08. September 2020

Presentation of a New Screening Tool for Assessing Responsiveness to Art

The Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA) facilitates the selection of samples for studies on the effects of art

A research team of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics has just published its presentation of an innovative screening tool for assessing people's responsiveness to works of art. The new tool allows researchers to select more precise samples of test subjects and will enable future studies to quickly gain a more nuanced understanding of aesthetic responsiveness.

With the Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA) researchers can distinguish individuals who regularly respond to artworks in an intense way from those who rarely experience more than an everyday appreciation of aesthetic objects. The scale is based on a questionnaire that aims to identify potential study participants who are particularly responsive to aesthetic stimuli. The intensity with which a person reacts to music, visual art, or poetry can be determined with the AReA scale under the categories Aesthetic Appreciation, Intensive Aesthetic Experience, and Creative Behavior; and this will enable researchers to select samples of particularly responsive subjects for their studies.

The AReA scale has been tested in studies with nearly 800 participants in the United States and Germany, and it can be used equally effectively in both English and German. The research team's presentation has just been released in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts of the American Psychological Association.

 

Original Publication:
Schlotz, W., Wallot, S., Omigie, D., Masucci, M. D., Hoelzmann, S. C., & Vessel, E. A. (2020). The Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA): A screening tool to assess individual differences in responsiveness to art in English and German. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000348