Designing Emotions as Mediators of Attitude Change from Socially-Focused Art Exhibitions: Two Studies of Matched Artist/Curator Intentions and Viewer Response on the Refugee Crisis and Climate Awareness

We offer first, exploratory evidence into a design element employed by many artists and curators to maximize impacts of art interventions towards attitude change—the anticipation and design for specific emotional experiences. In two exhibitions involving refugee acceptance (Study 1, N = 41) and climate awareness (Study 2, N = 49), we collected curator/artist-provided sets of specific intended emotions, matched to viewer reports and to changes in attitude measures via a pre-post design. In both studies, viewers felt more intended emotions and were proficient at identifying how they were intended to feel with, in Study 1, significant relation between the former and agreement that the exhibition had caused one to reflect. In Study 2, feeling more intended emotions, as set by the curator but not the artist, correlated to changes in nature connectedness. However, feeling more emotions in general, regardless of intentions, was consistently the strongest driver of effects, raising new implications for emotion-, arts-based-, and intervention-research.