ABSTRACT
In the course of the twentieth century, psychological aesthetics followed the paradigms of psychology, thereby also incorporating their shortcomings into its empirical designs. Recent approaches have partly overcome these deficiencies, yet still fail to include cultural context in a sufficiently elaborated way in their empirical models. It needs to be decided whether further development of such models will be pursued within the narrow limits of experimental methodology or expanded to the methods of psychology’s “sister interpretive disciplines in the humanities and in the social sciences” (Jerome Bruner), for example by including hermeneutic, descriptive or phenomenological approaches.
Among recent theoretical concepts of cultural psychology Ernst E. Boesch’s symbolic action theory provides an interesting fundament for explaining human aesthetic activities in cultural context. A similar fruitful theoretical background may be found in Alfred Lang’s Semiotic Ecology, in Peter Faltin’s semiotic theory of aesthetic signs or in Wilhelm Salber’s Psychological Morphology. Looking for an integrative approach to psychological aesthetics might be a challenging theoretical goal for recent cultural psychology.
