Putting beauty in context: the influence of context beauty on beauty ratings

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2009
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Abstract
[ examined whether attributions of beauty, like attributions of remembering, are influenced by list context. Subjects viewed a context block of low- or high-beauty images before rating the beauty of a critical block of medium-beauty images. Across experiments, I varied the similarity of the context block to the critical block. When the images in each block were of the same subtype (e.g., modern architecture), beauty ratings for the first half of the critical block images were higher after a low-beauty than a high­beauty context. This contrast effect was absent when the context images were of a completely different type (e.g., spring landscapes), but it also occurred when the context images were only of a different subtype ( e.g., classic architecture). This pattern fit a functional account of attributions about subjective experience better than an expectancy­heuristic account. These experiments suggest that a domain-general evaluation process operates in both remembering and classification tasks.
Description
Bibliography: p. 41-44
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Citation
Tousignant, C. (2009). Putting beauty in context: the influence of context beauty on beauty ratings (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/3177
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