New Directions in Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

The contributing authors to this book, all pre-eminent scholars in their fields, present their current thinking about the processes that underlie creativity and aesthetic experience. They discuss established theory and research and provide creative speculation on future problems for inquiry and new approaches to conceptualising and investigating these phenomena. The book contains many new findings and ideas never before published or new by virtue of the novel context in which they are incorporated. Thus, the chapters present both new approaches to old problem and new ideas and approaches not yet explored by leading scholars in these fields. The first part of the book is devoted to understanding the nature of the perceptual/cognitive and aesthetic processes that occur during encounters with visual art stimuli in everyday settings, in museums and while watching films. Also discussed in Part I is how cultural and anthropological approaches to the study of aesthetic responses to art contribute to our understanding about the development of a culture's artistic canon and to cross-cultural aesthetic universals. Part II presents new dimensions in the study of creativity. Two approaches to the development of a comprehensive theory of creativity are presented: Sternberg's Investment Theory of Creativity and a systems perspective of creativity based on a metaindividual world model. Also covered are the factors that contribute to cinematic creativity and a film's cinematic success, and the complex nature of the creative processes and research approaches involved in the innovative product design necessitated by the introduction of electronics in consumer products. Part III deals with the application of concepts and models from cognitive psychology to the study of music, literary meaning and the visual arts. The contributors outline a model of the cognitive processes involved in real-time listening to music, investigate what readers are doing when they read a literary text, describe what research shows about the transfer of learning from the arts to non-arts cognition and discuss the kinds of thinking skills that emerge from the study of the visual arts by high school students. In Part IV, the authors focus on the interactive contribution of observers' personalities and affect states to the creation and perception of art. The chapters include a discussion of the internal mechanisms by which personality expresses itself during the making of and the response to art; the relationship between emotion and cognition in aesthetics, in terms of the interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes across the time course of an aesthetic episode; the affective processes that take place during pretend play and their impact on the development of creativity in children and the causes and consequences of listener's intense experiences while listening to music.

Table of Contents:
Preface PART I VISUAL AESTHETICS CHAPTER 1 Perception and Moving Pictures: From Brunelleschi and Berkeley to Video and Video Games Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks CHAPTER 2 Experimental Scrutiny of the Role of Balance in the Visual Arts Paul Locher CHAPTER 3 The Mere Exposure Effect and Aesthetic Preference James E. Cutting CHAPTER 4 The Nature and Growth of Aesthetic Fluency Lisa F. Smith and Jeffrey K. Smith CHAPTER 5 Aesthetic Universals in Cultural Perception and Practice Dorothy Washburn PART II NEW DIRECTIONS IN CREATIVITY CHAPTER 6 Stalking the Elusive Creativity Quark? Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Creativity Robert J. Sternberg CHAPTER 7 A Metaindividual Model of Creativity Leonid Dorfman CHAPTER 8 Cinematic Creativity and Aesthetics: Empirical Analyses of Movie Awards Dean Keith Simonton CHAPTER 9 Creativity and Design: What the Established Teaches Us Kees Overbeeke and Jodi Forlizzi PART III ART AND COGNITION CHAPTER 10 Emergence, Anticipation, and Schematization Processes in Listening to a Piece of Music: A Re-Reading of the Cue Abstraction Model Irene Deliège CHAPTER 11 Experimental Approaches to Reader Responses to Literature David S. Miall CHAPTER 12 Studio Thinking: How Visual Arts Teaching Can Promote Disciplined Habits of Mind Ellen Winner, Lois Hetland, Shirley Veenema, Kim Sheridan, and Patricia Palmer PART IV ART, AFFECT, AND PERSONALITY CHAPTER 13 Emotion in Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Emotion Gerland C. Cupchik CHAPTER 14 Personality and Artistic Style: Patterns of Connection Pavel Machotka CHAPTER 15 Pretend Play, Affect, and Creativity Sandra W. Russ CHAPTER 16 Strong Experiences Elicited by Music-What Music? Alf Gabrielsson Index

About the Author :
Paul Locher was Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Montclair State University.