BACKGROUND Dissatisfaction with hand appearance is frequently the presenting complaint of patients with hand osteoarthritis (HOA), yet no tool exists for its measurement and few studies have examined aesthetic discomfort. OBJECTIVES The aims of this study were to measure the extent and to explore the associations of aesthetic concerns in HOA. METHODS 172 patients with HOA were assessed with...

Attractive individuals are perceived as possessing more positive personal traits than unattractive individuals. This reliance on aesthetic features to infer moral character suggests a close link between aesthetic and moral valuation. Here we aimed to investigate the neural underpinnings of the interaction between aesthetic and moral valuation by combining transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)...

A well-known method for generating computer art is based on the paradigm of user-guided evolution, a method whereby "artists" interactively search through populations of images in order to select, and subsequently breed, those images which show aesthetic promise. This can be a time consuming endeavor, lacking well-defined principles for controlling evolution and for obtaining images with desire...

Visual illusions constitute an interesting perceptual phenomenon, but they also have an aesthetic and affective dimension. We hypothesized that the illusive nature itself causes the increased aesthetic and affective valence of illusions compared with their non-illusory counterparts. We created pairs of stimuli. One qualified as a standard visual illusion whereas the other one did not, although ...

Web applications and web sites are integral part of day to day life, most of the activities like searching, banking, shopping, paying utility bills and other activities are carried online through web. Visual aspects and its aesthetic appeal of any web application are crucial factors to determine the success of web applications. In this paper we study aesthetics factors which form visual appeal ...

The aesthetic value of landscapes contributes to human well-being. However, studies which have investigated the link between biodiversity and ecosystem services have not taken aesthetic value into account. In this study we evaluated how the aesthetics of coralligenous reefs, a key marine ecosystem in the Mediterranean, is perceived by the general public and how aesthetic preferences are related...

UNLABELLED The rationale for crown lengthening procedures has progressively become more aesthetic-driven due to the increasing popularity of smile enhancement therapy. Although the biologic requirements are similar to the functionally oriented exposure of sound tooth structure, aesthetic expectations require an increased emphasis on the appropriate diagnosis of the hard and soft tissue relation...

Neuroimaging studies of aesthetic appreciation have shown that activity in the lateral occipital area (LO)-a key node in the object recognition pathway-is modulated by the extent to which visual artworks are liked or found beautiful. However, the available evidence is only correlational. Here we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the putative causal role of LO in the ae...

Aesthetic judgments, like most judgments, depend on context. Whether an object or image is seen in daily life or in an art gallery can significantly modulate the aesthetic value humans attach to it. We investigated the neural system supporting this modulation by presenting human subjects with artworks under different contexts whilst acquiring fMRI data. Using the same database of artworks, we r...

The recently developed Aesthetic Trinity Theory (ATT) is concerned with the categorization, description, and empirical analysis of aesthetic experiences of different quality and intensity — especially peak experiences. Its approach is derived from psychological aesthetics and the emerging field of experimental philosophy. A tripartite hierarchy is proposed: Aesthetic awe, as the peak experience...