26
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Examining Complexity across Domains: Relating Subjective and Objective Measures of Affective Environmental Scenes, Paintings and Music

      research-article
      * ,
      PLoS ONE
      Public Library of Science

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Subjective complexity has been found to be related to hedonic measures of preference, pleasantness and beauty, but there is no consensus about the nature of this relationship in the visual and musical domains. Moreover, the affective content of stimuli has been largely neglected so far in the study of complexity but is crucial in many everyday contexts and in aesthetic experiences. We thus propose a cross-domain approach that acknowledges the multidimensional nature of complexity and that uses a wide range of objective complexity measures combined with subjective ratings. In four experiments, we employed pictures of affective environmental scenes, representational paintings, and Romantic solo and chamber music excerpts. Stimuli were pre-selected to vary in emotional content (pleasantness and arousal) and complexity (low versus high number of elements). For each set of stimuli, in a between-subjects design, ratings of familiarity, complexity, pleasantness and arousal were obtained for a presentation time of 25 s from 152 participants. In line with Berlyne’s collative-motivation model, statistical analyses controlling for familiarity revealed a positive relationship between subjective complexity and arousal, and the highest correlations were observed for musical stimuli. Evidence for a mediating role of arousal in the complexity-pleasantness relationship was demonstrated in all experiments, but was only significant for females with regard to music. The direction and strength of the linear relationship between complexity and pleasantness depended on the stimulus type and gender. For environmental scenes, the root mean square contrast measures and measures of compressed file size correlated best with subjective complexity, whereas only edge detection based on phase congruency yielded equivalent results for representational paintings. Measures of compressed file size and event density also showed positive correlations with complexity and arousal in music, which is relevant for the discussion on which aspects of complexity are domain-specific and which are domain-general.

          Related collections

          Most cited references35

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          The tie that binds? Coherence among emotion experience, behavior, and physiology.

          Emotion theories commonly postulate that emotions impose coherence across multiple response systems. However, empirical support for this coherence postulate is surprisingly limited. In the present study, the authors (a) examined the within-individual associations among experiential, facial behavioral, and peripheral physiological responses during emotional responding and (b) assessed whether emotion intensity moderates these associations. Experiential, behavioral, and physiological responses were measured second-by-second during a film that induced amusement and sadness. Results indicate that experience and behavior were highly associated but that physiological responses were only modestly associated with experience and behavior. Intensity of amusement experience was associated with greater coherence between behavior and physiological responding; intensity of sadness experience was not. These findings provide new evidence about response system coherence in emotions.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Emotion and motivation II: sex differences in picture processing.

            Adhering to the view that emotional reactivity is organized in part by underlying motivational states--defensive and appetitive--we investigated sex differences in motivational activation. Men's and women's affective reactions were measured while participants viewed pictures with varied emotional and neutral content. As expected, highly arousing contents of threat, mutilation, and erotica prompted the largest affective reactions in both men and women. Nonetheless, women showed a broad disposition to respond with greater defensive reactivity to aversive pictures, regardless of specific content, whereas increased appetitive activation was apparent for men only when viewing erotica. Biological and sociocultural factors in shaping sex differences in emotional reactivity are considered as possible mediators of sex differences in emotional response.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              The do re mi's of everyday life: the structure and personality correlates of music preferences.

              The present research examined individual differences in music preferences. A series of 6 studies investigated lay beliefs about music, the structure underlying music preferences, and the links between music preferences and personality. The data indicated that people consider music an important aspect of their lives and listening to music an activity they engaged in frequently. Using multiple samples, methods, and geographic regions, analyses of the music preferences of over 3,500 individuals converged to reveal 4 music-preference dimensions: Reflective and Complex, Intense and Rebellious, Upbeat and Conventional, and Energetic and Rhythmic. Preferences for these music dimensions were related to a wide array of personality dimensions (e.g., Openness), self-views (e.g., political orientation), and cognitive abilities (e.g., verbal IQ).
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2013
                16 August 2013
                : 8
                : 8
                : e72412
                Affiliations
                [1]Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research Methods, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
                UC Davis School of Medicine, United States of America
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: MMM HL. Performed the experiments: MMM. Analyzed the data: MMM. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MMM HL. Wrote the manuscript: MMM HL.

                Article
                PONE-D-12-39803
                10.1371/journal.pone.0072412
                3745471
                23977295
                226975f6-e671-45ce-8f20-ab7df2c63c32
                Copyright @ 2013

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 11 December 2012
                : 13 July 2013
                Funding
                The authors have no support or funding to report.
                Categories
                Research Article

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article