Abstract
Philosophers claim that beauty is a kind of pleasure. Here,we empirically test a mathematical model that describes thebeauty–pleasure relation. Participants (N¼18) continuouslyrate pleasure while viewing images for 5 seconds and foranother 10 seconds after. At the end of each trial, they ratetheir overall feeling of beauty on a 4-point scale. First, wesummarize continuous pleasure ratings with a one-free-parameter model. Second, the joint distribution of pleasureand beauty is well modeled (r¼.72.2) as a bivariateGaussian where beauty means are a linear transformationof pleasure means. For each observer, the relation betweenbeauty and pleasure is constant across stimulus types. Thus,our model fits demonstrate that the relation betweenbeauty and pleasure is stable across experience. Yet, (co-)variances differ widely between observers and stimuli,showing that beauty and pleasure cannot be equated.
