ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to be the sin qua non of the aesthetic experience: aesthetic pleasure the immediate hedonic experience elicited by the perception of an object. To examine the relationship between fluency, affective experience, and judgment, Winkielman and Fazendeiro extended their conceptual priming paradigm with the use of a misattribution manipulation borrowed from the psychology of emotion. Processing fluency is a general term used to characterize the relative speed or ease of mental operations occurring at both the perceptual and conceptual levels. The chapter emphasizes the complexity of subjective experience, that there is clearly more to cognitive phenomenology than fluency and its attendant pleasure, and that this is especially true for the aesthetic experience. The basic idea behind this hot proposal is that high fluency can function as a signal of a positive state of affairs, either within the cognitive system or in the world.
