This experiment investigated how the esthetic judgment of human body and face modulates cognitive and affective processes. We hypothesized that judgments on ugliness and beauty would elicit separable event-related brain potentials (ERP) patterns, depending on the esthetic value of body and faces in both genders. In a pretest session, participants evaluated images in a range from very ugly to ve...

Whether beauty and ugliness represent two independent judgement categories or, instead, opposite extremes of a single dimension is a matter of debate. In the present 3T-functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study, 20 participants were scanned while judging faces and nude bodies of people classified as extremely ugly, extremely beautiful, or indifferent. Certain areas, such as the caudate...

We have used the technique of functional MRI to address the question of whether there are brain areas that are specifically engaged when subjects view paintings that they consider to be beautiful, regardless of the category of painting (that is whether it is a portrait, a landscape, a still life, or an abstract composition). Prior to scanning, each subject viewed a large number of paintings and...

The subj~ct of this paper does not call for an exploration of the constituents of any particular beautiful object, whether in any of the fine arts or in nature itself The topic rather calls for an analysis of the beautiful as to its metaphysical constituents. At the level of being is to be sought the answer to the question: What constitutes a beautiful thing? And at the metaphysical level also ...

Women with high body dissatisfaction look less at their 'beautiful' body parts than their 'ugly' body parts. This study tested the robustness of this selective viewing pattern and examined the influence of positive body exposure on body-dissatisfied women's attention for 'ugly' and 'beautiful' body parts. In women with high body dissatisfaction (N = 28) and women with low body dissatisfaction (...

Current approaches to aesthetic image analysis either provide accurate or interpretable results. To get both accuracy and interpretability, we advocate the use of learned visual attributes as mid-level features. For this purpose, we propose to discover and learn the visual appearance of attributes automatically, using the recently introduced AVA database which contains more than 250,000 images ...