The Relations of Empathy and Gender to Aesthetic Response and Aesthetic Inference of Visual Artworks

Abstract

The relation between empathy and aesthetic experience has been stated early in empirical aesthetics. Aesthetic empathy means the ability to take the perspective of an artwork´s depicted content or form. Nowadays, empathy defines the ability to infer other persons´ mental states and feelings. In this study, we investigated the relationship between empathy and aesthetic response and aesthetic inference abilities. Subjects judged twenty-four visual artworks on an affective, a cognitive, and a beauty dimension, in a Self- and Other-assessment. We analyzed these data in relation to self-judged empathy on four dimensions: emotional and cognitive empathy in fictitious and in real-world situations. Additionally, we considered gender differences in empathy and aesthetic response. Results show (gender-specific) correlations between empathy and aesthetic response and aesthetic inference abilities. This supports the assumption that empathy assists to adopt the perspective of visual artworks as well as to infer the aesthetic preferences of other people.