Five Types of Phenomenal Experience Underlie Our Engagements With Visual Art: A Large-Scale Network Modeling and Latent Profile Approach to Assessing Individual Encounters With Art

The visual arts are found across our societies and are tied to a range of cognitive, affective, and physiological impacts. Their widespread engagement remains a core feature of human behavior, cultural practice, as well as an emerging resource for initiatives targeting education, well-being, and societal or individual development. However, systematic empirical investigations on the actual scope and nature of our art experiences are limited, especially when considering nuanced, ecologically-valid engagements that may manifest across emotional, epistemic, and bodily levels. Similarly limited, is our understanding of what kinds of reactions we can actually have, how these manifest, and the extent to which such responses might be either shared or unique across artworks and individuals. In this paper we report the results of a large-scale, multi-site collection of 2,747 reports of individual meetings between one viewer and one artwork, using a diverse artwork range from 11 major museums across Europe and North America. By applying a theory-derived list of 90 phenomenal items targeting the felt-experience and assessing reports with network modeling and latent profile analysis, we revealed five supraordinate profiles that reflect distinct types of felt-experience. These experience types emerged across all artwork-viewer combinations and showed distinct relationships to ratings of hedonic, epistemic, economic, and well-being implications. Our findings provide both first robust evidence for complex patterned, but also shared responses, which may also serve key insights at the mechanistic level, and offer a robust foundation and methodology for future arts research and applications.