Mystery in experimental psychology, how to measure aesthetic emotions?

AESTHETIC EMOTIONS Emotions related to knowledge have been called aesthetic since the time of Kant. Existence of these specific emotions has been experimentally demonstrated and their cognitive functions have been analyzed (Perlovsky et al., 2010, 2013; Masataka and Perlovsky, 2012, 2013; Perlovsky, 2014). Musical emotions, an ability to be affected by sounds, the reason for evolutionary emergence of this ability were called “the greatest mystery” by Darwin (1871). Aesthetic emotions include musical emotions, emotions of cognitive dissonances, emotions related to improving knowledge, in particular improving knowledge near the “top” of the mental hierarchy experienced as emotions of the beautiful (Perlovsky, 2014). Other fundamentally important aesthetic emotions are discussed later. Although a number of outstanding scientists work in this field, there are no methods that even come close to a universally agreed approach to measuring qualities of aesthetic emotions, or establishing their classification, or an approximate number. Some researchers accept that there are two fundamental emotional dimensions, arousal and valence, and the rest are mixtures of the two (Russell, 1980). Juslin (2013) suggests that there are no specifically musical emotions, emotions experienced while listening to music are the same as those described by standard emotional words and mixtures of them. Scherer (2005) maintains that there are specifically musical emotions, the number of emotions is very large, however he doubts that they could be measured and that such measurements could be useful. Many researchers (Zentner et al., 2008) suggest that there is a tremendous number of aesthetic emotions and develop approaches to their measurements (e.g., tenderness, transcendence, nostalgia). The author of this article (Perlovsky, 2014) suggests specific and fundamental cognitive functions of musical emotions, which qualities and numbers are beyond possible language descriptions. The theory of drives and emotions (Grossberg and Levine, 1987) suggests that emotions and related feelings correspond to satisfaction or dissatisfaction of drives and instincts. These measure vital bodily parameters (such as sugar level in blood), and emotional neural signals convey their satisfactory or unsatisfactory ranges to decision-making parts of the brain. These are “bodily” emotions, of ancient origins, and there are words in every language for describing them. In English there are approximately 150 emotional words (Shaver et al., 1987); between 5 and 14 of these, are identified as significantly different by various researchers (Scherer, 2005; Petrov et al., 2012). The Grossberg-Levine theory has been extended to aesthetic emotions (Perlovsky and McManus, 1991; Perlovsky, 2001, 2007, 2010, 2014). The knowledge instinct has been suggested to drive improvement of mental representations in their correspondence to objects and events in the world (knowledge). In addition to increasing knowledge, the knowledge instinct drives the brain-mind to resolve contradictions between knowledge and bodily instincts, and among various aspects of knowledge. Satisfaction or dissatisfaction of this instinct is experienced as aesthetic emotions. A combinatorially large number of potential contradictions in knowledge predicts a very large number of emotions of cognitive dissonance and musical emotions. Musical emotions have been predicted to help overcoming emotional contradictions of cognitive dissonances among elements of knowledge and accumulate contradictory knowledge (Perlovsky, 2010, 2012a,b, 2014). These predictions have been experimentally confirmed (Masataka and Perlovsky, 2012, 2013; Perlovsky et al., 2013; Perlovsky, 2014). Prosodial emotions that we hear in human voice are usually discussed in their ancient and primitive aspects, which unify us with pre-language animals, such as signals of danger, rage, anger, disgust, and happiness. Less discussed aesthetic emotions of prosody are specifically human emotions motivating us to connect sounds and meanings in speech or more generally in language (although emotions of prosody are contained in sounds, we used to associate them with language). These emotions sound usually below the level of consciousness in everyday unarticulated speech. They constitute the essence of poetry beginning before the Bible, Homer, or Koran. Despite the importance of these emotions they have not been sufficiently studied. Not a single experimental publication addressing these emotions could be found. Among rare studies are