Emotion and the arts

Abstract

While many historical approaches equate the arts with aesthetics, I see the arts far more broadly than that. In addition, aesthetic emotions themselves need to be grounded in a general theory of human emotion. Along these lines, this chapter presents a communication model of emotion that covers the full gamut of processes from the production to the perception of emotion in the arts. The production side includes compositional processes for imbuing an artwork with emotions, as well as performance processes for conveying the emotions contained in an artwork. The perceptual mechanisms include recognition of the emotional content of an artwork, as well as the experience of felt emotions by people in response to such a work. The latter is where aesthetic emotions are situated in the model.