I base this on Michael J. Parsons five-stage model for aesthetic development from childhood to adulthood (and professional interpretation)[0]. But I think that it applies here, since deciding whether insects are cute or gross is very much an aesthetic judgment.

Here[1] is for example a paper linking the work to theatre:

> In the specific domain of visual art, Michael Parsons has proposed a developmental framework of aesthetic epistemology that describes how we move through stages or “sets of ideas” when discussing artworks’ subject matter, artists’ expressions, the forms and styles of visual media, and our judgments about each of these concepts. Like epistemologists, he marks the boundary of each stage by cognitive shifts in: 1) our primary mode of inquiry (i.e., perception, interpretation, and evaluation), 2) our expectations about the purposes of art, 3) our primary sources of artistic knowledge, and, 4) our primary criteria for making evaluative claims. Numerous studies in the visual arts have supported his framework with various populations, yet to date no one has offered an analogous epistemological framework for the domain of theatre.

One criticism of Parsons' model is that it's hierarchical in a way that implicitly suggests that later stages are "better" than earlier stages (in typical Western fashion). Then again, it is tied to cognitive development and growing more mature so how could you not end up with a staged one-follows-the-development-of-the-other ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. For a more recent, more elaborate model that is inspired by Parsons' model, see[2].

[0] Michael J. Parsons, How We Understand Art: A Cognitive Developmental Account of Aesthetic Experience (New York: Cambridge U P, 1987).

[1] Jeanne Klein, Mapping aesthetic development and epistemological understanding, https://journals.ku.edu/jdtc/article/download/4376/4104

[2] http://ppcms.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/usermounts/lederh7/1993-...