Emotional responses to art in situ and on screen: a test of the circumplex model and the genuineness effect

Abstract

Emotional responses are commonly measured within the valence–arousal dimensional space of Russell’s (1980) circumplex model, although the extent to which this organization captures emotional responses to art remains debated. We examined the correspondence between art-elicited emotional responses and this two-dimensional organization. We compared the correspondence in two viewing contexts and used the same representational space to assess the genuineness effect, that is, the difference in experience between an original artwork and a digital reproduction. Two groups of 52 participants viewed the same 17 artworks during a visit to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (genuine) or in the laboratory (digital format). Following each artwork consultation, participants first selected their main emotion from a set of predefined emotions and subsequently rated valence and arousal using visual analog scales on an iPad application. Observed emotion centroids showed correspondence with the external valence–arousal reference structure in both contexts, with similar patterns of correspondence for the museum and the laboratory. Fascination emerged as the most frequently reported emotion, and 7% of responses fell outside the predefined set of emotions derived from dimensional models. No significant differences were found between the museum and laboratory contexts for valence, arousal, or viewing time. Our findings indicate that emotional responses to artwork correspond closely to the dimensional organization of valence and arousal at the level of emotion centroids. However, the emotion categories derived from that organization do not fully capture what viewers report. That originals and digital reproductions elicited comparable emotional responses further suggests that the genuineness effect is either absent or very small.