Depression and aesthetic experience: can people with depression appreciate beauty?

Psychology experiments and interventions pose some puzzles: appreciation of beauty is posi-tively correlated with well-being or high life satisfaction, so why isn’t appreciation of beauty negatively correlated with depression? Given that appreciation of beauty is positively corre-lated with well-being, why do some interventions that increase appreciation of beauty not seem to be more effective in improving depressive symptoms? Looking at first-hand accounts of perceptual experience in depression and drawing on philosophical work on the phenome-nology of depression, I argue that a sense of alienation from the interpersonal and, by exten-sion, the aesthetic world, as distinct from an inability to appreciate beauty per se, is character-istic of depression. I then discuss some therapeutic implications.