Published Papers

Fingerhut, J., Gomez-Lavin, J., Winklmayr, C., & Prinz, J. J. (2021). The Aesthetic Self. The Importance of Aesthetic Taste in Music and Art for our Perceived Identity. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 577703. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.577703 

This study focused on the relationship between art and self-identity. More specifically, we assessed to what extent do aesthetic taste and interest in the arts constitute who we are, and empirically addressed in four studies providing participants (N=1,797) with a number of hypothetical scenarios involving changes in aesthetic preferences, for example, moving from liking classical music to liking pop, and assessing to what extent they are perceived as altering us as a person. These were also compared again other changes such altering political partisanship or religious orientation. Results showed that individuals thought that changes in art altered identity at a similar level as moral changes, and significantly stronger than for other categories of taste, such as food preferences. Termed the "aesthetic self effect," this phenomenon provides insights into the dynamic interplay between art, personal identity, and societal norms.

Kühnapfel, C., Fingerhut, J. & Pelowski, M. (2023). The Role of the Body in the Experience of Installation Art: A Case Study of Visitors’ Bodily Experience in Tomás Saraceno’s “in orbit.” Frontiers in Psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1192689

The study explores how bodily experiences shape engagement with installation art, focusing on its immersive nature and physical participation requirements. Conducted at the K21 Kunstsammlung NRW in Germany, the research surveyed 236 participants interacting with Tomás Saraceno's "in orbit" installation. Through a detailed questionnaire and network analysis, the study identified four distinct groups of bodily experiences: Presence, Proprioception, Interoception, and Disturbance. Proprioceptive experiences correlated with art appreciation and transformative outcomes, while disturbing experiences were associated with awe and self-reflection. These findings underscore the crucial role of bodily engagement in experiencing and appreciating installation art, with practical implications for enhancing art engagement and fostering transformative states. The study calls for further research on the embodied aesthetics of installation art to deepen our understanding of its impact and potential for change.

Kühnapfel, C., Trupp, M., Pelowski, M., & Fingerhut, J. (2025). On the impact of public art: How engaging a pedestrian-level exhibition improves neighborhood connectedness and well-being. Wellbeing, Space and Society, 8, 100252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wss.2025.100252

How might publicly visible art enhance well-being and positively impact mental health? One aspect of art's potential lies in its capacity to foster a sense of connection to one's neighborhood or surroundings and to enhance feelings of community. Although this has long been a goal for artists and cultural initiatives, especially in urban areas, it has not been studied experimentally. To begin to fill this gap, we investigated how a free sidewalk-level exhibition about a neighborhood in Berlin, Germany altered visitors’ connection to and satisfaction with their neighborhood, as well as their overall well-being. Using a pre-registered pre-post design, we asked passers-by to engage with the exhibition, and their attitudes and well-being were assessed before and after the experience. We also considered participants’ cognitive-affective experiences and their agreement with the intended emotions of the artist and curator as factors predicting changes. Results showed that after engaging with the exhibition, participants (N = 64) felt significantly more connected to the neighborhood and reported improved well-being. These changes were higher when participants felt the emotions intended by the artist. Additionally, feeling expansive emotions and reporting higher cognitive appraisal in terms of meaningfulness and understanding of the art related to improved neighborhood connectedness. Our findings provide preliminary evidence suggesting that publicly accessible art may function as a community-connecting node. It highlights the role of the artist's intention, felt emotions, and cognitive appraisals shaping in the impact of neighborhood galleries. These insights research could inform future public art exhibitions and urban well-being interventionsfuture exhibitions and interventions.

Sander, I., Mazumder, R., Fingerhut, J., Parada, F. J., Koselevs, A., & Gramann, K. (2024). Beyond built density: From coarse to fine-grained analyses of emotional experiences in urban environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 96, 102337. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102337

The migration of individuals to urban centers in the last century has coincided with a rise in stress-related mental health issues among city dwellers compared to their rural counterparts. Neurourbanism, a burgeoning field, seeks to comprehend the determinants of individual well-being within the urban context. This study investigated the impact of urban density on subjective emotional experiences with a focus on how urban density factors are operationalized in this research field. Using a remote desktop protocol coupled with eye tracking technology, we presented participants with realistic urban stimuli from Berlin, Germany, to assess gaze patterns and subjective responses. Following a two-step analytical approach, we first used a two-factorial design based on low/high built density and absent/present greenery, reflecting the common approach to operationalizing urban density. Subsequently, semantic segmentation of the stimuli was performed, providing a more fine-grained, continuous quantification of density factors allowing for a comparison of this approach with the first categorical analysis. Lastly, individual gaze patterns were exploratively analyzed to predict the impact of directed attention to different classes of urban density on subjective experiences. Dichotomous classification replicated previous findings indicating that high built density was associated with more negative subjective ratings compared to low density, and images lacking greenery received more negative ratings than those with green spaces. Using a continuous quantification of urban density factors and adding additional object classes (cars, people, sky) led to different results compared to the dichotomous approach. Gaze patterns only partially echoed subjective ratings, suggesting urban density factors influence ratings via a general urban scene impression without the need for directed attention towards them. These findings underscore the multifaceted influence of density factors on emotional appraisal in urban spaces, emphasizing the importance of chosen methods. The study demonstrates that fine-grained analyses of urban density factors enhance our understanding of how the urban environment affects the well-being of city dwellers.



For more information, visit: 
https://www.rpneurourbanism.com/density-factors-and-emotional-well-being

Pelowski, M., Marengo, E., Cotter, K. N., Kühnapfel, C., Speidel, K., & Fingerhut, J. (2025, January 20). Is Designing an Emotion 'Profile' a Mediator for Socially-Focused Attitude-Change via Art? A Study of matched Artist/Curator Emotion Intentions and Viewer Experiences in Two Exhibitions on the Refugee Crisis and Climate Awareness. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/edr4k_v1

We offer first, exploratory evidence into a design element employed by artists and curators to maximize impacts of art interventions towards attitude change. In two exhibitions involving refugee acceptance (Study 1, N = 41) and climate (Study 2, N = 49), we collected curator/artist- provided profiles of intended emotions, which were matched to viewer reports and to changes in attitude measures via a pre-post design. In both studies, viewers felt more intended emotions and were proficient at identifying how they were intended to feel, and with, in Study 1, a significant relation between the former and agreement that the exhibition had caused one to reflect about oneself. In Study 2, feeling more intended emotions, as set by the curator but not the artist, correlated to changes in nature connectedness and hedonic values. However, feeling more emotions in general, regardless of intentions, was consistently the strongest driver of effects, raising new implications for emotion, arts-based, and intervention research.

Fingerhut, J., & Schürmann, E. (2024). Theorien des Sehens zur Einführung. Junius.

This volume introduces philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, and social theories of vision. It discusses the relationship between visual perception and other conscious activities such as thinking and interpreting, as well as the issues of susceptibility to illusion and the truth claims of the senses. For the first time, the book also provides an overview of cognitive science concepts and so-called 4E theories, which understand vision as embodied and embedded. It covers the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Dewey’s pragmatism, Gibson’s ecological approach to perception, as well as current theories of predictive processing. Gender-critical theories of the gaze address ethical aspects. Another focus is on media theories of vision, which explore the influence of architecture, film, and new technologies, as well as the specificity of aesthetic experience.

Hilton, C., Befort, L., Brinkmann, R., Ballestrem, M., Fingerhut, J., & Gramann, K. (2025). Stairs as multifunctional spaces: Cortical responses to environmental affordances incorporate the intention to act. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 102, 102528. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2025.102528

Urban planning and design principles would benefit from enhanced understanding of how public spaces afford engagement. Place affordances refer to the behaviours that the architecture of a place enables the perceiving agent to enact and are incorporated into the early stages of human perceptual processes. However, less is known about how an agent's action intentions are integrated into the perception of affordances. In the present study, we presented participants with images of an architectural structure featuring lateral and central staircases with either high or low steps whilst recording brain activity with electroencephalography (EEG). Participants were primed to consider either reading a book, or meeting friends in the places, and were asked to rate the appropriateness of the places for the given activity and to select the location within the scene where they would conduct that activity. There was also a control condition with no primed activity that involved aesthetic ratings of the same places. Behavioural ratings showed that high steps were preferred for reading compared to low steps whereas step height was not a significant factor for conducting a social activity. Participants preferred the lateral stairs to read on, but shifted to the central stairway when the high steps were central with low steps on the lateral sides. In contrast, participants preferred the central stairway to conduct a social activity in all stair configurations. The EEG data showed no significant differences between the two activity conditions in early perceptual processes. However, pronounced differences in early brain dynamics were observed when participants judged places for activities compared to aesthetics. Specifically, latencies of the visual evoked P1 component were shorter and amplitudes were reduced for the aesthetic ratings, which also yielded larger P2 and P300 amplitudes, signifying modulation of perceptual and attentional processes for the exact same stimuli, by the intention to act. These results demonstrate the importance of human action intentions in the environment when considering place affordances.