Menninghaus et al. describe a “paradox” whereby recipients choose to expose themselves to works that embody negative affect despite the potential for aversive emotional experiences. Their model incorporates “processing components” and/or “cognitive mechanisms” into psychology to account for “the pleasure in art reception that is associated with negative emotions” (sect. 1, point C, para. 1). In everyday life, negative emotions secure attention, intensify emotional involvement, and enhance memorability, and these effects can transfer to aesthetic experiences. “Distancing” is initiated through the activation of “cognitive schemata of art, representation and fiction” (sect. 1, para 3) and is maintained throughout. This provides a sense of safety and control, and establishes a framework for “embracing” negative emotions, resulting in an experience that is “more intense, more interesting, more moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful.” A mixed array of stimulus properties involving “aesthetic virtues of using the media” and the compositional “interplays of positive and negative emotions,” together with interpretive “meaning-making efforts,” “integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories” (abstract).
Concealed beneath this “paradox” is a contradiction whereby a holistic and organismic ontology (concerning the nature of aesthetic experience) is paired with an atomistic and mechanistic epistemology from psychology to explain the underlying process. On the holistic side, they highlight Kant's idea that “the interplay of opposite feelings sets the mind of the spectator in motion.” The dynamic interaction of positive and negative emotions leads to meaningful interpretations in accordance with what Fechner called a “reconciliatory moment.” Thus, “meaning construction can redeem negative emotions on the level of higher cognitive processes” (sect. 1, point B, para. 2). The process of interpretation is influenced by metonymical contiguity such that the meaning of one element is modified by a neighboring element.
This is consistent with holistic ideas of the German Romantic movement. Johann Schlegel argued that, by reflecting the social realities of its audience, theatre can enhance social awareness. By selecting critical moments from life, and using carefully fashioned dialogue, the playwright exposes the hidden workings of a character's mind and shapes an audience's experience. Schiller proposed that aesthetic perception represents a way of relating to things that harmonize both thought and feeling, while involving the whole personality (Burwick Reference Burwick1991; Cupchik Reference Cupchik2002). August Schlegel maintained that audiences combine a detached appreciation of theatrical illusion with an embracing and imaginative effort after meaning. Bullough (Reference Bullough1912) anticipated the Distancing-Embracing model in his Gestalt account of optimizing “psychical distance.” The “negative inhibitory” side involves detaching from the pragmatics of everyday life (i.e., Distancing) which is complemented, on the positive side, by an elaboration (i.e., Embracing) of the experience in a new aesthetic light. These various accounts emphasize the holistic interaction of audiences with art or theatrical works.
A problem arises when the atomistic Enlightenment epistemology underlying cognitive psychology is introduced to explain why negative emotions can shape aesthetic pleasure. The authors suggest that “artworks compete for attention” (sect. 2, para. 1) and “negative emotions are quite generally a resource that is predestined for the arts' purposes” (sect. 1, point A). Danziger (Reference Danziger1997) has argued against the tendency to treat concepts “such as emotion or memory, as if they exist quite independently of how we think about them” because “the categories one meets in psychological texts are discursive categories, not the things themselves” (p. 186). Isolating “negative emotions” treats them as entities separate from the narrative situations in which artists and authors embed them. The idea that negative emotions are gratuitously inserted into texts falls within the Enlightenment emphasis on manipulating an audience's imagination and emotions through mimesis, the careful selection of subject matter treated as “real” (Schneider Reference Schneider, Pape and Burwick1995). This self-conscious use of negative emotions to capture attention or shock audiences is appropriate for a subset of artistic projects or (soap) operas.
Reference to keeping “negative emotions at a cognitive appraisal–driven distance, thereby preventing them from being outright incompatible with the hedonic expectations of art reception” (sect. 6)) raises a series of issues. One has to do with relations between “emotions” and “hedonic expectations” or “reward.” Arnheim (Reference Arnheim, Koch and Leary1985) took strong issue with “hedonistic psychophysics” – “the insipid and unfruitful aesthetic conception of art as a source of pleasure” (p. 861). He was against any attempt to reduce how “people perceive, organize, and comprehend works of art to a single scalable variable” (p. 861). The focus should be more on “persons who act as perceivers” than on the “objective percept” in isolation. This search for emerging meanings and metaphors (Arnheim Reference Arnheim1971) fits with Winnicott's (Reference Winnicott1971) account of personally meaningful “transitional objects” in which emotion is invested leading to deep attachment. Thus, suggestions in creative works stimulate connections in recipients which determine attachment (Cupchik Reference Cupchik2016).
Qualitative categories of emotion do not have an easy relationship with quantitative affective dimensions including pain-pleasure and arousal (Izard Reference Izard1971). Happiness-sadness, fear-anger, and interest-disgust have been described as “natural-kinds” linked to our mammalian past (Panksepp Reference Panksepp2007). Core affect and conceptual act theories (Barrett Reference Barrett2017; Russell & Barrett Reference Russell and Barrett1999) explain emotion away in terms of nonemotional bodily processes linked to inferences about causal situations. A “cognitive appraisal account of emotions” (sect. 3.1) fits with this reductionist approach to explaining emotion in a way that is removed from holistic accounts of experience. This, in essence, captures the contradiction hiding beneath the paradox. Although the Distancing-Embracing model is consistent with Bullough's (Reference Bullough1912) holistic account of “psychical distance,” the isolation of negative emotion is burdened by limitations of an epistemology that denies the spontaneity of whole emotional experiences in favor of inferences about internal states based on logical analyses of situations.
The good intentions of the Distancing-Embracing model relate to a distinction between emotional elaboration and affective covariation in a depth of processing model (Cupchik Reference Cupchik2016). According to the principle of emotional elaboration, a person pursues an exhaustive understanding of the work, embracing unique aspects of the narrative that resonate with episodic emotional memories. A deeper interpretation enhances attachment to and memory for the work (Garner Reference Garner1962). The principle of affective covariation proposes that the work is appraised as having the potential for a positive or negative effect on pleasure or arousal, given a person's expectations and needs. Rewarding experiences thus result from coherent interpretations of situations or matching the chosen work against transitory affective needs, respectively.
Menninghaus et al. describe a “paradox” whereby recipients choose to expose themselves to works that embody negative affect despite the potential for aversive emotional experiences. Their model incorporates “processing components” and/or “cognitive mechanisms” into psychology to account for “the pleasure in art reception that is associated with negative emotions” (sect. 1, point C, para. 1). In everyday life, negative emotions secure attention, intensify emotional involvement, and enhance memorability, and these effects can transfer to aesthetic experiences. “Distancing” is initiated through the activation of “cognitive schemata of art, representation and fiction” (sect. 1, para 3) and is maintained throughout. This provides a sense of safety and control, and establishes a framework for “embracing” negative emotions, resulting in an experience that is “more intense, more interesting, more moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful.” A mixed array of stimulus properties involving “aesthetic virtues of using the media” and the compositional “interplays of positive and negative emotions,” together with interpretive “meaning-making efforts,” “integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories” (abstract).
Concealed beneath this “paradox” is a contradiction whereby a holistic and organismic ontology (concerning the nature of aesthetic experience) is paired with an atomistic and mechanistic epistemology from psychology to explain the underlying process. On the holistic side, they highlight Kant's idea that “the interplay of opposite feelings sets the mind of the spectator in motion.” The dynamic interaction of positive and negative emotions leads to meaningful interpretations in accordance with what Fechner called a “reconciliatory moment.” Thus, “meaning construction can redeem negative emotions on the level of higher cognitive processes” (sect. 1, point B, para. 2). The process of interpretation is influenced by metonymical contiguity such that the meaning of one element is modified by a neighboring element.
This is consistent with holistic ideas of the German Romantic movement. Johann Schlegel argued that, by reflecting the social realities of its audience, theatre can enhance social awareness. By selecting critical moments from life, and using carefully fashioned dialogue, the playwright exposes the hidden workings of a character's mind and shapes an audience's experience. Schiller proposed that aesthetic perception represents a way of relating to things that harmonize both thought and feeling, while involving the whole personality (Burwick Reference Burwick1991; Cupchik Reference Cupchik2002). August Schlegel maintained that audiences combine a detached appreciation of theatrical illusion with an embracing and imaginative effort after meaning. Bullough (Reference Bullough1912) anticipated the Distancing-Embracing model in his Gestalt account of optimizing “psychical distance.” The “negative inhibitory” side involves detaching from the pragmatics of everyday life (i.e., Distancing) which is complemented, on the positive side, by an elaboration (i.e., Embracing) of the experience in a new aesthetic light. These various accounts emphasize the holistic interaction of audiences with art or theatrical works.
A problem arises when the atomistic Enlightenment epistemology underlying cognitive psychology is introduced to explain why negative emotions can shape aesthetic pleasure. The authors suggest that “artworks compete for attention” (sect. 2, para. 1) and “negative emotions are quite generally a resource that is predestined for the arts' purposes” (sect. 1, point A). Danziger (Reference Danziger1997) has argued against the tendency to treat concepts “such as emotion or memory, as if they exist quite independently of how we think about them” because “the categories one meets in psychological texts are discursive categories, not the things themselves” (p. 186). Isolating “negative emotions” treats them as entities separate from the narrative situations in which artists and authors embed them. The idea that negative emotions are gratuitously inserted into texts falls within the Enlightenment emphasis on manipulating an audience's imagination and emotions through mimesis, the careful selection of subject matter treated as “real” (Schneider Reference Schneider, Pape and Burwick1995). This self-conscious use of negative emotions to capture attention or shock audiences is appropriate for a subset of artistic projects or (soap) operas.
Reference to keeping “negative emotions at a cognitive appraisal–driven distance, thereby preventing them from being outright incompatible with the hedonic expectations of art reception” (sect. 6)) raises a series of issues. One has to do with relations between “emotions” and “hedonic expectations” or “reward.” Arnheim (Reference Arnheim, Koch and Leary1985) took strong issue with “hedonistic psychophysics” – “the insipid and unfruitful aesthetic conception of art as a source of pleasure” (p. 861). He was against any attempt to reduce how “people perceive, organize, and comprehend works of art to a single scalable variable” (p. 861). The focus should be more on “persons who act as perceivers” than on the “objective percept” in isolation. This search for emerging meanings and metaphors (Arnheim Reference Arnheim1971) fits with Winnicott's (Reference Winnicott1971) account of personally meaningful “transitional objects” in which emotion is invested leading to deep attachment. Thus, suggestions in creative works stimulate connections in recipients which determine attachment (Cupchik Reference Cupchik2016).
Qualitative categories of emotion do not have an easy relationship with quantitative affective dimensions including pain-pleasure and arousal (Izard Reference Izard1971). Happiness-sadness, fear-anger, and interest-disgust have been described as “natural-kinds” linked to our mammalian past (Panksepp Reference Panksepp2007). Core affect and conceptual act theories (Barrett Reference Barrett2017; Russell & Barrett Reference Russell and Barrett1999) explain emotion away in terms of nonemotional bodily processes linked to inferences about causal situations. A “cognitive appraisal account of emotions” (sect. 3.1) fits with this reductionist approach to explaining emotion in a way that is removed from holistic accounts of experience. This, in essence, captures the contradiction hiding beneath the paradox. Although the Distancing-Embracing model is consistent with Bullough's (Reference Bullough1912) holistic account of “psychical distance,” the isolation of negative emotion is burdened by limitations of an epistemology that denies the spontaneity of whole emotional experiences in favor of inferences about internal states based on logical analyses of situations.
The good intentions of the Distancing-Embracing model relate to a distinction between emotional elaboration and affective covariation in a depth of processing model (Cupchik Reference Cupchik2016). According to the principle of emotional elaboration, a person pursues an exhaustive understanding of the work, embracing unique aspects of the narrative that resonate with episodic emotional memories. A deeper interpretation enhances attachment to and memory for the work (Garner Reference Garner1962). The principle of affective covariation proposes that the work is appraised as having the potential for a positive or negative effect on pleasure or arousal, given a person's expectations and needs. Rewarding experiences thus result from coherent interpretations of situations or matching the chosen work against transitory affective needs, respectively.