Abstract: PURPOSE: The relationship between beauty and pleasure is a significant aspect of the aesthetic mechanism. Whether there is a separation between beauty and pleasure in visual aesthetic experience is still unclear. In the current study, we attempt to investigate whether there is a dissociation between beauty and pleasure experience by adoption of an affection priming effect.
METHODS: Sixty healthy subjects without long training in visual art participated. The stimuli consisted of priming images and target images. Priming images were selected from the International Affective Picture Set (IAPS, Lang et al., 2001). Target images of 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 that recruited 73 subjects to rate images along the dimension of beauty and pleasure; there were 60 target images in total, with 15 images per category. For a typical trial, after presentation of priming image for 200ms, subjects rated the target image in dimensions of beauty and pleasure by moving and clicking the mouse.
RESULTS: We found that if the target images were of the pleasant type, there was a significant difference in the pleasure ratings of the target stimuli between the positive and negative affective priming conditions, but no significant difference in the beauty ratings of the target stimuli. Additionally, there was no significant difference between two priming conditions if the target images were of unpleasant type.
CONCLUSIONS: We found that the difference of affective priming effect only impacts the evaluation of pleasure, but not the evaluation of beauty, which may reflect the potential separation of beauty and pleasure experience.

Key words: Visual aesthetics, beauty, pleasure, priming effect, priming affection