ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a neural theory for the conscious experience of pleasure in art that is founded on insights from the neuroscience of emotion. It reviews some of the available literature on the aesthetic evaluation of paintings and faces in the functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner to highlight what the results can contribute to the question of emotion and pleasure in aesthetic experience. The results showed that compared with a color-discrimination task, rating faces on attractiveness resulted in increased regional cerebral blood flow in the left anterior and middle frontal cortex, left fronto-temporal junction, orbitofrontal cortex, caudate nucleus, and the visual cortex. The chapter reviews the results of studies in visual aesthetics of artworks in which subjects were instructed explicitly to focus on subjective preferences or beauty, both of which involve cognitive as well as affective states. It discusses a study in which subjects were instructed explicitly to focus on subjective preferences while viewing faces in the scanner.
