This chapter aims to be the sin qua non of the aesthetic experience: aesthetic pleasure the immediate hedonic experience elicited by the perception of an object. To examine the relationship between fluency, affective experience, and judgment, Winkielman and Fazendeiro extended their conceptual priming paradigm with the use of a misattribution manipulation borrowed from the psychology of emotion. Processing fluency is a general term used to characterize the relative speed or ease of mental operations occurring at both the perceptual and conceptual levels. The chapter emphasizes the complexity of subjective experience, that there is clearly more to cognitive phenomenology than fluency and its attendant pleasure, and that this is especially true for the aesthetic experience. The basic idea behind this hot proposal is that high fluency can function as a signal of a positive state of affairs, either within the cognitive system or in the world.

People often prefer familiar stimuli, presumably because familiarity signals safety. This preference can occur with merely repeated old stimuli, but it is most robust with new but highly familiar prototypes of a known category (beauty-in-averageness effect). However, is familiarity always warm? Tuning accounts of mood hold that positive mood signals a safe environment, whereas negative mood signals an unsafe environment. Thus, the value of familiarity should depend on mood. We show that compared with a sad mood, a happy mood eliminates the preference for familiar stimuli, as shown in measures of self-reported liking and physiological measures of affect (electromyographic indicator of spontaneous smiling). The basic effect of exposure on preference and its modulation by mood were most robust for prototypes (category averages). All this occurs even though prototypes might be more familiar in a happy mood. We conclude that mood changes the hedonic implications of familiarity cues.

People often prefer familiar stimuli, presumably because familiarity signals safety. This preference can occur with merely repeated old stimuli, but it is most robust with new but highly familiar prototypes of a known category (beauty-in-averageness effect). However, is familiarity always warm? Tuning accounts of mood hold that positive mood signals a safe environment, whereas negative mood signals an unsafe environment. Thus, the value of familiarity should depend on mood. We show that compared with a sad mood, a happy mood eliminates the preference for familiar stimuli, as shown in measures of self-reported liking and physiological measures of affect (electromyographic indicator of spontaneous smiling). The basic effect of exposure on preference and its modulation by mood were most robust for prototypes (category averages). All this occurs even though prototypes might be more familiar in a happy mood. We conclude that mood changes the hedonic implications of familiarity cues.

Liking for previously encountered stimuli, or the " warm glow of familiarity, " is a classic phenomenon (Titchener, 1915). One source of " warm glow " is a simple repetition (Zajonc, 1968, 2001). Such " mere exposure " enhances familiarity and liking (Whittlesea & Price, 2001). 1 This enhancement sometimes generalizes to new but categorically similar exemplars, producing so-called structural mere-exposure effects (Gordon & Holyoak, 1983). However, the most robust exposure effects on familiarity and liking occur on prototypes of the presented category (after all, prototypes resemble all the exposed exem-plars). Thus, prototypes are rated as highly familiar, even when they are objectively new—a memory illusion observed with stimuli ranging from random dots to words (e. also highly liked, an effect known as beauty-in-averageness (Langlois & Roggman, 1990). It occurs with a range of stimuli— including abstract patterns, faces, watches, and cars—and dependent measures—including attractiveness ratings and psychophysiological responses (Halberstadt, 2006). For example, prototypes of a dot pattern from an exposed versus novel category elicit more incipient " smiles " (subtle increase in the activity of face muscles associated with smiling; But is familiarity always warm? Several accounts assume so. Titchener (1915) said that " intrinsically, recognition is always an agreeable and relaxing experience " (p. 179). Some models of the mere-exposure effect posit that familiarity inevitably increases positivity because unreinforced repetition is a form of conditioning to the absence of negative consequences— associating the stimulus with relief from fear of novelty (e.g., Zajonc, 2001). Some models of the fluency-affect link assume that familiarity is intrinsically rewarding because it is connected with easy, efficient and conflict-free processing (e.g., Abstract People often prefer familiar stimuli, presumably because familiarity signals safety. This preference can occur with merely repeated old stimuli, but it is most robust with new but highly familiar prototypes of a known category (beauty-in-averageness effect). However, is familiarity always warm? Tuning accounts of mood hold that positive mood signals a safe environment, whereas negative mood signals an unsafe environment. Thus, the value of familiarity should depend on mood. We show that compared with a sad mood, a happy mood eliminates the preference for familiar stimuli, as shown in measures of self-reported liking and physiological measures of affect (electromyographic indicator of spontaneous smiling). The basic effect of exposure on preference and its modulation by mood were most robust for prototypes (category averages). All this occurs even though prototypes might be more …