Albert Flexas

University of the Balearic Islands | UIB · Department of Applied Pedagogy and Educational Psychology

Aesthetic appreciation is part of our everyday life: it is a subjective judgment we make when looking at a painting, a landscape, or—in fact—at another person. Neuroimaging and electrophysiological evidence suggests that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a critical role in aesthetic judgments. Here, we show that the experience o...

We examined the influence of affective priming on the appreciation of abstract artworks using an evaluative priming task. Facial primes (showing happiness, disgust or no emotion) were presented under brief (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, SOA = 20ms) and extended (SOA = 300ms) conditions. Differences in aesthetic liking for abstract paintings depending...

Neuroimage experiments have been essential for identifying active brain networks. During cognitive tasks as in, e.g., aesthetic appreciation, such networks include regions that belong to the default mode network (DMN). Theoretically, DMN activity should be interrupted during cognitive tasks demanding attention, as is the case for aesthetic apprecia...

Improvements in neuroimaging methods have afforded significant advances in our knowledge of the cognitive and neural foundations of aesthetic appreciation. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to register brain activity while participants decided about the beauty of visual stimuli. The data were analyzed with event-related field (ERF) and Time-Freq...

Los avances tecnológicos y el creciente dominio del entorno virtual por parte de la población (por su mayor accesibilidad, la popularidad de las redes sociales, la introducción de espacios virtuales en el ámbito educativo...) han provocado un aumento notable del ciberacoso en los últimos años. Este estudio muestra que casi la mitad de los jóvenes e...

Moral decision-making is influenced by various factors, including personality and language. In this cross-sectional study, we investigated the Foreign-Language effect (FLe) in early, highly proficient, Catalan-Spanish bilinguals and examined the role of several personality dimensions in their responses to moral dilemmas. We obtained a multilevel da...

Bullying is a widespread and worrying phenomenon, related to many different personal, behavioral, and social variables which can modulate it and its outcomes, also in the long term. These relationships are usually studied in children and adolescents, but less often in adults who have suffered or perpetrated bullying in the past. The present work ex...

Background: Bullying in childhood and adolescence is a worldwide problem. There is a general lack of validated retrospective measures of bullying, especially in Spanish-speaking populations. The present study aimed to adapt the retrospective version of the California Bullying Victimization Scale (CBVS-R) to Spanish and examine its psychometric pro...

Within the extended SOA level aesthetic liking ratings for artworks were significantly higher when primed with happiness expressions than when primed with disgust expressions. On the other hand, within the brief SOA level, priming with happiness expressions also increased the liking ratings in comparison with the disgust expressions, and the neutra...

We investigate the influence of affective priming on the aesthetic preference of similar abstract pictures. Facial primes were photographs of men and women, expressing happiness, disgust or a neutral state, that were presented for brief (SOA = 20 msec) and extended duration (SOA = 300msec) conditions. The target stimuli acted visually masking the p...

Aesthetic impression formation emerges later than the genuine perceptive processing. Activity identified in the right LOFC (300-400 ms) corresponds essentially to the representation of the negative value of the initial aesthetic impression. This initial negative impression formation subsequently would drive the second stage of aesthetic experience...

We present a review of the main dance styles, cultures and subcultures within styles in order to provide theoretical background for future studies of aesthetic preference in dance.

The objective of this poster is to show the results of brain activity registered by Magnetoencepahlography (MEG) when participants judged visual stimuli as not beautiful. In an aesthetic appreciation task, participants were asked to respond whether they found each image beautiful or not beautiful, emphasizing the importance of expressing their own...

Studies of visual esthetic preference have shown that people without art training generally prefer representational paintings to abstract paintings. This, however, is not always the case: preferences can sometimes go against this usual tendency. We aimed to explore this issue, investigating the relationship between “unusual responses” and reaction...

We propose a revised set of moral dilemmas for studies on moral judgment. We selected a total of 46 moral dilemmas available in the literature and fine-tuned them in terms of four conceptual factors (Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, Evitability, and Intention) and methodological aspects of the dilemma formulation (word count, expression style, qu...

A comprehensive characterization of the neurobiological underpinnings of artistic activities and aesthetic experience will require understanding of their evolution. Evolutionary approaches to these phenomena have thus far lacked adequate conceptual, archaeological, and neurobiological grounding. Here, after the necessary conceptual clarifications,...

This study provides exploratory evidence about how behavioral and neural responses to standard moral dilemmas are influenced by religious belief. Eleven Catholics and 13 Atheists (all female) judged 48 moral dilemmas. Differential neural activity between the two groups was found in precuneus and in prefrontal, frontal and temporal regions. Furtherm...

Neuroaesthetics is a growing field of research concerned with the biological foundations of aesthetic experiences and artistic activities. In this paper we trace the major milestones in the history of neuroaesthetics, from British Empiricism to current neuroimaging studies, emphasizing the continuity of certain basic assumptions and controversies....

It is well established that aesthetic appreciation is related with activity in several different brain regions. The identification of the neural correlates of beauty or liking ratings has been the focus of most prior studies. Not much attention has been directed towards the fact that humans are surrounded by objects that lead them to experience aes...

Analysis Results from SPM8 (Statistical Parametric Mapping). (PDF)

Knowledge in neuroaesthetics has considerably increased as a result of neuroimaging studies. Neuroimaging studies have revealed activity in a broad network of brain regions while participants enjoyed the beauty of visual stimuli. Nevertheless, little attention is usually paid to what goes on with regards to the non-beautiful stimulus processing. Th...

RESUMEN: los autores señalan la existencia de una base evolutiva de los valores humanos a tra-vés de estudios de neuroimagen con el fin de explicar con precisión la evolución de la estética y la ética. ABSTRACT: The authors point out the existence of a cognitive basis to human valúes through neu-roimaging studies in order to explain accurately the...