Aims, Concepts, and Methods for the Representation of Individual Differences in Esthetic Responses to Design Features

In studying the consumer's evaluative judgments of esthetic objects such as artworks or fashion designs, one has reason to anticipate considerable heterogeneity as to preference structures wherein affect depends on the features and feature interactions of interest. For example, one might expect esthetic responses toward fashion designs to vary meaningfully among individuals differing in visualizing/verbalizing tendency (VV), intrinsic/extrinsic motivation (IE), romanticism/classicism (RC), and sex. Yet we lack parsimonious and clearly interpretable methods for representing such individual differences in evaluative judgments. Accordingly, this article (1) argues for the important role played by such personality variables as VV, IE, RC, and Sex in moderating esthetic responses, (2) develops instruments intended to measure VV, IE, and RC, (3) presents a method that uses canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to represent differences in preference structures, and (4) provides an illustrative application that tests some aspects of the reliability and validity of this approach to representing individual differences in esthetic responses to design features.