Nature versus art as elicitors of the sublime: A virtual reality study.

ABSTRACT: The sublime-the mixed aesthetic experience of uplift and elevation in response to a powerful or vast object that otherwise is experienced as menacing-has nurtured philosophical discourse for centuries. One of the major philosophical issues concerns whether the sublime is best thought of as a subjective response or as a stimulus. Recently, psychology has conceived of the sublime as an emotion, often referred to as awe, arising from natural or artistic stimuli that are great, rare, and/or vast. However, it has not yet been empirically demonstrated whether two major elicitors of the sublime-nature and art-differ in inducing this state. In order to experimentally compare nature and art, we exposed 50 participants to sublimity-inducing content in two different formats (nature-based and art-base

SUBMITTER: Chirico A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7984734 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature