Feeling Moved Mediates the Enjoyment of Emotional Images and Music

The "aesthetic sadness paradox" – the enjoyment of sadness in art – has long puzzled scholars. Recent studies with film and music suggest that the feeling of being moved might explain this paradox: People don’t enjoy sadness itself, but rather the experience of being moved, which sad art often elicits (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2017). We test this "being moved hypothesis" across a broader range of emotional aesthetic experiences, asking whether being moved mediates: (1) the enjoyment of sadness in static images, which express emotion differently than film and music do, (2) the enjoyment of happiness across artforms, and (3) beauty ratings across sad and happy artforms. In a pre-registered online study, 203 participants rated music excerpts, representational paintings, abstract paintings, and nature photos (12 each) in terms of liking, perceived sadness and happiness, and feelings of being moved. Linear mixed-effects models and nested model comparisons revealed that, for images and music, ratings of being moved fully mediate the effect of sadness on liking (100% mediation, all p < 0.001) and substantially mediate the effect of happiness on liking (60-70% mediation across image types, all p < 0.001). Results were very similar for beauty judgments. Individuals higher in empathy, aesthetic reward, and art expertise experience more enjoyment from sadness in images and music. Our results suggest that the feeling of being moved enables the enjoyment of emotional art across domains (paintings, photographs, music), helping to elucidate the relationship between emotion and aesthetic experience.