This study aims at investigating if receiving different kinds of external information could make impacts on people's aesthetic experience. Thirty participants were randomly recruited from an office building in Guangzhou, China. Participants were assigned to three groups respectively. Each group viewed images of two females with different features after reading different kinds of articles. During the experiment, an eye tracker was used to record participants’ visual data which reflects their corresponding aesthetic attention. The experiment reveals that the current mainstream aesthetic preferences for Chinese females are “fair” skin tone and "slim" body shape. Meanwhile, after reading Article promoting different views, participants’ visual attention distribution on one of the females as a stimulus significantly changed. Therefore it can be concluded that external information has an impact on people’s aesthetic experience.

Ao Jiani. The Impact of External Information on People's Aesthetic Attention. International Journal of Frontiers in Sociology (2022), Vol. 4, Issue 11: 1-5. https://doi.org/10.25236/IJFS.2022.041101.

[1] Wang Ya. (2006). An Analysis of Mural Art in Primitive Society. Journal of Shaoguan University, 27 (2), 95-97.

[2] Fu Zhiyi. (2002). A Preliminary Probe into the Secular Aesthetics of African Prehistoric Rock Paintings. Journal of Southwest University for Nationalities: Philosophy and Social Sciences , 23 (4), 154-156.

[3] Zou Shuhui. (2022). The Aesthetic Consciousness of Primitive Society: An Analysis of Primitive Creation. Ceramics, (5), 64-66.

[4] Weir, D. J. (2006). Timing the market: How to profit in the stock market using the yield curve, technical analysis, and cultural indicators. Wiley. 

[5] Swami, V., Caprario, C., Tovée, M. J., & Furnham, A. (2006). Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Japan: A cross‐cultural study. European Journal of Personality, 20(1), 69–81. 

[6] Frederick, D., Forbes, M., Jenkins, B., Reynolds, T., & Walters, T. (2015). Beauty standards. The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, 113–196. 

[7] Kirsch, L. P., Urgesi, C., & Cross, E. S. (2016). Shaping and reshaping the aesthetic brain: Emerging perspectives on the Neurobiology of Embodied Aesthetics. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 62, 56–68. 

[8] Brattico, P., Brattico, E., & Vuust, P. (2017). Global sensory qualities and aesthetic experience in music. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 11. 

[9] Schacter, D. L. (1992). Priming and multiple memory systems: Perceptual Mechanisms of implicit memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 4(3), 244–256. 

[10] Leder, H., Belke, B., Oeberst, A., & Augustin, D. (2004). A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. British Journal of Psychology, 95(4), 489–508. 

[11] Rosenlee, L.-H. L. (2007). Confucianism and women: A philosophical interpretation. SUNY. 

[12] Rainey, L. D. (2010). Confucius and Confucianism: The essentials. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 

[13] Sekayi, D. (2003). Aesthetic resistance to commercial influences: The impact of the Eurocentric beauty standard on Black college women. Journal of Negro Education, 467-477.

[14] Jung, J. (2018). Young women's perceptions of traditional and contemporary female beauty ideals in China. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, 47(1), 56–72. 

[15] Leung, F., Lam, S., & Sze, S. (2001). Cultural expectations of thinness in Chinese women. Eating Disorders, 9(4), 339–350.

[16] Kunst-Wilson, W. R., & Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognized. Science, 207(4430), 557–558.