Looking at life through rose-colored glasses: Dispositional positive affect is related to the intensity of aesthetic experiences

ABSTRACT

Individuals with a tendency to experience more positive affect have been shown to preferentially attend to positive stimuli. Anecdotal evidence even holds that individuals perceive more beauty when positive affect prevails. In two studies, we investigated the role of dispositional affect in predicting the frequency and intensity of aesthetic experiences. In Study 1, we examined experience sampling method (ESM) data on 99 students’ aesthetic experiences. In Study 2, we used an intensive ESM investigation over the course of two weeks to collect data on aesthetic emotions (N = 97), and then associated the ESM data with dispositional affect questionnaires. The results of both studies showed a positive association between dispositional positive affect and the intensity of aesthetic experiences. However, dispositional affect and the frequency of aesthetic experiences were found to be unrelated. These findings suggest that dispositional affect does not predict how much beauty we see, but rather how much we enjoy it.

KEYWORDS:

• Positive affect
• dispositional affect
• aesthetic experience
• savoring
• aesthetic emotions
• beauty

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Jan Prüßing-Peters for the data collection for Study 2. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript. We are also grateful to Merrie Bergmann for her copy editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Please contact the first author if you are interested in working with the data reported in this manuscript. The data described in this article are openly available in the open science Framework at http://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2022.2070530

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://doi.org/doi.org/10.5160/psychdata.wdre21pr16

Notes

1. The ESM data described in Study 1 were originally collected as part of another research project (Weigand & Jacobsen, 2021a; for the data, see, 2021b). For the reader’s convenience, there is some duplication here in reporting the methodological details of the studies.

2. We note that our sensitivity analyses indicated that for the relationship between DPES and the probability of an aesthetic experience in Study 1, a medium effect could only be detected with a power of 35%. In Study 2, for the probability of having an aesthetic experience, small moderation effects could have been missed. Future studies should aim at a larger sample size to overcome these power issues.