Conscious vs. Preconscious Affective Priming Modulate Beauty Ratings and Gaze Patterns in Portrait, Landscape and Abstract Paintings

Despite emotion’s central role in aesthetic experience, few studies have examined how affective priming influences art appreciation, and existing findings are contradictory. Some report that negative primes decrease aesthetic ratings, while others find paradoxical enhancement effects. These inconsistencies likely reflect differences in awareness level, stimulus type, and painting category. To clarify these effects, we investigated how unpleasant versus neutral pictures used as primes influence beauty ratings and eye-movement patterns across three painting types (Abstract, Landscape, Portrait), comparing conscious (1000 ms) and preconscious (50 ms) prime presentation. Fifty-two participants rated the beauty of 120 AI-generated paintings as baseline. Two weeks later, the same paintings were re-presented following neutral and unpleasant primes while participants provided ratings and binocular eye-movements were recorded during 4-second viewing periods. Abstract paintings showed the largest downward shift from baseline (p < .001). Crucially, unpleasant primes reduced beauty ratings only in the conscious presentation (p = .006), with no priming effect under preconscious presentation. Eye-tracking showed that the Conscious group exhibited a less exploratory viewing style (fewer fixations and saccades, shorter scan-paths) independent of prime valence, while painting type modulated scan-path length (Portraits < Landscapes ≈ Abstracts). These results demonstrate that conscious awareness is necessary for negative affect to bias aesthetic evaluations, while awareness level independently constrains visual exploration. Together, these findings contribute to our understanding of how top-down cognitive processes gate emotion–aesthetics interactions.