Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionMotion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience
Introduction
‘The painting will move the soul of the beholder when the people painted there each clearly shows the movement of his own soul...we weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving. These movements of the soul are known from the movements of the body.’ ([1], p. 80).
Although no consensus has been reached on how to define art, the problem of the nature of art (however so defined) has attracted the interest of cognitive neuroscientists who opened a field of research named ‘neuroesthetics’ 2, 3. Other attempts have been made to derive invariant universal perceptual rules to explain what art is, and what esthetic pleasures we derive from it, on the basis of psychophysical and neurocognitive knowledge of the visual part of the brain (see, for example, Refs 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).
Here, we pursue a different strategy. First, we ‘bracket’ the artistic dimension of visual works of art and focus on the embodied phenomena that are induced in the course of contemplating such works by virtue of their visual content. We illustrate the neural mechanisms that underpin the empathetic ‘power of images’ [9] and show that embodied simulation and the empathetic feelings it generates has a crucial role (Box 1). Second, we address – within the same empathetic framework – one aspect of the effects of works of art, namely the felt effect of particular gestures involved in producing them.
Most spectators of works of art are familiar with feelings of empathetic engagement with what they see in the work itself. These feelings might consist of the empathetic understanding of the emotions of represented others or, most strikingly, of a sense of inward imitation of the observed actions of others in pictures and sculptures. These observations raise two questions: how relevant is empathy to esthetic experience, and what are the neural mechanisms involved?
Section snippets
Empathy in esthetic experience
We begin with examples of the ways in which viewers of works of art report bodily empathy. For instance, in the case of Michelangelo's Prisoners, responses often take the form of a felt activation of the muscles that appear to be activated within the sculpture itself, as if in perfect consonance with Michelangelo's intention of showing his figures struggle to free themselves from their material matrix (Figure 1). In looking at scenes from Goya's Desastres de la Guerra, bodily empathy arises not
Embodied simulation in esthetic experience: actions and intentions
The discovery of mirror neurons illuminates the neural underpinnings of the frequent but hitherto unexplained feeling of physical reaction, often in apparent imitation of the actions represented within a work of art or suggested by the implied movements involved in its making; mirror neurons also offer the possibility of a clearer understanding of the relationship between responses to the perception of movement within paintings, sculpture and architecture (and not just in their anthropomorphic
Embodied simulation in esthetic experience: objects
The discovery of ‘canonical neurons’ in the macaque premotor cortex 17, 23 and the discovery of parietal neurons with similar properties 24, 25 showed that the observation of static graspable objects activates not only visual areas of the brain but also motor areas that control object-related actions such as grasping. The observation of a graspable object leads to the simulation of the motor act that the object affords. This implies that the same neuron not only codes the execution of motor
Embodied simulation in esthetic experience: emotion and sensation
The historic theories of physiognomic expression, such as those of Charles Le Brun from 1688 onwards, suggested correlations between specific facial expressions and specific emotions [34]. They have generally not been taken as seriously as they merit [35]. Despite the work of Paul Ekman on the correlations between emotion and physiognomic expression [36], the earlier claims continue to be regarded as having no empirical foundation. Yet current neuroscientific research has begun to unveil the
Embodied simulation and implied gesture: feeling the movement behind the mark
Whether in response to a wide range of non-figurative works or to figurative works where the marks of the maker's instruments are particularly clear, observers often feel a form of somatic response to vigorous handling of the artistic medium and to visual evidence of the movement of the hand more generally. Such issues cast considerable light on esthetic experience because it is here divorced from any form of overt imitation of a realistically portrayed gesture or movement, but rather it is
Concluding remarks
Automatic empathetic responses constitute a basic level of response to images and to works of art. Underlying such responses is the process of embodied simulation that enables the direct experiential understanding of the intentional and emotional contents of images. This basic level of reaction to images becomes essential to any understanding of their effectiveness as art. Historical and cultural or contextual factors do not contradict the importance of considering the neural processes that
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by MIUR (Ministero Italiano dell’Università e della Ricerca).
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