BAPS 2016 - Factors contributing to the attractiveness of neatly organized compositions.

Abstract

Neatly organized compositions seem to have an attractive power on a lot of people. The popularity of images collected on blogs like “Things Organized Neatly” clearly underlines that statement. This project aims to investigate what aspects – of the spectators or of the images themselves – contribute to people experiencing them as aesthetically pleasing. More concretely, it will be assessed which stimulus dimensions as well as which individual differences play a role in the aesthetic preference for specific organized images. As this will be the first psychological study with this type of stimuli, a literature review as well as an exploratory qualitative investigation were conducted to develop a non-exhaustive list of characteristics possibly involved in the liking of these images. Stimulus aspects that could play a role include, amongst others, qualitative differences but also complexity differences regarding variation in colour, configuration, and texture; type (i.e., same or different) and number of objects; origin (i.e., natural or nonnatural) and part-whole congruence. Furthermore, also conceptual aspects (e.g., whether or not the separate objects in the composition belong together) could be involved. An important individual difference that will be taken into account is the personal need for structure, also related to different Big Five traits (e.g., conscientiousness). The qualitative investigation gives rise to intriguing research questions, of which a subset will be tested in an online study with carefully selected stimuli. Characteristics (or combinations of characteristics) consistently related to aesthetic liking might then be tested in more carefully controlled experimental studies with parametrically varied stimuli.

Date
May 24, 2016
Location
Antwerp, Belgium