., 2017; Künecke, Hildebrandt, Recio, Sommer, & Wilhelm, 2014). To measure different emotions with EMG in facial muscles, the most common way to distinguish the positive and negative emotion is to measure the activation level of the M. zygomaticus (smiling muscle) and the M. corrugator (frowning muscle) as the indicators. The activation of the M. zygomaticus and the relaxing of the M. corrugator are usually identified as the indicator of positive emotion. On the contrary, the activation of the M. corrugator and the relaxing of the M. zygomaticus are usually identified as the indicator of negative emotion. In this way, researchers can use fEMG
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to detect whether participants receive stimulus images and generate emotions, as well as determining the valence of emotions.
Hypothesis
This study would attempt to investigate the reason for people to prefer negative emotion in the theme of arts, since many various studies were only offering glimpses of parts of the entire puzzle of understanding aesthetic experience. Kawakami et al.
(2013) mentioned how people could separate and tell the difference between sad feeling that music brought and the pleasure they feel after listening to it. Moreover, there were two hypotheses about the relationship of those emotions: the "sweet anticipation” and
“re-evaluation” when listening to sad music in the context of art, which were believed to be the reason of pleasure experience, and that pleasure, as a consequence of cognitive progress, was derived from sadness (Kawakami et al., 2013). These hypotheses were consistent with DEM prediction, in which art with a negative theme was believed to contribute more than a positive theme in the creation of the final aesthetic pleasure (Menninghaus et al., 2017). Moreover, the pleasure was thought to come from the result of transforming the negative emotion; hence, the need of producing negative as one of the basic emotions before aesthetic emotion.
In addition, there have been some examples that such “paradoxical emotions”
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could co-exist. In the study of mixed emotions, Oceja and Carrera (2009) have found some evidence that negative and positive emotion could be detected simultaneously.
Wagner et al. (2014) also found that a sense of disgust and aesthetic appreciation could be felt by the audience at the same time. Those findings all revealed that regardless of the order of appearance, different emotions could co-exist along the course of time, even if they paradoxically contrasted in valence, as this is a very common phenomenon in our daily life.
In the case of DEM and the example of study by Wagner et al. (2014), the authors also pointed out that appropriate psychological distancing and art context were indispensable elements for deriving pleasure from arts of negative theme. If people in face of the stimuli were without adequate psychological distancing, they could completely react in a different way that might not even result in pleasure at the end.
In a fEMG study (Gerger, Leder, & Kremer, 2014), people’s reaction in different psychological distancing was revealed by manipulating the connotaion of artworks.
Specifically, the response toward a negative stimulus was found to be relatively positive under the context of art (at a relatively far psychological distance). In their study, half of the images were taken from the IAPS, and half of the images were taken from real artworks. For one group of participants, they were told that the picture they were looking at was "a work of art", while the other half were told that it was "a press photo".
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The fEMG results showed that the contextual effect was significant in smiling muscles, but not in frowning muscles. For the smiling muscles, when participants viewed the stimulus as in the context of artwork, the response to the positive stimulus was modulated and smoothed down. And more importantly, for the negative stimulus, only the real artwork stimulus was "positively attuned" in the negative response of the smiling muscle, which was also liked more in the ratings. This phenomenon may well be the supporting evidence that psychological distancing modulates the response to positive and negative stimuli, especially producing positive appreciation of negative stimuli in the works.
Based on the evidence described above, the current study also generalized that the basic emotion and aesthetic emotion could both exist simultaneously, in which there were at least two emotions produced from viewing arts, instead of shifting from one to another form of response. No antagonism was observed and only independence between the two was noted. Moreover, there might be an asynchrony in the production of the two emotions. According to DEM and other supporting evidence, it is possible that basic emotion comes first and then followed by aesthetic emotion. On the other hand, an appropriate distance is prone to produce aesthetic emotion. Therefore, psychological distancing was manipulated to enhance the level of aesthetic emotional response in the present study.
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In summary, the aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between basic emotion and aesthetic emotion when viewing artworks with negative theme. To verify multiple theoretical points, an all-sided experiment was designed to understand the time course of both aesthetic and basic emotion, the possibility of co-existence of these two emotions, and the effect of psychological distancing. The study adopted a three-factor design with the aesthetic level, the valence of emotion and the psychological distancing as independent variables. fEMG was used as the assessment tool, and the change relative to baseline with its temporal parameter was the dependent variable. Multiple hypotheses were proposed for testing in this study to reveal the process of appreciating negative arts as described in the following sections.