In his research on authentic happiness, Seligman (2002)
identified two levels of pleasure: bodily pleasure and higher
pleasure. He posited that bodily pleasure is an immediate but
temporary sensory response. Through direct touch, taste, smell,
sight, or hearing, bodily pleasures can be evoked at once. For
instance, taking a hot shower in the cold winter can produce
immediate comfort and pleasure. Higher pleasure involves the
same primitive sensation as bodily pleasure but with a more
complex cognition process. It is noticed that for a product
to evoke higher pleasure, it is necessary for the consumer to
understand the product’s content. For instance, a listener might
feel pleasure when listening to harmonic music, but can gain a
higher level of pleasure if he or she understands the content of
the music.
In 1941 Duncker sidestepped the body-soul dichotomy
and identified three types of pleasure: sensory, aesthetic, and
accomplishment pleasures. Sensory pleasure involves the
immediate object of pleasure being in the form of a sensation
(e.g., the flavor of wine, the feel of a hot shower); aesthetic
pleasure involves sensation that is an expressive response to
something, whether offered by nature or created by man (e.g.,
a beautiful mountain, harmonious music); accomplishment
pleasure represents the pleasant emotional consciousness that
something valued has come about (e.g., mastery of a skill, an
impressive sports performance) (Dubé & Le Bel, 2003). Among
these three types of pleasure, sensory pleasure and aesthetic
pleasure can be associated with the physical and spiritual
pleasure experienced in relation to the visual appearance of a
product, and this is the focus of this paper. Accomplishment
pleasure, on the other hand, deals with the assessment of
personal skill, performance and goals, and is thus difficult to
evaluate when it comes to just looking at a product; this level
of pleasure, therefore, is not covered in this study.