Emotion Archive

The emotional impact of music Music has the ability to express and evoke emotions that listeners can recognize and experience within themselves. Previous studies indicate that the primary reason for intentional music listening is often the emotional impact it provides. Whether it’s to enhance, reduce, or alter one’s mood, music holds the power to elicit emotions in roughly half of listening episodes, with positive emotions prevailing. The strongest emotions are reported when music receives focused attention and when it is listened to alone. However, individuals sometimes find it challenging to differentiate between the emotions they genuinely felt while listening to music and those they perceive as inherent to the composition itself. Which emotions does music induce? The fact that music is able to evoke emotions is something that everyone has probably felt at some time. In research, there are three main approaches to the question of what kind of emotions are involved, whereby in our research we focus primarily on the latter. The dimensional approach represents emotions on the basis of the expression of several continuums, above all on the basis of the dimensions valence (positivity/negativity) and arousal (strength or intensity of the emotion). Discrete emotion models apply basic emotions such as joy, sadness, anger or fear to the measurement of music-induced emotions. Domain-specific approaches take into account the special character of aesthetic emotions and define music-specific emotion terms. One example is the GEMS, with 45 emotion terms, 9 dimensions and the three superordinate factors Sublimity, Vitality and Unease. Factors influencing music induced emotions Despite the general consensus among music listeners regarding the intended emotional expression of a piece of music, there exist variations among individuals in terms of the intensity and differentiation of their emotional responses to music. These differences can primarily be attributed to four factors that influence the emotional impact of musical compositions: the musical structure, the performance, the personal characteristics of the listener, and the context in which the music is experienced. In our research, we take a closer look at these four factors and their interactions and base our studies on the Induction Rule Model (Scherer & Zentner, 2001). Read about our published articles Performance Features and Music Induced Emotions Read More Listener Features and Music Induced Emotions Read More

Music emotions and congruency effects

Has it ever happened to you to feel an emotion while listening to a piece of music? I’m sure it did. Music is in fact known to be a powerful mean to evoke emotions. Emotions felt during listening to music can be assessed subjectively (by asking individuals to report the emotions they feel) or objectively (by looking at physiological / neuronal activity changes). The use of self-report questionnaires would have higher validity if accompanied by an objective assessment, to ascertain that the individual does really feel something. In fact, it is possible that a person recognizes that a music piece conveys happiness, but s/he won’t really feel the happiness. Using both objective and subjective methods seem to be thus the best solution. However, the current available objective methods (e.g., skin conductance, EEG, fMRI, heart rate), require to test participants in the lab with specific instruments, sometimes expensive and time consuming. Finding an alternative objective method seems therefore important. Our Research Project In the present research project, we are investigating behavioral methods that could be used to have an objective assessment of music felt emotions. The first attempt to do so, has made use of the mood-congruency effects, for which, when an individual is in a specific mood, the subsequent attentive and memory processes will be congruent to that specific mood. For example, if you feel sad, you are more likely to notice sad stimuli in the environment and recall sadder events to your memory. Given the known effect of mood on subsequent cognitive processes, we asked ourselves: if music is able to make you feel an emotion, can this felt emotion affect your mood, and in turn affect your cognitive processes? In a first study we tried to answer this question, by asking our participants to listen to music and to look at different pictures right after each music piece. The pictures could be either congruent or incongruent with respect to the emotion evoked by the music. We subsequently present a memory task, where the participants had to judge whether a picture was presented before with the music or not. We hypothesized that congruent pictures would be better memorized than incogruent ones if music is able to influence your mood. And this is what we found! [Read the whole study here] However, one study only is not sufficient to shout “eureka”, and we are currently working on follow up studies that will shed light on this effect, its solidity, and its causes. Stay tuned! References Talamini, F., Eller, G., Vigl, J., & Zentner, M. (2022). Musical emotions affect memory for emotional pictures. Sci Rep 12, 10636. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-15032-w Krumhansl, C. L. (1997). An exploratory study of musical emotions and psychophysiology. Can. J. Exp. Psychol. Can. Psychol. Expérimentale 51, 336–353. Zentner, M. & Eerola, T. (2010). Self-report measures and models. In Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications 187–221 . Oxford University Press. Lewis, P. A. & Critchley, H. D. (2003). Mood-dependent memory. Trends Cogn. Sci. 7, 431–433.