Characterizing the emotional response to art beyond pleasure: Correspondence between the emotional characteristics of artworks and viewers’ emotional responses

Although emotions are some of the most discussed aspects of the experience of art, we know very little about what emotions people experience during aesthetic encounters. In this chapter, we used emotional heat maps—a novel approach to characterizing art viewers’ aesthetic responses to art—to examine the following research questions in two museum studies: (1) What emotions do people experience after encounters with art, and how intense are these emotions? (2) To what extent do museum visitors experience the same emotions to a particular exhibition or artwork? and (3) To what extent is there a correspondence between the emotional characteristics of an art exhibition or artwork and the emotions that viewers experienced? Results showed that there was fairly good agreement among viewers regarding the emotions that they experienced in response to a particular artwork or exhibition and that there were correspondences between art viewers’ emotional responses and the emotional characteristics of the exhibition or artwork that they viewed. The use of emotional heat maps was effective in going beyond traditional aesthetics measures of liking and pleasure and allowing a nuanced characterization of the aesthetic experience of art.