Wonder as an Epistemic and Aesthetic Emotion

In my talk, I will present a theory of wonder as an emotion that is conducive to perspective shifts, exploration, and understanding (its epistemic functions). I will argue that this also makes wonder uniquely suited to track what we value in cultural artifacts and art (its aesthetic function). As part of this, I will provide a re-analysis of data from empirical aesthetics (from my own lab and others) with a focus on the above questions.