슬프지만 아름다운; 시각 예술의 미적 판단과 정서 평가에 대한 뇌 반응

Abstract

Appreciation of art involves both cognitive and affective processes. However, the two processes and the neural underpinnings of them have not been differentiated clearly in the previous studies of neuroaesthetics. Moreover, aesthetic experience has often been confounded by positive emotional contents in artworks or positive emotion appraisal. Aesthetic appreciation and accompanying neural activity regarding artworks evoking negative emotion have not been studied extensively. In the current work using fMRI, we investigated whether brain areas involved in aesthetic judgment can be distinguished from those involved in emotion appraisal. We also explored neural correlates of artworks judged as beautiful yet inducing sad emotion. Our results identified brain regions differentially involved in aesthetic judgment and emotion appraisal, despite the widely shared network. Specifically, the medial prefrontal lobe showed greater activation for aesthetic judgment, while areas including the middle frontal gyrus, putamen, middle temporal gyrus, caudate nucleus, and precuneus showed greater activation for emotion appraisal. We also found increased neural activity in areas including the insula, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), pre-, and post-central gyri in association with perceiving and judging “sad but beautiful” artworks. These results suggest that the two core processes in experiencing art are closely related to each other, but not identical, and that beauty and positive emotion do not always go hand in hand.