Relations between perceived affect and liking for melodies and visual designs

Sensory valuation is a fundamental aspect of cognition. It involves assigning hedonic value to a stimulus based on its sensory information considering personal and contextual factors. Hedonic values (e.g., liking) can be deemed affective states that motivate behavior, but the relations between hedonic and affective judgments have yet to be established. To fill this gap, we investigate the relations between stimulus features, perceived affect, and liking across domains and with potentially relevant individual traits. Fifty-eight participants untrained in music and visual art rated their liking and perceived valence and arousal for visual designs and short melodies varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity, and filled several questionnaires. First, we examined group-level relations between perceived affect and liking across domains. Second, we inspected the relations between the individual use of musical and visual properties in judgments of liking and perceived affect—i.e., between aesthetic and perceived-affect sensitivities. Third, we inquired into the influence of information-related (need for cognition, NFC) and affect-related (need for emotion, NFE) traits on individual sensitivities. We found domain-specific effects of the stimulus features on liking, a linear association between valence and liking, the inverted-U model of arousal and liking, a binary profile of musical aesthetic sensitivities, and a modulatory effect of NFC on how people use stimulus properties in their hedonic and affective judgments. In summary, the results suggest that hedonic value is primarily computed from domain-specific sensory information partially moderated by NFC.