ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2015
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation over the Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Left Primary Motor Cortex (mPFC-lPMC) Affects Subjective Beauty but Not Ugliness.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- What Does it Mean to Be Beautiful? Exploring the Limits of AI-Driven Beauty Assessment.The Journal of clinical and aesthetic dermatology · 2025Article
- Asymmetric representation of symmetric semantic information in the human brain.Neuroimage. Reports · 2025Article
- Testing the Reproducibility of the Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation: Failure to Modulate Beauty Perception by Brain Stimulation.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Movement in Aesthetic Experiences: What We Can Learn from Parkinson Disease.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2021Article
- Tracking two pleasures.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Article
- Medial prefrontal cortex involvement in aesthetic appreciation of paintings: a tDCS study.Cognitive processing · 2020Article
- Neural correlates of visual aesthetic appreciation: insights from non-invasive brain stimulation.Experimental brain research · 2020Review
- Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over vmPFC modulates interactions between reward and emotion in delay discounting.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Intense Beauty Requires Intense Pleasure.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- The neural correlates of flow experience explored with transcranial direct current stimulation.Experimental brain research · 2018Article
- The experience of beauty derived from sorrow.Human brain mapping · 2017Article
- Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Affects Judgments of Moral Violations.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Neuroaesthetics has been searching for the neural bases of the subjective experience of beauty. It has been demonstrated that neural activities in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the left primary motor cortex (lPMC) correlate with the subjective experience of beauty. Although beauty and ugliness seem to be semantically and conceptually opposite, it is still unknown whether these two evaluations represent extreme opposites in unitary or bivariate dimensions. In this study, we applied transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to examine whether non-invasive brain stimulation modulates two types of esthetic evaluation; evaluating beauty and ugliness. Participants rated the subjective beauty and ugliness of abstract paintings before and after the application of tDCS. Application of cathodal tDCS over the mPFC with anode electrode over the lPMC, which induced temporal inhibition of neural excitability of the mPFC, led to a decrease in beauty ratings but not ugliness ratings. There were no changes in ratings of both beauty and ugliness when applying anodal tDCS or sham stimulation over the mPFC. Results from our experiment indicate that the mPFC and the lPMC have a causal role in generating the subjective experience of beauty, with beauty and ugliness evaluations constituting two distinct dimensions.
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