Humans Prefer Curved Visual Objects

By Moshe Bar, Maital Neta. Psychology Science, 2006

665 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52b1c06824f96a513c7e9b0f4fed1289b566c028

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Citations in the corpus

Affective response to architecture – investigating human reaction to spaces with different geometry (2017, background): “Research indicates that angular contours are less pleasing than round contours (Silvia and Barona 2009; Bar and Neta 2006; Leder, Tinio, and Bar 2011).”
Effects of Novelty and Its Dimensions on Aesthetic Preference in Product Design (2012, background): “Bar and Neta (2006) demonstrated people’s general preference for curved objects,by using pairs of real objects, such as watches or sofas, that had the same semantic meaning and general appearance except that one was angular and the other curved in form.”
Visual aesthetics and human preference. (2013, background): “A recently discovered phenomenon of shape preference is that people tend to like objects with curved contours more than similar objects with sharp contours (Bar & Neta 2006).”
Isn't It Cute: An Evolutionary Perspective of Baby-Schema Effects in Visual Product Designs (2011, neutral): “Throughout the rest of this paper, we will use the terms affect or affective response to refer to rapidly formed impressions of a product’s valence as positive or negative, triggered by the product’s appearance per se (Bar & Neta, 2006; Zajonc, 1980).”
The “Physics” of Notations: Toward a Scientific Basis for Constructing Visual Notations in Software Engineering (2009, background): “These are the least effective shapes for human visual processing and empirical studies show that curved, 3D, and iconic shapes should be preferred [5], [56], [148].”
Emotion processing and the amygdala: from a ‘low road’ to ‘many roads’ of evaluating biological significance (2010, neutral): “For example, judgments of threat can be made from facial stimuli that are presented for as briefly as 39 ms (backward masked”
What Makes a Visualization Memorable? (2013, background): “Previous work has demonstrated that people’s emotions are more positive toward rounded corners than sharp corners [3].”
Hedonic mediation of the crossmodal correspondence between taste and shape (2015, background): “Previous research has shown that people prefer rounded over angular objects (Bar & Neta, 2006).”
The Curvature Effect (2016, methodology): “This finding does not support the threat hypothesis related to angles (Bar & Neta, 2006, 2007).”
Logo design in marketing communications: Brand logo complexity moderates exposure effects on brand recognition and brand attitude (2016, background): “…design and consumer responses, we based our assumptions mainly on research on advertisements, which proposed that specific design characteristics like complexity affect consumer responses (Bar and Neta 2006; Bottomley and Doyle 1996; Pieters, Wedel, and Batra 2010; Zhang, Feick, and Price 2006).”
Do People Prefer Curved Objects? Angularity, Expertise, and Aesthetic Preference (2009, methodology): “When using real objects (Bar & Neta, 2006; Kastl & Child, 1968), researchers are probably confounding angularity with typicality.”