Looking Past Pleasure: Anger, Confusion, Disgust, Pride, Surprise, and Other Unusual Aesthetic Emotions

Psychological aesthetics, for the most part, is concerned with people's feelings of pleasure in response to art. The study of mild positive feelings will always be important to psychological aesthetics, but the range of aesthetic feelings is much wider than liking, preference, and pleasure. This article provides an overview of some unusual aesthetic emotions: knowledge emotions (interest, confusion, and surprise), hostile emotions (anger, disgust, and contempt), and self-conscious emotions (pride, shame, and embarrassment). Appraisal theories of emotion can describe how these emotions differ and when they come about. An expanded view of aesthetic experience creates intriguing and fertile directions for future research.