Beauty has received sparse attention from emotion theorists, some of whom have argued that aesthetic pleasure is cognitive in nature and too “disinterested” to be emotional. This view is supported by research suggesting that aesthetic pleasure is based on processing fluency. The authors review recent findings in the psychology of aesthetics and present two arguments. First, processing fluency e...

We offer the first empirical comparison of the pleasure in seeing (i.e., schadenfreude) and in causing (i.e., gloating) others' adversity. In Study 1, we asked participants to recall and report on an (individual or group) episode of pleasure that conformed to our formal definition of schadenfreude, gloating, pride, or joy, without reference to an emotion word. Schadenfreude and gloating were di...

Mark Akenside was one of a number of eighteenth-century men who rose to prominence as both a poet and a doctor. He was born in 1721 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and in 1738 attended Edinburgh University, initially to prepare for becoming a Presbyterian clergyman, but switching after a year to the study of medicine. During his student career, he wrote a long philosophical poem, The pleasures of imagi...

Like human children, most young mammals devote a significant amount of time and energy playing together, and social play is fun. Although social play is very pleasurable, it is more than just a frivolous activity: it is crucial for the development of behavioral flexibility, the acquisition of social and cognitive competence, and the maintenance of group cohesion. Social play is a natural reinfo...

The central argument of this chapter is that in thinking about the uses of video in educational research, we should break free of educational videos’ roots in instructional films and observational analysis, and add to the goals of documenting and informing the goals of provoking self-reflection, challenging assumptions, creating things of beauty, entertaining, and giving pleasure. When we enter...

Smoke from cigars, pipes and cigarettes has curled its way through all levels of society in the last two hundred years. Matthew Hilton peels away the multifaceted images evoked by smoking in British literature, advertising and the cinema, as well as by more recent medical and political responses. The virtues attributed to tobacco, pleasure and relaxation, were primarily for the leisured classes...