What Can Happen When We Look at Art?: An Exploratory Network Model and Latent Profile Analysis of Affective/Cognitive Aspects Underlying Shared, Supraordinate Responses to Museum Visual Art

Art-viewing is a defining component of society and culture, in part because the experience involves a wide-range and nuanced configuration of emotional and cognitive responses. Precisely because of this complexity, however, questions of the actual nature, scope, and variety of art experience remain largely unanswered: what kinds of patterns do we exhibit, how do various components go together, and can these be distilled into shared experiential outcomes? We introduce an exploratory study based on 345 individuals’ unique experiences with one of three sets of artworks. Experiences were assessed via 46 affective and cognitive items based on a recent model, with individuals reporting to what degree they felt each during their encounter. Network and latent profile analyses revealed five patterns, aligning to a Harmonious, Facile, Transformative, and two Negative outcomes. These largely supported model hypotheses, connected to specific appraisals, and could be found, although with varying probability, across individual viewers and artworks.