Development and validation of the Art Engagement Reflection Scale

Aesthetic encounters often feel immediate, yet contemporary theories emphasize that engagement with art unfolds over time through a sequence of perceptual and cognitive processes. Despite the importance of this temporal structure to models of aesthetic experience, there are no psychometric tools designed to capture engagement as a process rather than as a disposition or an outcome. We introduce the Art Engagement Reflection Scale (AERS), a brief, mixed-methods, artwork-specific measure grounded in the mirror model of art. We present two studies that examined the psychometric properties of the AERS across controlled and naturalistic online contexts. In Study 1, participants responded to researcher-selected artworks. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a hierarchical structure in which three distinct but related levels loaded onto a higher-order depth of engagement factor. Quantitative scores showed graded engagement across levels, and qualitative analyses revealed shifts from concrete, perceptually grounded language to more abstract and interpretive content. Study 2 extended these findings to a virtual gallery context in which participants selected a personally meaningful artwork. The hierarchical structure replicated, and AERS scores showed strong convergent validity with dispositional and artwork-specific measures of aesthetic experience, as well as theoretically consistent associations with personality traits such as openness. By capturing both the degree and the nature of engagement, the AERS offers a flexible tool for testing process-oriented theories of aesthetic experience in laboratory, museum, and field settings.