The aesthetic experience of a collection of works—such as a sculpture garden, a neighborhood filled with street art, or an afternoon spent wandering in a museum—is not simply the sum of experiences of the individual works. In the present research, we explored visit-level aesthetic experiences in a field study of 298 visitors to a museum of modern and contemporary art. In particular, we focused on emotional diversity: the richness, complexity, and heterogeneity of the emotions that people experienced during their visit. After their visit, participants reported the degree to which they experienced, if at all, 10 emotions, for which we calculated diversity metrics reflecting their emotional variety (the number of emotions experienced) and emotional balance (the relative evenness between emotions or dominance of a single emotion) during the visit. Overall, the sample reported a rich aesthetic experience, but there was wide and predictable variability. Among other findings, emotional variety was higher for people with greater openness to experience and among first-time visitors to the museum; emotional balance was higher among people high in openness to experience and people with greater interest in art. The concept of diversity—the richness and complexity of someone’s emotional experience of the arts—appears promising for understanding holistic aesthetic experiences, such as entire museum visits rather than single works, as well as for many other questions in empirical aesthetics.
The Art of Feeling Different: Measuring and Exploring the Diversity of Emotions Experienced During a Museum Visit
