CHAPTER 4
The Arts are More than Aesthetics:
Neuroaesthetics as Narrow Aesthetics
Steven Brown and Ellen Dissanayake
Neuroaesthetics is a young enough field that there seems to be no established view
of its proper subject matter. Morphologically, the term implies the scientific study
of neural aspects of the perception of artworks such as paintings, or elements of
artworks such as musical intervals. We are concerned, however, that practitioners
of this new field may not be aware of the tremendous ambiguities inherent in the
terms “aesthetics” and “art,” ones that limit a proper understanding of human art
behavior. Connotations of these terms are particularly inappropriate and misleading when considering the experiences, practices, and functions of the arts in
preindustrial, folk, aboriginal, or Pleistocene societies, and even in contemporary
popular culture.
It is only during the last two centuries that the terms “Art” (with an implied
capital A, connoting an independent realm of prestigious and revelatory works)
and “aesthetics” (as a unique, and even reverential, mode of attention toward such
works) have taken on their present elitist meanings and become unavoidably intertwined (Davies, 2006; Shiner, 2001). The word “aesthetic” (from the Greek
aiesthesis, having to do with the senses) was first used in 1735 by a German
philosopher in a book on poetry (Baumgarten, 1735/1954), and since that time
has been employed in two different, but not always distinct, ways. Enlightenment
philosophers and their followers gradually developed the now elitist notion of
“the aesthetic”—a special form of disinterested knowledge and appreciation—to
describe the emotional response elicited by the perception of great works of art
(Shiner, 2001).
While this meaning of aesthetic has strong historical connections with the arts and
with artworks, a second usage has come to refer to any value system having to do
with the appreciation of beauty, such as the beauty of nature. In recent decades,
for example, some ethologists and evolutionary psychologists have adopted this
second, broader notion of aesthetics in a new field, originally called “landscape
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aesthetics” (Appleton, 1990; Orians, 2001; Ruso, Renninger, & Atzwanger, 2003)
or “Darwinian aesthetics” (Thornhill, 1998), but generally called “evolutionary
aesthetics” (Voland & Grammer, 2003) today. Evolutionary aesthetics investigates
sensory preferences in animals and humans that promote selective attention and
positive emotional responses toward objects in the environment that lead to adaptive
decision making and problem solving (Orians, 2001). Objects perceived in this
manner are considered to be beautiful (Thornhill, 1998). Following Darwin (1871),
who noted that animals (especially birds) seemed to appreciate beauty and who
attributed the spectacular colors and patterns of male birds to female choice, some
workers in evolutionary aesthetics have proposed that human art arose by sexual
selection in a similar manner to the courtship displays performed by male birds to
attract females for mating (e.g., Miller, 2000, 2001).
Although workers in evolutionary aesthetics do not overtly adhere to the elitist
philosophical connotations of aesthetics, some nevertheless write as though their
findings are applicable to an understanding of human responses to art and beauty
(e.g., Thornhill, 1998). Judging by the work published thus far under the banner of
neuroaesthetics, this field seems to be expressly concerned with art, not least the
masterpieces of European visual art and even abstract paintings (e.g., Kawabata
& Zeki, 2004; Solso, 1994; Vartanian & Goel, 2004; Zeki, 1999). We suspect that
this interest in elite visual art arises from the implicit association of both art and
aesthetics with the eighteenth century Eurocentric notions of these concepts.
In this chapter, we suggest that present-day neuroaesthetics is limited in three
important respects by a narrow, culture-bound sense of aesthetics/art. First, its
aesthetic data—based on sensory percepts and preferences—apply to a much wider
range of objects than art objects. Neuroaesthetics, like evolutionary aesthetics and
other scientific notions of aesthetics, is predicated on a class of emotions whose
biological function is to generate an appraisal of the properties of objects. However,
aesthetic emotions, seen here as general appraisals of like or dislike, are superordinate: they are critical in all living creatures for assessing a wide variety of objects
important for biological survival, as in evolutionary aesthetics, where they include
landscapes, food quality, the appearance and behaviors of conspecifics, and so forth.
Strictly speaking, it is this broad area—not works of art alone—that defines the
domain of neuroaesthetics; a better goal for the field would be to develop a general,
superordinate theory of aesthetic responses that applies to all appraised objects rather
than one linked to artworks (or landscapes or mates, for that matter). As presently
conceived, neuroaesthetics has no way of distinguishing art from nonart. Characterizing the neural responses elicited by viewing a modern abstract painting begs
the question that what is being assessed is a response to art. In the next section,
we present a view of art as a behavior of “artification,” a neologism that allows us to
think of art as an activity, in other words as something that people do (to “artify”).
Second, the arts themselves deal with a much broader realm of human experience
than aesthetic responses or preferences for features. A focus on such responses
and preferences, even in individual artworks, reduces the arts to the level of
receiver psychology and social functionlessness, as presupposed in many philosophical approaches to the fine arts based on Enlightenment principles. Although
THE ARTS ARE MORE THAN AESTHETICS /
45
complex behaviors such as creating art (like choosing a mate or finding a suitable
habitat) include an aesthetic dimension, they are in no way reducible to it, nor is it
the most important thing about them. Introducing another neologism, we propose a
new field, “neuroartsology,” as a comprehensive neuroscientific approach to the
arts, which is conceived in the broader framework of art as an evolved behavior.
Third, because aesthetic experience, broadly speaking, concerns the emotional
appraisals of objects (be they art objects or otherwise), we find it necessary to ground
neuroscientific studies of aesthetic responses where they belong, in a larger theory of
emotion. Until recently, biological theories of emotion have been strongly
dominated by the “basic emotion” theory (BET), dating back to Darwin (1872). We
believe that the BET provides an inadequate basis for the understanding of not only
aesthetic responses but of many other emotions that accompany the production and
perception of the arts. To take the starkest example (and the one most central to this
volume), while there is indeed a basic emotion for the negative-valenced appraisal of
disgust, there is no basic emotion corresponding with its positive-valenced
counterparts of liking, attraction, ecstasy, and so on. Hence, neuroaesthetics, no less
than evolutionary aesthetics, is in need of a richer theory of emotion than the one
provided by the BET. In a later section, we discuss the Clore/Ortony theory as one
promising alternative, and attempt to relate it to neuroimaging work in the field of
emotion.
In summary, neuroaesthetics should not be limited to the arts but should instead
focus on all types of aesthetically appraised objects and phenomena; and a proper
understanding of the arts does not benefit from a narrow neuroaesthetics of perceptual preferences, but instead requires a neuroartsology that seeks to explain the
full array of cognitive, neural, and cultural phenomena involved in the universal
behaviors of artification.
WHAT IS ART AND WHAT IS IT FOR?
Although aesthetics is a confused term, the concept of art is, if anything, even
more conflicted and contested. And as with the term aesthetics, the modern use of
art is derived from the eighteenth century philosophy of fine art and its focus on
artworks that were largely created for a wealthy elite, mainly the church and the
court. It is therefore burdened with Eurocentric conceptions regarding the practices
and meanings of classical/fine art. However, a comprehensive scientific understanding of art must include its manifestations in all human cultures. A foray into
the arts of non-Western cultures not only compels us to confront art practices that
are removed from the “disinterested” aesthetic practices of Western fine art, but also
forces us to consider the arts as behaviors that may have no necessary connection
with beauty (Dissanayake, 2007).
When we look at the contexts for the production of the arts in premodern (traditional, aboriginal) societies around the world and throughout time, we find that
they are notably practiced in ritual ceremonies (Alcorta & Sosis, 2005; Dissanayake,
1988, 2006). Indeed, ceremonies, whatever else they may be, are collections of
arts (conceived of as artified behaviors). Despite wide cultural variability, ritual
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ceremonies, as behavioral manifestations of cognitive belief systems about the
way the world works (Alcorta & Sosis, 2005), have some common characteristics.
They are performed at times of perceived uncertainty, when individuals and groups
wish to influence the outcomes of circumstances that they perceive as vital to their
livelihood and survival (Dissanayake 1992, in press; Rappaport, 1999; Turner,
1969). They are typically multimodal, combining singing, instrument playing,
dancing, literary language, dramatic spectacle, and the decoration of bodies, surroundings, and paraphernalia. In addition, they are typically participative: even
when an audience observes specialists performing, they join in by clapping, moving,
shouting, singing, and so forth. As John Chernoff, a scholar of West African
drumming, has observed: “the most fundamental aesthetic in Africa is that without
participation, there is no meaning” (Chernoff, 1979, p. 23).
The arts in ceremonial contexts provide a multitude of critical social functions for
cultures small and large, including historiographic functions related to a society’s
ancestry and identity; discursive functions related to the justification and feasibility
of planned endeavors; functions related to the marking of time (e.g., calendrical
rituals [harvests], life-cycle rituals [weddings, funerals, births]); communication
with deities; relief of anxiety and stress; social coordination, to name but a few. A
major purpose of arts activities is to foster cooperation in support of collective
endeavors, such as hunting, foraging, resisting enemies, building infrastructure, and
the like. The arts are also the major means of maintaining social harmony and
ameliorating conflicts within groups. The group benefits of the arts across cultures
are strong and widespread. Reducing the arts’ adaptive function to individual sexual
display, as sexual selectionists have proposed (Miller, 2000), makes the arts into
a completely competitive enterprise, when there is an abundance of evidence to
suggest that the arts do precisely the opposite, foster cooperation and obviate individual competitiveness. Hence, while we acknowledge the existence of sexual
display in the context of arts-suffused rituals, we reject a reduction of the arts
to sexual display. In fact, if a connection is indeed to be found here, it is more
likely that sexual display is a secondary offshoot of the group-assembly aspect of
ceremonial rituals rather than the reverse (Brown, 2000). Once the group comes
together for the business of collective survival, there can be opportunities for sexual
display within such a context.
We suggest that it is profitable to consider the arts not as objects (paintings,
songs), qualities of objects (beauty, consonance), cues to sensory-cognitive preferences, or passive registrations of sensory/cognitive stimuli, but as behaviors of
artification—things that people do. Over several decades, one of us [ED] has gradually refined such a concept (Dissanayake, 1988, 1992, 2000, in press). Artification
(originally called “making special”) refers to the universally observed penchant
of human individuals (and groups) to “make ordinary reality extraordinary”
(Dissanayake, 1992, p. 49).
An understanding of artification and its manifestations in human ritual practices
is made clearer by an application of the ethological concept of “ritualization,”
as developed in the study of other animals (Tinbergen, 1952). Briefly, ritualized
behaviors are communicative displays that take ordinary, unremarkable behaviors
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47
drawn from everyday life (e.g., preening, nest building, pecking for food) and use
them in an altered manner and novel context in order to communicate something
entirely different from their original source. Ethologists have described the alterations that occur during ritualization in both animals and humans (Eibl-Eibesfeldt,
1989, pp. 439-440), and have shown that, compared with the precursor behavior, the
ritualized version becomes (a) simplified: it is formalized, stereotyped, or patterned;
(b) repeated, often with a “typical intensity” or regularity of pace that departs from
desultory performance of ordinary actions; (c) exaggerated; and (d) elaborated,
sometimes with (e) manipulation of expectation. These alterations or operations
serve to attract attention to and sustain interest in the new message, which is often
concerned with aggression or courtship.
The human behavior of artification, like ritualization, uses operations such as
formalization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration performed on components
of ordinary behaviors to make them notable and extraordinary. In the most elementary sense, ordinary body movements, when artified (or stylized) through
formalization, repetition, elaboration, and exaggeration, become “dance,” ordinary
language is made poetic or literary, and ordinary materials (bodies, artifacts, surroundings) are rendered extraordinary with paint, carving, and accoutrements of
countless kinds. More broadly, a dance in a traditional culture becomes further
enhanced as a narrative reenactment of historical (mythical) events. Artified
behaviors, like ritualized behaviors, attract attention, sustain interest, and shape
emotion. Indeed, while not themselves art, the preferences investigated by evolutionary aesthetics and neuroaesthetics are often themselves artified or used in artifications, as when appealing colors or shapes emphasize or enhance an important
object, event, or message.
Lest artification be seen exclusively in terms of its ability to stimulate aesthetic
responses, we point out that the result of such an activity has an important cognitive
consequence, mainly to generate a new signification for something compared with
its ordinary meaning or use. For example, ornamentation of objects like weapons or
vessels is a way of giving them special power: the placement of a crucifix in a new
church is a way of sanctifying and protecting it, and the utterance of special texts like
prayers or incantations is a way of making contact with remote deities. Hence, the
emphases that underlie the “alterations” of artification involve not only changes
in context or performance properties such as repetition and exaggeration but include
cognitive changes in the signification and function of an object or event. Arts
behaviors are among the most important mechanisms that link ritual practices with
cognitive belief systems (Alcorta & Sosis, 2005).
Interestingly, human infants are born with predispositions to respond to the
operations of ritualization (or artification) on the vocalizations, facial expressions,
and head/body movements of adult caretakers. In the universal dyadic behavior of
“baby talk,” adults spontaneously (that is, without being taught) simplify, repeat,
elaborate, and exaggerate their utterances, expressions, and kinetic movements,
thereby attracting infant attention and sustaining their interest. Adults temporally
coordinate these signals with infant responses, as evidenced by studies that show
that, by eight weeks, infants expect contingent responses from their adult partners
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(Murray & Trevarthen, 1985; Nadel, Carchon, Kervella, Marcelli, & RéserbetPlantey, 1999).
Such coordinated, dyadic behavior is hypothesized by Dissanayake (2000; in
press) to have originated as a behavioral adaptation that addressed the “obstetric
dilemma” of two million years ago when the anatomical trend toward a narrowed
pelvis in fully bipedal Homo erectus conflicted at childbirth with a concomitant
anatomical trend toward enlarged brains and skulls. Among other adaptations (e.g.,
separable pubic symphysis in females at parturition, compressible infant skull,
extensive postnatal brain growth), the gestation period was significantly reduced
(Falk, 1998; Gould, 1977; Portmann, 1941), resulting in helpless infants dependent
on their caretakers for years, rather than weeks or months as in other primates.
A mother’s simplification, repetition, elaboration, and exaggeration of affinitive
communicative behaviors (e.g., smiling, open eyes, eyebrow flash, head bob, head
nod, soft undulant vocalization, touching, patting, kissing) served to reinforce
affinitive neural networks in her own brain and, when performed on a shared
temporal basis, also set up a means of neural coordination of behavior and of
matching of affective change between the pair (Beebe, Lachmann, & Jaffe, 1997;
Trevarthen, 1979). Mother-infant interaction would seem to operate like a ritualized
behavior, where signals from one context (affinitive, prosocial behaviors, observable
in human adults and other primates) are altered and come to mean something
different or, in this case, foster an adaptive mutual emotional bond. Dissanayake
(2000; in press) suggests that human sensitivity to and competence for the operations
of artification originated phylogenetically in evolved interactions between ancestral
mothers and their immature infants.
A THEORY OF EMOTION
We have argued that the concept of aesthetics, unencumbered by its Eurocentric
conflation with art, applies to a wide array of objects (as in evolutionary aesthetics),
and that a neural theory of the arts requires much more than a neuroaesthetic analysis
of sensory preferences for art objects. An understanding of the proper connection
between neuroaesthetics and the arts requires not only a functional analysis of the
behaviors comprised in the arts but, equally importantly, a grounding of aesthetic
responses in a theory of human emotion.
We understand emotions as being responses to events or objects in the environment, driven by appraisals of goodness or badness. They are strongly tied to goaldriven motivational states important for survival, as related to feeding, self-defense,
mating, migration, and so forth. The concept of emotion requires three critical
facets: valence, intensity, and focus. Valence refers to the fact that the vast majority
of emotions fall binarily into the categories of positive and negative (Ortony &
Turner, 1990). In other words, most emotional appraisals are experienced as either
“good for me” or “bad for me.” In contrast to this discrete division, emotions vary
in intensity along a graded scale from weak to strong. Frustration and gladness
are low-intensity emotions compared with highly intense counterparts like rage and
ecstasy. Synthetic schemas that unite valence and intensity include the “circumplex”
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or “pleasure-arousal” model, in which valence (pleasure) and intensity (arousal)
are seen as orthogonal dimensions on a two-dimensional plot (Reisenzein, 1994).
While significant, such schemes still lack a third critical ingredient in the
psychology of emotion, namely focus. The most universally accepted scheme for
focus is the Basic Emotion Theory (BET), first suggested by Darwin (1872) but
elaborated in the twentieth century by Ekman and colleagues (Ekman, 1992, 1999).
The BET scheme comprises some 5 to 8 discrete emotion types that are shown to
have strong biological underpinnings, both by the unique facial expressions that
accompany them and by their universal expression across cultures. The BET has
been a major driving force for neuroimaging work on emotion and, not surprisingly,
the major emotions analyzed in neuroimaging studies (mostly fear) are components of the BET scheme (Hennelotter & Schroeder, 2006). Of these basic emotions,
only disgust can be categorized as an aesthetic emotion although there are clearly
nonaesthetic meanings of disgust in addition to aesthetic ones.
To our way of thinking, the BET greatly underrepresents the number of human
emotions as well as the richness of human emotional life. Psychologists who have
cataloged human emotions find there to be literally hundreds of emotions, not merely
a handful (see Clore, 1994). We are sympathetic to the criticisms of the BET put
forth by Clore, Ortony, and others (e.g., Ortony & Turner, 1990), and find that their
perspective on emotional focus provides a more promising way of understanding
the complexities of human emotion than the BET.
In the Clore/Ortony scheme (Clore, 1994; Clore & Ortony, 2000), emotions are
categorized with regard to three foci: outcomes, objects, or agency. To these, we add
a fourth category, what we call the “social interaction” focus.
1) Outcomes. The first category deals with valenced reactions to the consequences of outcomes. These are the motivational emotions, spanning the range from
happiness (being pleased with an outcome) to sadness (being displeased with an
outcome). Joy is a positive outcome-emotion, one that has a higher intensity than
happiness, while grief and sadness are analogous negative-valence emotions.
2) Objects. The second category deals with valenced reactions to the aspects of
objects and events. Importantly for this volume, it is this category that comprises the
aesthetic emotions, spanning the range from liking/attraction to disliking/disgust.
This is also the category that is invoked when people discuss preferences and taste.
Hence, feelings of aesthetic attraction, whether for a face, a food item, a melody, or a
building, fall into this category, as do negative-valenced counterparts such as hate
and disgust. Regarding neuroaesthetics, it is telling that the basic emotion theory
does not contain a positive-valenced aesthetic term (e.g., attraction, liking, love),
only the negative-valenced emotion of disgust.
3) Agency. The third category of emotion involves valenced reactions to the
actions of agents, and includes the spectrum from approval to disapproval. This
category comprises a large part of what people think of as moral emotions (judgments of the appropriateness of behavior), including assessments of praiseworthiness or shamefulness. Interestingly, the negative-valenced basic emotion of disgust
sits in two focus categories. On the one hand, disgust can be an aesthetic assessment
of the properties of an object (e.g., of feces, spoiled food), but on the other, it can be a
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moral assessment of the actions of an agent (e.g., of a politician, boss, or store clerk).
Hence, a scheme such as that proposed by Clore and Ortony permits an appreciation
of the “multifocus” nature of emotion terms in a way that the BET simply cannot.
4) Social interaction. The fourth category of focus, which we offer here as a
refinement of the Clore/Ortony scheme, involves valenced reactions to social interactions with other people. While similar to the moral emotions discussed under
agency, these emotions go beyond simple appraisals of agency, and can probably be
best encapsulated by the comfort/discomfort emotional spectrum. Do we feel that
people are on our side or against us? Are they supporting our goals or thwarting
them? When our ego feels threatened by someone whom we perceive as being
better or more competent than ourselves, it is this fourth category that is experienced.
On the positive side, this involves emotions like love, trust, and affiliation that
are so central to the experience of the arts. These are rewarding emotions that are
not aesthetic in nature but that definitely reinforce aesthetic assessments. We will
talk more below about the interplay between attraction (an aesthetic emotion) and
affiliation (a social-interaction emotion). On the negative side is a basic emotion
which, like disgust, has complex multifocus connotations, namely fear. Fear is an
“outcome” emotion related to predictions of negative consequences for future events
(e.g., stage fright related to a class presentation), but fear is also a strong socialinteraction emotion related to a perception of people’s intent to thwart our goals
or hurt us (i.e., being afraid of someone).
Beyond these four general foci of emotion, there is an important interplay among
emotions of a similar valence that tend to act in a mutually reinforcing manner.
We propose that there is a union of emotions that vary in focus but are similar in
valence. For example, people tend to evaluate as morally good those things that
they think of as aesthetically beautiful, and as bad those things they assess as ugly.
Hence, in mythology, the wicked witch is ugly and the good prince is handsome.
In numerous premodern societies (e.g., Basongye, Dinka, Igbo, Javanese, Lega,
Senufo, Temne, Wahgi, among many others), the good (refined, wholesome) and
the beautiful are conceptually inseparable (Dissanayake, 1992; van Damme, 1996).
Socially, we assess as morally good those people who support our goals and around
whom we feel comfortable. We tend to find them attractive (if not immediately, at
least over time). So, aesthetic and moral evaluations of a given object tend to be
parallel (Brown & Volgsten, 2006). Situations where they fail to be so tend to cause
feelings of cognitive dissonance; we are confused if the ugly witch is benevolent
or the handsome prince is evil. In sum, we tend to make parallel appraisals of
multiple aspects of objects or situations, and these appraisals tend to be mutually
reinforcing along the lines of valence.
To summarize, an understanding of aesthetics must be rooted in a theory of
human emotion, which includes the dimensions of valence, intensity, and focus.
The “basic emotion” theory lacks sufficient theoretical sophistication for an
accurate understanding of focus. We believe that the Clore/Ortony theory is a
richer view of emotion. Of the four foci of emotion that we discussed, “aspects of
objects” is the one most directly related to aesthetic emotions. However, our plea is
to look beyond aesthetic emotions and recognize the complex network of emotions
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involved in the arts, not least the interactions between aesthetic emotions and other
socially important emotions.
ORBITOFRONTAL CORTEX AND THE
APPRAISAL OF VALENCE
As just discussed, emotions are based on a valenced appraisal of an object or
event, that is, an assessment of the goodness or badness of something in terms of
individual goal attainment. The appraisal process is in many ways a comparison
between “exteroceptive” perception—the perception of things occurring in the
external world around us—and “interoceptive” perception—a reporting of the status
of our internal environment as related to the functional state of our organs vis-à-vis
physical and emotional needs. There are “visceral afferent” systems that report on
the state of our homeostatic mechanisms, such as the need for food, warmth, or
sleep. When we perform a goal-directed behavior, a comparison is made between
our intended goal and the current visceral state. We make judgments of the
outcomes based on whether they promote our goals (positive valence, rewarding) or
oppose them (negative valence, aversive). Hence, when we perceive things around
us in the context of goal-directed behavior, parallel sensory signals arrive from
exteroceptors and interoceptors, and they must be compared. An “appraisal of
valence” system makes an assessment of the compatibility between exteroceptive
inputs and interoceptive inputs. Based on this comparison, an emotion of positive
or negative valence, and of a given intensity, is registered.
In thinking about brain centers for the four foci of emotion previously mentioned,
it is interesting to consider the paralimbic cortex of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC,
mainly human Brodmann area 11, but also including anteroventral portions of the
cingulate cortex) as a promising candidate for a multifocus and multimodal brain
area dealing with the appraisal of valence (Rolls, 2004). This is one of the few
brain areas that shows consistent responsiveness to objects of both positive and
negative valence. Interestingly, the orbitofrontal cortex is perhaps primarily a
higher-level sensory cortex for smell and taste, serving as a secondary olfactory
and gustatory cortex (Rolls, 2005). This, in and of itself, may indicate something
significant about the origins of aesthetics in the appraisal of food sources (and
perhaps conspecifics as well via odor and taste mechanisms).
Neuroimaging studies of aesthetic emotions, especially those of positive valence,
have demonstrated activations in the orbitofrontal cortex in response to a wide
diversity of rewarding stimuli, including music (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Blood,
Zatorre, Bermudez, & Evans, 1999; Brown, Martinez, & Parsons, 2004), paintings
(Kawabata & Zeki, 2004), faces (Aharon, Etcoff, Ariely, Chabris, O’Connor,
& Breiter, 2001; Nakamura et al., 1998; O’Doherty, Winston, Critchley, Perrett,
Burt, & Dolan, 2003), odors (Anderson et al., 2003), tastes (Small, Gregory, Mak,
Gitelman, Mesulam, & Parrish, 2003), and touches (Francis et al., 1999). Hence,
there is ample evidence of multisensory processing within the context of a given
emotional focus (namely, aesthetic appraisals of objects and events). Beyond such
multisensory processing is crossmodal processing. For example, the conjunction of
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olfaction and gustation within neurons of the OFC is thought to mediate the
higher-order sensation of flavor (Rolls, 2005). Cross-modal associations are present
even in very young infants and include visual, kinetic, and vocal associations
(Schore, 1994).
Other brain areas that have been implicated in emotional processing show more
valence specificity than the OFC. For example, positive emotions are associated
with areas like the ventral striatum (nucleus accumbens), ventral tegmental area,
periaqueductal gray, and their associated dopaminergic and opiate neurotransmitter
systems (Burgdorf & Panksepp, 2006). Negative emotions are associated with areas
like the amygdala and anterior/ventral insula. So, the orbitofrontal cortex is
perhaps the best candidate for a superordinate emotion area that spans both valence
and focus. It is also one of the cortical receiving areas for visceral afferents, which
thus provides clues regarding the mechanism by which it can make an appraisal
of valence. By mediating a comparison between exteroceptive information from
all the sensory pathways (via their “what” or object-recognition pathways) and
interoceptive information from the organ systems, the orbitofrontal cortex is in a
good position to generate an assessment of “good for me” vs. “bad for me” and hence
assign valence to the emotional appraisal of a stimulus. In addition, the OFC is a
paralimbic area that is closely connected with mnemonic areas like the parahippocampal gyrus and hippocampus, thus modulating the memorability of stimuli. It
also projects extensively to subcortical motivation-emotion integration centers,
especially in the right hemisphere (Tucker, 1992). The importance of the OFC for the
appreciation of art objects like symphonies and sculptures may derive evolutionarily
from the function of this part of the cortex in making appraisals of the olfactory and
gustatory properties of food sources and perhaps conspecifics as well. The OFC is
also important for affiliative interactions, which is the topic of the next section.
AFFILIATION vs. ATTRACTION
Both musical anthropologists and popular music theorists agree that Western
thinking about the arts is based on an objectification of artworks (see also cultural
theorist Shiner, 2001). Art genres are seen to be composed of collections of discrete
“artworks” (e.g., books, symphonies, ballets) having individual authorship
(Stockfelt, 2006). Because aesthetic emotions are those that relate to the properties
of objects, it is perhaps natural to reduce the arts to the appraisal of objects, namely,
aesthetic responses. However, as described above, we believe that a theory of the
arts based exclusively on the properties of objects is inadequate. Having described
the four foci of emotions in our modification of the Clore/Ortony theory, we feel it
important to emphasize that the efficacy of the arts in terms of human behavior is
dependent upon the production and perception of all types of emotions and not just
object-based aesthetic emotions. We suggest that one of the most significant (and
understudied) emotions that drives the arts is social affiliation, an emotion of strong
reward value. This is tied in with our view that one of the most important functions of
the arts is to create and reinforce a sense of social unity so as to promote cooperation
and cohesion within social groups. In fact, affiliative interactions are the very basis
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53
for group formation, including family units and friendships. There is a strong
developmental basis for this, as ritualized affinitive signals exchanged between
mothers and infants in baby talk attune infants’ cognitive and affective capacities
in ways that provide a foundation for the skills at work in later production and
perception of the arts (Miall & Dissanayake, 2003). While affiliation sits in our
category of social-interaction emotions, it is highly tied in with moral emotions about
the appropriateness of social actions and with motivational emotions about their
goals and consequences. And as per our discussion of emotion above, all of these
different emotion types should be mutually reinforcing. Hence, object-based
aesthetic emotions are part of a suite of responses that includes the rewarding
emotions of affiliation, anticipation, and moral righteousness.
There is a small amount of neuroimaging literature devoted to affiliation, including maternal love and romantic love. It is telling that the experience of affiliative
emotions activates the orbitofrontal cortex as well as other reward centers of the
brain such as the periaqueductal gray (Bartels & Zeki, 2004; Carter et al., 1999;
Miller & Rodgers, 2001; Nitschke, Nelson, Rusch, Fox, Oakes, & Davidson, 2004).
This latter area contains a high concentration of receptors for vasopressin and
oxytocin—both of which are implicated in the experience of affiliation in animals
(Nelson & Panksepp, 1998; Young & Wang, 2004; see also papers in Pedersen,
Caldwell, Jirikowski, & Insel, 1992)—and projects to the orbitofrontal cortex. This
finding is consistent with our claim above that the orbitofrontal cortex transcends the
focus of emotion, and that interactions between emotions of more than one focus
may come together in this brain area, thus providing a biological explanation for why
the wicked witch should be ugly or the good prince should be handsome. We can
speculate that the functional properties of the orbitofrontal cortex provide important
insight into the human affinity toward multimodal processing so central to ritualized
behaviors, extending from mother-infant interaction all the way to the artifications of
groupwide ceremonies. Additionally, the contribution of oxytocin to stress reduction
supports an argument that some social participation in the arts, in addition to other functions, may relieve individual anxiety (Dissanayake, 2007; Üvnas-Moberg, 1999).
The bottom line for us is that the arts provide a marriage of the four emotional foci
of outcome, object, agency, and social interaction. It is misleading and reductionist
to relegate the arts to a narrow domain of aesthetics only. It does not do justice to
either the arts or the richness of the emotions that accompany them. Activities like
music making and dance in small-scale cultures are consummate ways of eliciting
the organismic properties of a group and ultimately solidifying the sense of common
cause that is so important for group actions, not least costly ones like hunting or
warfare. Aesthetic approaches to the arts focus on objects rather than behaviors and
therefore neglect most of the functional consequences of the arts.
NEUROARTSOLOGY, NOT NEUROAESTHETICS
Although we appreciate the pitfalls in proposing neologisms, we believe that a
deep understanding of the evolution and neuroscience of the arts will only come
about from a “neuroartsology” and not a neuroaesthetics. To the extent that aesthetic
54 / NEUROAESTHETICS
responses are a critical facet of the experience of the arts, neuroaesthetics will no
doubt provide important enlightenment for the neural study of the arts. And yet,
neuroartsology will cover much more ground than that offered by neuroaesthetics.
As mentioned, the arts take advantage of all aspects of cognitive life and capitalize
on all four categories of human emotions described in this chapter, not only aesthetic
emotions. In addition, neuroartsology places a strong emphasis on the behavioral
functions of producing and perceiving art. It does not reduce the products of artification to the aesthetic responses of perceivers, responses that are little different from
responses to any other salient stimulus. Perhaps most importantly, neuroartsology
encompasses a host of cognitive and behavioral mechanisms of the arts that have
no direct aesthetic functions or consequences. Features of the arts such as pitchcombination rules in music, rhythmic entrainment in dance or music, role-playing in
drama or dance, or image creation through drawing or painting need not have any
direct aesthetic function and may instead be serving social roles related to motivating
people to take up arms, communicating with deities, educating people about their
ancestral lineages, or assuaging anxiety and generating catharsis after a misfortune.
Aesthetic emotions are unquestionably an integral part of the arts, but they are
neither necessary nor sufficient to characterize them. Thus, a narrow focus on
aesthetic responses is ultimately a distraction from the larger picture of what the arts
are about. Finally, to the extent that the arts are perceived as rewarding, this is not so
only because artworks are appealing objects. There is a wide variety of rewarding
emotions that occur when people create and experience art apart from simply
object-based emotions, including the pleasure of social communion and the moral
zeal of common cause.
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