In our daily lives we experience many aesthetic stimuli. Our perception of beauty can be influenced by our experiences, our environment, our mood and individual differences. In three ESM studies we investigated the relation between the experience of beauty and affective state by asking participants to rate photos of their surroundings and objects and categorize them into human-made or natural. We found that beautiful experiences occur frequently (in the order of 2-3 notifications per hour). Additionally, we showed that these aesthetic experiences influence affective states by demonstrating an impact on valence and arousal ratings. In particular, higher beauty ratings were associated with more positive valence and lower arousal rating (i.e., calmer).
Our results support the standard account that people perceive beauty mostly in nature and that these preferences are moderated by individual characteristics. Specifically, we showed that art interest influences beauty ratings by increasing beauty ratings in the human-made category but decreasing them in the natural one. This may indicate that people who have an art interest are more sensitive to the beautiful aspects of human-made objects than others.
Furthermore, we demonstrated that the ability to appreciate beauty depends on individual differences and can be characterized by the personality trait ‘Openness to Experience’. People who are more open to experience in general tend to be more receptive and willing to look for beauty in everyday life. However, the relationship between beauty and openness to experience is moderated by other personality traits such as social intelligence and conscientiousness.
The ESM studies also showed that the perceived attractiveness of individuals varies with their gender and age. When we asked raters to assess images of the same individual before and after applying a beauty filter, we found that the centralized perceived attractiveness score increased significantly for all images of younger individuals (p
Interestingly, the ratings of intelligence and trustworthiness were also affected by the beautification. The resulting linear models show that after beautification the scores of these dependent variables decrease, which is consistent with a mitigation of the beauty halo effect for these attributes. In addition, our analyses also reflected the gender gap for these dependent variables: the ratings of attractiveness, intelligence and sociability increase more for females than for males after beautification. The ratings of happiness and trustworthiness decrease less for males than for females after beautification.
In the future we plan to extend our research on the beautifull by studying how specific aspects of an experience or environment may influence beauty perceptions and if these are mediated by the person’s psychological characteristics. In addition, we will investigate whether a person’s ability to perceive beauty is related to her or his physical and emotional well-being. We believe that our research will contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of the beautifull. We would like to thank the participants of our ESM studies for their commitment and participation.