Empathy strengthens beauty

Images and music elicit powerful emotional and aesthetic responses in observers. Are these effects stronger for some people than others? Here we test to what extent empathy affects beauty, as philosophers have long supposed. 307 online participants rated the perceived beauty, happiness, and sadness of 12 art images, 12 nature photographs, and 24 songs. The stimuli were presented in two blocks, and participants took the PANAS mood questionnaire before and after each block. Between blocks, they viewed a mood induction video that increased their happiness, increased their sadness, or left their mood unchanged. Participants completed the Questionnaire for Cognitive and Affective Empathy. We used path modeling to test the effect of empathy score on beauty ratings, felt happiness and sadness (mood questionnaire ratings), and perceived happiness and sadness (stimulus ratings). We find that higher-empathy participants find music and images more beautiful (b = 0.40 and 0.22, respectively, on a 10-pt scale, p < 0.001), and they perceive stronger emotion in these stimuli (b = 0.3, p < 0.001). We also compare empathy to traits more commonly studied in empirical aesthetics: openness to experience, sensitivity to aesthetic reward, and art expertise. Empathy boosts perceived beauty and emotion at least as much as the other traits do. While the empirical study of empathy mainly focuses on one’s response to the emotions of other people, we here quantify the effect of empathy on one’s perception of objects. We conclude that more empathic people perceive more emotion and more beauty in images and music.