INTERESTED EXPERTS, CONFUSED NOVICES: ART EXPERTISE AND THE KNOWLEDGE EMOTIONS

Experts and novices differ in how they experience and understand art, and expertise in the arts moderates a wide range of aesthetic processes. The present research examined the role of expertise in the experience of interest and confusion, two knowledge emotions, particularly whether expertise moderated the cognitive appraisals that bring about the emotions. A sample of 174 people viewed and rated a series of abstract images taken from small-press publications. Expertise was measured with the aesthetic fluency scale (Smith & Smith, 2006), and multivariate multilevel models were used to estimate the effects of expertise and appraisals. As expected, people high in expertise found the images significantly more interesting and less confusing. The main effects of appraisals on interest and confusion replicated past work, and expertise interacted with most of the appraisals-the cognitive foundations of interest and confusion have different weights for experts and novices.