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Preference for paintings is also affected by curvature

Preference for curvature has been demonstrated using many types of stimuli, but it remains an open question whether curvature plays a relevant role in responses to original artworks. To investigate this, a novel set of paintings was created, consisting of 3 variations—curved, sharp-angled, and mixed—of the same 16 indeterminate subjects. The present research aimed to differentiate between liking and wanting decisions. We assessed liking both online (study 1) and in the lab (study 2, task 2), using a continuous slider and a dichotomous forced choice, respectively. In both tasks, participants assigned higher ratings to the curved compared to the sharp-angled version of the paintings. Similarly, when participants were explicitly asked if they wanted to take the paintings home, they assigned higher wanting ratings to the curved version (study 2, task 3). However, when they were asked to act as a curator and select works they wanted for their gallery (study 2, task 4) and to make a physical effort to visually consume the painting (implicit wanting; study 2, task 1), no significant difference was found between the 3 sets of paintings. Finally, we found that explicit wanting decisions predicted liking for paintings, while implicit wanting and explicit liking predicted explicit wanting of the artworks in both the home and art contexts. This confirmed that it is possible to differentiate between liking and wanting responses to artistically relevant stimuli. We conclude that this theoretical distinction helps to explain previous conflicting results on the curvature effect, establishing a new line of research in the field of empirical aesthetics.