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  • Foreword
  • Elizabeth M. Delacruz, Editor

For the past 100 years, researchers in the social sciences have conducted empirical studies of human creativity, aesthetic response, and judgment in the arts. Individual and cultural differences in aesthetic sensitivity have been of particular interest amongst cognitive and cultural psychologists. Since its earliest years in publication, Visual Arts Research (VAR) has shared that interest. The first essay in this issue of VAR, "Comparison of Several Artistic Judgment Aptitude Dimensions Between Children in Chicago and Lisbon," describes a search for principles and explanations that account for cultural variations in aesthetic judgment. In this essay, Nikolaus Bezruczko and João Pedro Fróis share their cross-cultural examination of selected dimensions of aesthetic judgment. Bezruczko and Fróis find stability across two culturally different groups (children in Chicago and children in Lisbon) in some aesthetic dimensions (simplicity and uniformity) and variations in other dimensions (symmetry and expressiveness). In their explanation of differences identified, Bezruczko and Fróis shed light on the powerful effect of cultural mediation on the aesthetic behaviors of children.

Recurring questions in studies of human aesthetic behaviors include the search for reliable and valid criteria to describe the aesthetic quality or value of aesthetic objects (including, but not limited to, art), and our ability to reliably describe human variations in creating and responding to selected aesthetic objects. Research devoted to describing such aesthetic attributes and behaviors uses identifiers that focus on ascribed properties or qualities of aesthetic stimuli and/or the abilities of people to exhibit or demonstrate understandings about such purported qualities. The problems are in identifying which aesthetic qualities or criteria best [End Page v] inform researchers' understandings about human creative and aesthetic capabilities, what kinds of research methodologies and stimulus materials yield the best findings, and whether the search for universally applicable criteria and findings is in actually based on false and outmoded essentialist assumptions about human endeavors. Critiques of attempts to identify generalizable human aesthetic capabilities rest on the observation that selected aesthetic criteria or descriptors common to such studies and conducted primarily from a Western perspective favor what has now been categorized as a modernist aesthetic theory, a theory known for its affinity for high degrees of spontaneity, expressiveness, abstraction, and the use of nonlinear space. Studies based on modernist aesthetic criteria, critics observe, not only do not accurately describe anything generalizable or universal about artistic or aesthetic development, but instead reflect the prevailing tastes of particular groups of people; that is, those well-schooled and holding influence in the Western professional art world at a particular time. "The U-shaped Curve in the Low Countries: A Replication Study" conducted by Folkert Haanstra, Marie-Louise Damen, and Marjo van Hoorn continues to refine questions about and research in this area of inquiry. Their study reaffirms the finding that the cultural biases of judges of aesthetic quality produce a prominent and problematic effect on attempts to describe the graphic development of both children and adults.

Whereas Haanstra, Damen, and van Hoorn focus on adult judgments about the quality of individuals' and groups' aesthetic productions, Yen-Ching Lin and Bin I are concerned with the aesthetic-response behaviors of different subjects; that is, their subjects' different understandings and reactions to aesthetic productions or stimuli. Studies in this vein often take the form of comparisons of variations between groups and using multidimensional scaling analyses of viewer's ratings of selected aesthetic stimuli. "Generation and Gender Differences in Aesthetic Responses to Popular Illustrations" expands the scope of this kind of research in two ways: (a) by investigating generation and gender differences with regard to both cognitive and emotional dimensions of responses to aesthetic stimuli, and (b) by selecting popular images as the stimuli, rather than either the artificial stimuli or selected artworks often used by other researchers. Their findings both inform and further complicate how we understand different viewers' dispositions, preferences, and abilities to interpret imagery more typical to their everyday visual, cultural, or aesthetic experience.

Interest in the aesthetic qualities of the everyday visual environment takes a different turn in the next essay. In "Environmental Communication and Visual Pollution in the Nigerian City of Port Harcourt: Implications for Design Education and...

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