A Novel Approach Towards Aesthetic Judgment

This chapter considers a more complete description of the judgment process, in order to pave the way for the explanation of how aesthetic judgments may produce both preferences and emotional states. It proposes a novel approach that takes philosophical aesthetics as its point of departure — but that adopts a descriptive (as opposed to normative) and empirical (as opposed to speculative) perspective, and that takes individual differences explicitly into consideration, instead of ignoring them. A preliminary psychological model is needed to guide the exploration. Aesthetic judgment is regarded as one of the psychological mechanisms through which music may arouse emotions. Thus, before describing the model, the chapter situates the mechanism within the broader BRECVEMA framework.