Decoding Emotional Reactions to Architectural Heritage: A Comparison of Styles

Research has identified how heritage elicits emotional responses that significantly affect the tourist destination image. In this vein, this study explores how people emotionally re-act to architectural heritage by examining five representative styles in Spain—Gothic, Re-naissance, Baroque, Modernism, and Contemporary. In an experimental design, partici-pants observed visual stimuli depicting seven types of urban infrastructure, such as buildings, streets, bridges, façades, quarters, squares, and churches, and their emotional responses were recorded using automated facial expression recognition. The system clas-sified eight core emotions: neutral, happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and contempt. Gender differences were also analyzed to identify possible variations in emo-tional activation. The results show that architectural forms—whether historical or con-temporary—evoke distinct emotional patterns that help explain how people perceive and value historical heritage. By bringing together concepts from heritage tourism, environ-mental psychology, and user experience studies, this research highlights the relevance of emotions as a key element in understanding the relationship between people and the ar-chitectural spaces they inhabit or visit.