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Cited by 2,907

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience?

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Reber, Rolf, Schwarz, Norbert, Winkielman, Piotr·2004·Personality and Social Psychology Review
DOI 10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
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Abstract

We propose that aesthetic pleasure is a funnction of the perceiver's processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. We review variables known to influence aesthetic judgments, such as figural goodness, figure-ground contrast, stimulus repetition, symmetry, and prototypicality, and trace their effects to changes in processing fluency. Other variables that influence processing fluency, like visual or semantic priming, similarly increase judgments of aesthetic pleasure. Our proposal provides an integrative framework for the study of aesthetic pleasure and sheds light on the interplay between early preferences versus cultural influences on taste, preferences for both prototypical and abstracted forms, and the relation between beauty and truth. In contrast to theories that trace aesthetic pleasure to objective stimulus features per se, we propose that beauty is grounded in the processing experiences of the perceiver, which are in part a function of stimulus properties.

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Metadata

Authors
Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P.
Venue
Personality and Social Psychology Review
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2004-11
Volume
8
Issue
4
Pages
364-382
ISSN
  • 1088-8683 (ISSN-L)
  • 1532-7957
DOI
10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
OpenAlex
W2116146325
Cited by
2,907
References
10
FWCI
8.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
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Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.