Abstract
This article argues that familiarity is an important ingredient of the aesthetic brew, potentially more important than the tinge of surprise. Most of the examples are drawn from the psychology of music, pointing at people’s preferences for music from their youth, strong correlations between familiarity and liking of musical excerpts, the Caillebotte effect in preferences for paintings, and neuroimaging work on the role of anticipation in the experience of musical chills. In addition, I refer to the value of incremental work in creators, and the influence of prototypicality and self-relevance for the aesthetic response. Surprise/complexity/originality/expectation violations play a role too, but their influence needs to be carefully Goldilocked: There is an inverse-J-shaped relationship between originality and liking, and, within music, liking is associated with proximity to pink noise. Finally, there is evidence that different aspects of musical events lead to different responses, illustrating that the aesthetic brew is a complicated mix.
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Notes
There is, as the editor (MJM) pointed out to me, an obvious matter of time scale here. Revisiting the St. Matthew Passion every day would likely result in a complete lack of pleasure in the piece. The editor suggests that familiarity can be seen as a baseline for the aesthetic response, and surprise as a modulator. On the basis of the evidence presented in the remainder of this piece, I would argue that there is a strong case to be made that familiarity is a particularly strong determinant of the aesthetic response, and one that is in need of explanation. If I do change in between my listening sessions, why do I still keep going back to this particular piece of Bach’s? What is this pull, then, except for the pull of the familiar—the repetition of something that once rang resplendent in my mental repertoire and keeps on ringing?
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Verhaeghen, P. Once More, with Feeling: the Role of Familiarity in the Aesthetic Response. Psychol Rec 68, 379–384 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-018-0312-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-018-0312-1