Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 26 June 2022

Abstract and Keywords

Since the beginning of the time when researchers have endeavored to understand and identify giftedness and individual ability, they have been attentive to how individuals differ in their capacity to recognize aesthetic quality—a construct that is frequently referred to as aesthetic sensitivity. In this chapter, I first attempt to clarify what the intricate construct of aesthetic sensitivity refers to—and what it does not. Then, I briefly depict the century-old history of research on the topic. Later, I examine the main challenges that arise from the accurate measurement of aesthetic sensitivity, and the strategies used to face such challenges. Afterwards, I discuss the relations between aesthetic sensitivity and mental ability, as well as with personality. I later discuss the training and development of aesthetic sensitivity. Finally, I review the current limitations of—and propose future directions for—research on the topic.

Keywords: aesthetic ability, good taste, intelligence, perceptual ability, individual differences

Nils Myszkowski

Nils Myszkowski, Pace University, Psychology

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.