The Contributions of Emotion and Reward to Aesthetic Judgment of Visual Art

It has long been assumed that emotions play an important role in our interactions with artworks. Similarly, how rewarding we find an artwork could also be an important driver of our aesthetic preference for it. Vartanian and Goel (2004) tested this idea by presenting participants with images of paintings in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, recording brain activation as they viewed and rated them on aesthetic preference. Their results demonstrated that activation in brain regions that encode reward and emotions—including the caudate nucleus, cingulate sulcus, and the visual cortex—covaried with preference ratings assigned to the paintings. This study represented an early example of how brain imaging could be used to test theoretically derived predictions from empirical aesthetics. Indeed, data from that study and several others since have accumulated to demonstrate that emotions and rewards are a cornerstone of our aesthetic experiences in relation to artworks and other classes of stimuli.