Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement Are Reflected in Resting-State fMRI Connectivity: Implications for Stress Resilience and Stress-Related Growth

Beauty as a Neural Resource

Johnson and colleagues’ 2021 paper asks a question that philosophy of aesthetics has debated for millennia and settles it with a brain scanner: does the capacity to be moved by beauty matter for psychological functioning, or is it merely a pleasant supplement to the serious business of adaptation? The answer is unequivocal. Using resting-state fMRI, the researchers demonstrate that individuals who report higher aesthetic engagement — a stable dispositional orientation toward appreciating beauty in art, nature, and everyday experience — show distinctive patterns of functional connectivity in the brain at rest. Specifically, these individuals show stronger coupling between the default-mode network (the system responsible for self-referential thought, daydreaming, and narrative self-construction) and primary sensory cortices. Their brains, even when doing nothing, are more richly connected between the systems that construct the self and the systems that receive the world.

The Feeling Function Has a Neural Address

For depth psychology, this finding provides neurobiological traction for one of Jung’s most consequential but least empirically supported claims: that the feeling function — the capacity to evaluate experience according to its worth, beauty, and meaning — is not a luxury but a structural requirement for psychological wholeness. Jung placed feeling alongside thinking, sensation, and intuition as one of the four fundamental functions of consciousness, and insisted that the differentiation of all four was necessary for individuation. Johnson’s data suggest that aesthetic engagement is not merely a preference or cultural acquisition but a neural trait — a stable pattern of brain organization that influences how the individual processes stress, makes meaning, and grows through adversity. The feeling function, it appears, has a resting-state connectivity profile.

Stress Resilience Through Aesthetic Perception

The paper’s most consequential finding is the link between aesthetic engagement and stress-related growth. Participants with higher aesthetic sensitivity not only reported greater resilience under stress but also demonstrated greater capacity for post-traumatic growth — the ability to derive meaning, purpose, and positive change from adversarial experience. This finding reframes aesthetic sensitivity from a personality trait to a psychological resource. The capacity to be moved by beauty is not separate from the capacity to be moved by suffering; both require the same underlying architecture — a self permeable enough to be affected by the world and organized enough to integrate what it encounters. Schore’s affect regulation theory makes a complementary point: the capacity to regulate intense affect — whether aesthetic or traumatic — depends on the development of right-hemispheric connectivity that integrates bodily sensation with self-representation.

Clinical Implications for Depth Practice

This paper offers empirical support for therapeutic approaches that cultivate aesthetic sensitivity as a clinical intervention — not as adjunctive enrichment but as direct work on the psyche’s capacity to metabolize experience. Marion Woodman’s use of poetry, movement, and art in her body-soul workshops; James Hillman’s insistence that the soul is nourished by beauty and starved by ugliness; Thomas Moore’s argument that care of the soul requires aesthetic attention to the ordinary — all of these therapeutic positions find neuroscientific grounding in Johnson’s demonstration that the brain’s aesthetic circuitry and its resilience circuitry are structurally intertwined.