The Sublime, an empirical investigation

The sublime has occupied a special space in aesthetic theory since Burke’s classic A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757, referring to a group of aesthetic experiences associated with magnitude and power. Despite recent use of the term in general psychology, there is a lack of empirical characterisation of the sublime, especially in relation to beauty. Our exploratory work addresses these issues: (1) to understand the physical characteristics of items judged as sublime, (2) to understand underlying emotional and cognitive factors of the sublime and (3) to understand the role of individual differences. Study 1 was an image rating task in which participants rated a wide range of natural images on their degree of the sublime and beauty. Study 2 was a word-association task, with words taken from a corpus of aesthetic-related and sublime-related adjectives/phrases being rated in terms of their perceived associations with the sublime and the beautiful. Results demonstrate that there are physical and psychological properties associated uniquely with the sublime, and that individual differences may play an important role. The current results provide insight into the literature of the sublime, and have implications on recent trends of emotional and environmental psychology.