Theoretical Integration Essay: Aesthetics and Emotion in Entertainment Media

Abstract

The different perspectives in psychological aesthetics contribute to media psychology in complementary ways. A behavioral perspective stresses pleasure and challenge as motives for exploring both proximal (e.g., painting) and distal (e.g., television) media, and maintains that people prefer moderate levels of stimulation. The constructivist viewpoint emphasizes the multilayered and open-ended nature of aesthetic artifacts and holds that pleasure emerges from the coherent interpretation of a work that may be personally meaningful. Emotion theories either focus on action or experience in everyday life and in the narrative structure of proximal and distal media. The action orientation is tied to a behavioral-cognitive perspective and the idea that recipients can selectively engage artifacts that modulate pleasure and arousal. The experience orientation is linked with the psychodynamic/phenomenological viewpoint and the projection of personal meaning in the interpretation of multilayered artifacts. New interactive media forms provide an occasion for sensory modulation of experience and for the experience of agency through the manipulation of possible story outcomes. The active participation of audience members is governed by their ability to master the distal interface of the interactive console in much the same way that artists must master proximal techniques of manipulating a medium, such as paint.