中国情境下沉浸式艺术体验后的情感动态：PANAS 前后测数据的二次分析

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Environmental Psychology

• 1. Academy of Fine Art and Design, Xuchang University, Jiangguanchi, China

• 2. School of Education, Xuchang University, Jiangguanchi, China

Abstract

Immersive and new-media art is increasingly promoted as a low-cost and scalable route to mood improvement, yet most evidence rests on simple pre-post mean comparisons that ignore measurement error, response shift, and individual variability. This study reports a secondary analysis of a within-subjects dataset in which thirty adults in a Chinese setting completed the full twenty-item Positive and Negative Affect Schedule immediately before and after an immersive art exposure, with no missing data. Parcel-level longitudinal measurement invariance held at the configural and metric levels, ruling out response shift. Random-intercept mixed models showed that negative affect declined by about three points (b = -3.13, p = .013), a small to moderate standardized effect (dz = -.45, 95% CI [-.96, -.08]), whereas positive affect did not change reliably (b = 0.63, p = .492). Individual-level classification indicated that 30 percent of respondents showed reliable reductions in negative affect. Bayesian estimation gave weak-to-moderate evidence for a reduction in negative affect (BF10 = 3.19) and moderate evidence against change in positive affect (BF01 = 4.40). The association between positive and negative affect was close to zero before the exposure and did not change afterward (Z = -0.27, p = .785), a pattern that is compatible with, though not confirmatory of, dialectical accounts of affect in East Asian samples, given the inherent orthogonality of the PANAS scales and the absence of a Western comparison group. The findings suggest that immersive art primarily dampens negative affect while leaving positive affect and the decoupling of the two dimensions intact. Implications for the social and individual bases of aesthetic experience are articulated, emphasizing person-contingent responding and culturally valued calm. Tentative implications for arts-in-health practice are discussed, alongside the limitations of a small single-group design without a control condition or demographic covariates.

Keywords

aesthetic experience, Bayesian estimation, dialectical affect, Immersive art, PANAS, Positive and negative affect, Reliable change

Received

18 July 2026

Accepted

01 October 2026

Copyright

© 2026 Gong and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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