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Aesthetic Impact of Anthropomorphic Figures in Art: The Case of Facial Expressions

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Aesthetics and Neuroscience

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Abstract

The impact on beholders of anthropomorphic representations depicting facial expressions undoubtedly plays a prominent role in societies, given the special place granted to these images through space and time, and their cultural and social importance. Here, we investigate this impact in terms of the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms behind the aesthetic experience. Given that face processing is universal among humans, this is necessarily a cross-cultural issue, and we therefore chose to tackle it from an interdisciplinary perspective, reviewing the artistic, ethnographic, anthropological and cognitive literature on figuration and facial expression processing. This review was informed by the results of an experimental pilot study. Our findings shed light on the relationship between the three dimensions of the aesthetic experience (attention, emotion, and aesthetic judgement), and show that figures share a common property that modulates the aesthetic impact.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are some exceptions involving realism and shape economy. Boas (1927) highlighted some very realistic representations that conflict with the main style of the region. These representations have specific functions in society, such as illusion in drama and caricature (e.g., Kwakiutl tribes) (Boas 2003).

  2. 2.

    Some of them feature discernible faces.

  3. 3.

    Especially when characters are composed from several naked bodies similarly to Arcimboldo’s portraits.

  4. 4.

    Assembled by brushstrokes from collections of fruit and vegetables, animals, and other objects. Even though these portraits were built from nonphysiognomic shapes, they are fully recognizable as faces.

  5. 5.

    The N170 is a component of the event-related potential associated with face perception. It reflects the operation of a neural mechanism tuned to detect human faces (Bentin et al. 1996).

  6. 6.

    This test, called the inverted effect, is used to probe observers’ face perception expertise.

  7. 7.

    This is the aim of all anthropological theories.

  8. 8.

    Especially when some objects regarded as artistic in Western eyes are not in their original environment.

  9. 9.

    Where aesthetics referred solely to beauty judgement.

  10. 10.

    Abduction of agency, in the sense of the anthropological theory of art (Gell 1998), is the inference of the intentions or capabilities of an object viewed as another person.

  11. 11.

    Here, the word intention was used in its strict sense by Gell, that is, the desire to act, to achieve a goal. The notions of agency and intentionality were used by Gell in the sense of implicit theory of mind or folk psychology - terms usually used by philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists (Bloch 1999). In this chapter, we keep to these meanings when using the word intention.

  12. 12.

    A mode of identification is a cognitive mode that humans use implicitly to experience the world (Descola 2006): how a group of persons, whether or not they are geographically and culturally connected, interpret, construe and conceptualize the world, and how they make sense of it.

  13. 13.

    Having the form of animals.

  14. 14.

    We focused on the first two points here: attention and emotion. The third point has since been tackled in a study that is still ongoing and will not be mentioned here. However, we used a third criterion: aesthetic value, in this experiment, alongside attention and emotion to address the aesthetic experience issue.

  15. 15.

    Even though expressiveness was assessed by the participants themselves, it was independent of their aesthetic reaction, as the assessment relied solely on the structure and aspect of the image.

  16. 16.

    Which is only reasonable, as both the images and the participants were randomly selected.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Jean Nicod, Pavillon Jardin, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29, rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris, France

    Amel Achour Benallegue & Jérôme Pelletier

  2. Laboratoire CLLE-LTC UMR 5263, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, 05 allée Antonio Machado, 31100, Toulouse, France

    Gwenaël Kaminski

Authors
  1. Amel Achour Benallegue
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  2. Jérôme Pelletier
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  3. Gwenaël Kaminski
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Correspondence to Amel Achour Benallegue .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Equipe IRIS, CNRS, University Paris-Descartes, Paris, France

    Zoï Kapoula

  2. Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Marine Vernet

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Achour Benallegue, A., Pelletier, J., Kaminski, G. (2016). Aesthetic Impact of Anthropomorphic Figures in Art: The Case of Facial Expressions. In: Kapoula, Z., Vernet, M. (eds) Aesthetics and Neuroscience. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46233-2_5

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