Abstract: PURPOSE: The relationship between beauty and pleasure is on debate. In the current study, we aim to investigate whether there is a dissociation between the beauty and pleasure experience by measuring the break time in a continuous flash suppression paradigm.
METHODS: Fifty-eight healthy subjects without long training experience in visual art participated. Two Mondrian masks, one above and one below the center of screen, were presented to the dominant eye, and refreshed every 100ms; the target image was presented randomly to the top or down side of the screen in the non-dominant eye. The target images that covered four categories, e.g. beautiful-pleasant (B-P), beautiful-unpleasant (B-UnP), unbeautiful-pleasant (UnB-P), and unbeautiful-unpleasant (UnB-UnP), were selected from a pilot study. There were 15 images in each category, leading to a total of 60 target images. The break time was recorded as the time when subject reported where the target image appeared after seeing it consciously.
RESULTS: The results revealed that the break time for B-UnP images was significantly longer than that for B-P images, i.e., for beautiful pictures instead of unbeautiful images, unpleasant images, as opposed to pleasant ones, increased the break time. 2) the break time for B-UnP images was significantly longer than that for UnB-UnP images, i.e., for unpleasant images, instead of pleasant images, unbeautiful images decreased the break time, as opposed to beautiful ones.
CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicated that there is an inconsistent effect between beauty degree and pleasure degree of images on break time, signifying a potential separation of beauty and pleasure perception.

Key words: Visual Aesthetics, Beauty, Pleasure, Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression, Break Time