Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) investigates why and how people create art and how they perform, experience, and evaluate it. The Institute’s focus is on music, but we also engage with other performing arts such as dance and film. The MPIEA explores the underlying genetic, biological, and psychological processes that underlie the production and perception of art, as well as their interaction with the cultural, social, and historical factors and functions of aesthetic practices and discourses. The research focuses primarily on the foundations of aesthetic evaluation, perception and experience. Key topics include: * the nature of “aesthetic pleasure” and the different types of aesthetic appeal and “aesthetic emotions”; * the cognitive and affective mechanisms involved in aesthetic perception and their neural, physiological and behavioral correlates; * the motivational implications and consequences of aesthetic liking (tendencies to seek prolonged and/or repeated exposure to aesthetically appealing objects, pictures, songs, texts; decision-making grounded in aesthetic judgments, such as purchasing aesthetically appealing objects, etc.); * the ontogenesis of aesthetic preferences, their change over lifetime, and their historical, cultural and individual variability; * the range of historically and culturally varying concepts used to designate and discuss aesthetic judgments, such as “beautiful,” “ugly,” “sublime,” “interesting,” “fascinating,” “poetic,” “uncanny,” “marvelous,” “awesome,” “moving,” “touching,” “shattering,” “tragic,” “suspenseful,” etc.; * the functions of aesthetic practices and judgments for the development of cognitive and affective capabilities as well as for the subjective well-being, self-conception, and “self-fashioning” of individuals, for social communication, and for economic purposes.