Museums and cultural organisations exist not just to preserve the past, but to have an impact on the future through inspiring change in their visitors. Exactly how to best define and demonstrate this impact has been a source of some debate in the museum community, but one concept that has emerged as central to impact is that of ‘emotion’.

In early museum studies, the idea of engaging with emotion was seen as a distraction from the fact-based, authoritative voice museums should have. Museums were considered to be objective and expert arbiters of facts, with no room to engage with a concept as vague and subjective as emotion (Smith and Campbell, 2015). However, more recent research into audience impact has highlighted the benefits of engaging with emotion, especially when dealing with some of the stories left out by the traditional museum approaches of the past. Developing programmes or exhibitions which deliberately deal with emotional content can help visitors experience greater impact, make deeper connections and ultimately, even create positive change.

There is little doubt that engaging in emotion work in museums has real benefits. However, when deliberately targeting visitor emotion, it is vitally important that we also consider possible negative effects on the visitor, and in turn, the impact this can have on our frontline teams.

The impact on Visitor Experience staff

As we have seen above, there are good reasons to design emotion into museum experiences. Used wisely, programming that targets audience emotion can have a greater impact on our visitors, enable them to make deeper connections and even inspire positive behaviour change. But in order to say we have used it wisely we have to consider the impact emotional programming has on the jobs of frontline staff.

We’ve probably all had museum and heritage experiences that have affected us deeply. Some examples would clearly be challenging and deeply troubling to come face to face with, like a charred child's lunchbox at the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum, or nooses displayed at Kingston Lacy representing men hanged for homosexuality.