The pleasantness of visual symmetry: always, never or sometimes

There is evidence of a preference for visual symmetry. This is true from mate selection in the animal world to the aesthetic appreciation of works of art. It has been proposed that this preference is due to processing fluency, which engenders positive affect. But is visual symmetry pleasant? Evidenc...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014-03, Vol.9 (3), p.e92685-e92685
Main Authors: Pecchinenda, Anna, Bertamini, Marco, Makin, Alexis David James, Ruta, Nicole
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Art works
Biology and Life Sciences
Classification
Cognition & reasoning
Experimental psychology
Female
Humans
Hypotheses
Male
Mate selection
Medicine and Health Sciences
Muscle function
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Personality
Photic Stimulation
Pleasure
Preferences
Priming
Reaction Time
Social psychology
Social Sciences
Symmetry
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:There is evidence of a preference for visual symmetry. This is true from mate selection in the animal world to the aesthetic appreciation of works of art. It has been proposed that this preference is due to processing fluency, which engenders positive affect. But is visual symmetry pleasant? Evidence is mixed as explicit preferences show that this is the case. In contrast, implicit measures show that visual symmetry does not spontaneously engender positive affect but it depends on participants intentionally assessing visual regularities. In four experiments using variants of the affective priming paradigm, we investigated when visual symmetry engenders positive affect. Findings showed that, when no Stroop-like effects or post-lexical mechanisms enter into play, visual symmetry spontaneously elicits positive affect and results in affective congruence effects.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0092685