Many philosophers and psychologists have made claims about what is felt in an experience of beauty. Here, we test how well these claims match the feelings that people report while looking at an image, or listening to music, or recalling a personal experience of beauty. We conducted ten experiments (total n = 851) spanning three nations (US, UK, and India). Across nations and modalities, top-rated beauty experiences are strongly characterized by six dimensions: intense pleasure, an impression of universality, the wish to continue the experience, exceeding expectation, perceived harmony in variety, and meaningfulness. Other frequently proposed beauty characteristics — like surprise, desire to understand, and mind wandering — are uncorrelated with feeling beauty. A typical remembered beautiful experience was active and social like a family holiday — hardly ever mentioning beauty — and only rarely mentioned art, unlike the academic emphasis, in aesthetics, on solitary viewing of art. Our survey aligns well with Kant and the psychological theories that emphasize pleasure, and reject theories that emphasize information seeking.

许多哲学家和心理学家都对美的体验中的感受提出了主张。在这里，我们测试这些说法与人们在观看图像、听音乐或回忆个人美的经历时所报告的感受的匹配程度。我们在三个国家（美国、英国和印度）进行了 10 项实验（总共n = 851）。在不同国家和不同方式中，顶级美容体验都具有六个维度的强烈特征：强烈的愉悦感、普遍性的印象、继续体验的愿望、超出期望、感知到的多样性和谐以及意义。其他经常提到的美丽特征——比如惊讶、渴望理解和走神——与感觉美无关。典型的记忆中的美好经历是活跃的、社交性的，就像家庭度假一样——几乎从不提及美——而且很少提及艺术，这与学术上强调美学、单独观看艺术不同。我们的调查与康德和强调快乐的心理学理论非常吻合，并拒绝强调信息寻求的理论。