2017年5月12日，國際著名學術雜誌《Cell》子刊《Current Biology》雜誌在線發表了美國紐約大學Denis Pelli和Aenne Brielmann研究員的一篇研究論文，研究從實驗上揭示了感官美和心靈感覺的關係。
美麗的體驗需要一個人的思想嗎?感官上的快樂是美麗嗎?這些問題一直困擾著哲學家。德國哲學家伊曼努爾·康德曾說，要評判美，就要有一個有修養的心靈，而感官快樂不是美麗。本研究中研究組將這些哲學理論設計到一系列心理實驗中，發現康德的觀點有對有錯。
研究人員表示，焦慮確實能減損對美麗的體驗。此外，當看到一幅美麗的圖畫時，人們也能體驗到美麗。證據表明，感官快樂也是美麗。為了檢驗這些哲學理論，Denis Pelli和Aenne Brielmann招募了62人蔘加研究。他們要求參加者描述當看到一幅畫、品嚐蛋糕或撫摸柔軟的泰迪熊時，體驗到的高興和美麗的程度。研究人員還為每個人展示了不同的照片，美麗的、不美的和中性的，讓參與者對照片的美麗程度進行排序。
在又一輪實驗中，研究者重複了之前的行為，但參與者處於心煩意亂的狀態。結果顯示，煩躁不會改變對不美事物的體驗，但會減少對美的感覺。這就表明康德認為美需要思想是對的。
但雖然這位哲學家認為感官快樂不是美，但30%的參與者表示，吃蛋糕或撫摸泰迪熊絕對是美的體驗。
研究人員詢問了一些認為吃蛋糕是美的參與者這意味著什麼。Brielmann 和Pelli報告稱，“他們大多表示吮吸蛋糕對其有個人意義，例如溫暖的孩童時代的記憶。甚至有人回答：‘任何東西都能是美麗的’。”
原文鏈接：
原文摘要：
The experience of beauty is a pleasure, but common sense and philosophy suggest that feeling beauty differs from sensuous pleasures such as eating or sex. Immanuel Kant [1, 2] claimed that experiencing beauty requires thought but that sensuous pleasure can be enjoyed without thought and cannot be beautiful. These venerable hypotheses persist in models of aesthetic processing [3, 4, 5, 6, 7] but have never been tested. Here, participants continuously rated the pleasure felt from a nominally beautiful or non-beautiful stimulus and then judged whether they had experienced beauty. The stimuli, which engage various senses, included seeing images, tasting candy, and touching a teddy bear. The observer reported the feelings that the stimulus evoked. The time course of pleasure, across stimuli, is well-fit by a model with one free parameter: pleasure amplitude. Pleasure amplitude increases linearly with the feeling of beauty. To test Kant’s claim of a need for thought, we reduce cognitive capacity by adding a “two-back” task to distract the observer’s thoughts. The distraction greatly reduces the beauty and pleasure experienced from stimuli that otherwise produce strong pleasure and spares that of less-pleasant stimuli. We also find that strong pleasure is always beautiful, whether produced reliably by beautiful stimuli or just occasionally by sensuous stimuli. In sum, we confirm Kant’s claim that only the pleasure associated with feeling beauty requires thought and disprove his claim that sensuous pleasures cannot be beautiful.
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