Abstract
The sublime – the mixed aesthetic experience of uplift and elevation in response to a
powerful or vast object that otherwise is experienced as menacing – has nurtured
philosophical discourse for centuries. One of the major philosophical issues concerns
whether the sublime is best thought of as a subjective response or as a stimulus.
Recently, psychology has conceived of the sublime as an emotion, often referred to as
awe, arising from natural or artistic stimuli that are great, rare, and/or vast. However, it
has not yet been empirically demonstrated whether two major elicitors of the sublime –
nature and art – differ in inducing this state. In order to experimentally compare nature
and art, we exposed 50 participants to sublimity-inducing content in two different
formats (nature-based and art-based) using 360° videos. We compared Vincent Van
Gogh’s The Starry Night with a photorealistic version of the actual place depicted in
the painting, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. We measured participants’ emotional
responses before and after each exposure, as well as the sense of presence. The
nature-based format induced higher intensity emotional responses than the art-based
format. This study compares different sublime stimuli (nature vs. art) for eliciting the
sublime.
Lingua originale | English |
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pagine (da-a) | N/A-N/A |
Rivista | PLoS One |
Volume | N/A |
DOI | |
Stato di pubblicazione | Pubblicato - 2021 |
Keywords
- sublime
- virtual reality