Code For: Bad Beauty: The Impact of Affect and Biospheric Values on Beauty Judgments of Environmental Pollution Photography

Aesthetic judgments are influenced by both integral and incidental feelings, yet the relative strength of these influences remains unclear. We investigated how incidental mood, integral affect, and biospheric values affect beauty judgments of photographs depicting environmental pollution. Participants (N = 501) were randomly assigned to a positive, neutral, or negative mood condition before rating the beauty of images paired with neutral or negative descriptive texts. Results replicated the moral framing effect: negative descriptive texts led to significantly lower beauty ratings (p < .001, d = 0.5). While a good mood led to higher beauty ratings than a bad mood (p = .011, d = 0.25), the overall incidental mood effect was only marginally significant. Biospheric values negatively predicted beauty ratings in the negative text condition, but not in the neutral condition, suggesting that value-driven responses depend on contextual cues. In conclusion, our findings highlight the role of integral affect in aesthetic judgments and suggest that incidental mood effects were overshadowed. Future research should examine whether aesthetic judgments are inherently resistant to incidental affect or if stronger manipulations could produce more robust effects. unknown unknown