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I found a little discussion of the issue in Russell (2000), where he summarises some of the views of the scientific literature: Recent reviews of the empirical literature bearing on the claim of special aesthetic significance for this ratio in the context of the perception of simple figures include Green (1995), Hoge (1995), and contributors to a ...

Indicator of genetic fitness argument There is an evolutionary psychology argument. As with most evolutionary psychology arguments, the strength of the evidence is typically a bit fuzzy. Symmetry in many aspects of the human body is functional. Such symmetry might be seen as the natural state that arises from a healthy life and a youthful body. In contrast ...

It's an interesting question, I imagine the desire is multifaceted and that it may reflect multiple desires and multiple activities. In particular, I'd distinguish between (a) the desire for a viewing experience and (b) the desire to get to the top and achieve goals. Desire to Climb There are many examples of people taking joy in climbing. This can be ...

There is a processing fluency theory that explains it quite nicely. In short, according to this theory the symmetrical objects are pleasant as they are easier to process. See Reber et al (2004) for a detailed description: We propose that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the perceiver's processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process ...

To add a small neuroscientific point to excellent @JeromyAnglim answer - there has been an interesting study by Rizzolatti group (guy who 'discovered' mirror neurons) published in PLoS ONE. Di Dio, et al. (2007) looked at the brain responses to Classical and Renaissance sculptures, but they manipulated the proportion of sculptures' features by violating the ...

Dude. This is an awesome experiment. Emotional Design is written by my favorite cognitive psychologist, Donald Norman. It's full of research on taste. In it, he says taste is highly subjective and based on culture. C is probably equally distant in both cases, at the point where it becomes unreadable. Unless at that point you'd rather look at C and say, ...