showing 25 related works from this author
“I hate this part right here”: Embodied, subjective experiences of listening to aversive music
2021
Although the majority of previous research on music-induced responses has focused on pleasurable experiences and preferences, it is undeniable that music is capable of eliciting strong dislike and aversion as well. To date, only limited research has been carried out to understand the subjective experience of listening to aversive music. This qualitative study explored people’s negative experiences associated with music listening, with the aim to understand what kinds of emotions, affective states, and physical responses are associated with listening to aversive music. One hundred and two participants provided free descriptions of (1) musical features of aversive music; (2) subjective physi…
An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music
2018
The recent surge of interest towards the paradoxical pleasure produced by sad music has generated a handful of theories and an array of empirical explorations on the topic. However, none of these have attempted to weigh the existing evidence in a systematic fashion. The present work puts forward an integrative framework laid out over three levels of explanation – biological, psycho-social, and cultural – to compare and integrate the existing findings in a meaningful way. First, we review the evidence pertinent to experiences of pleasure associated with sad music from the fields of neuroscience, psychophysiology, and endocrinology. Then, the psychological and interpersonal mechanisms underly…
Measuring music-induced emotion: A comparison of emotion models, personality biases, and intensity of experiences
2011
Most previous studies investigating music-induced emotions have applied emotion models developed in other fields to the domain of music. The aim of this study was to compare the applicability of music-specific and general emotion models – namely the Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS), and the discrete and dimensional emotion models – in the assessment of music-induced emotions. A related aim was to explore the role of individual difference variables (such as personality and mood) in music-induced emotions, and to discover whether some emotion models reflect these individual differences more strongly than others. One hundred and forty-eight participants listened to 16 film music excerpts a…
Maladaptive music listening strategies are modulated by individual traits
2022
Music listening is a great resource for mental well-being, pleasure, and self-regulation, but it may also be maladaptive. Depression, for instance, has been shown to relate to music use that is characterized by rumination, avoidance, and mood worsening. However, we know little of the role of individual differences in such maladaptive music use. Hence, this study focused on examining the role of personality, empathic traits, emotional contagion, and the types of musical reward as predictors of maladaptive music listening. Participants ( N = 318) answered an online survey comprising measures for the abovementioned traits in addition to the Healthy-Unhealthy Music Scale (HUMS) as a measure of…
Attitudes toward sad music are related to both preferential and contextual strategies.
2015
Music-related sadness and its paradoxical pleasurable aspects have puzzled researchers for decades. Previous studies have highlighted the positive effects of listening to sad music and the listening strategies that focus on mood-regulation. The present study explored people’s attitudes toward sad music by focusing on a representative sample of the Finnish population. Three hundred and fifty-eight participants rated their agreement with 30 statements concerning attitudes toward sad music. The ratings were subjected to factor analysis, resulting in 6 factors explaining 51% of the variance (RMSEA = 0.049). The factors were labeled Avoidance, Autobiographical, Revival, Appreciation, Intersubjec…
Can sad music really make you sad? Indirect measures of affective states induced by music and autobiographical memories
2012
The present study addressed music’s disputed ability to induce genuine sadness in listeners by investigating whether listening to sad music can induce sadness-related effects on memory and judgment. Related aims were to explore how the different mechanisms of music-induced emotions are involved in sadness induced by familiar, self-selected music and unfamiliar, experimenter-selected music, and whether the susceptibility to music-induced sadness is associated with trait empathy. One hundred twenty participants were randomly assigned into four conditions with different tasks: listening to unfamiliar sad or neutral music, or to self-selected sad music, or recalling a sad autobiographical event…
Adolescents’ expression and perception of emotion in music reflects their broader abilities of emotional communication
2014
Background: Musical behavior has been shown to reflect broader individual differences. However, despite the prevalence of music in the lives of young people little is known about the mechanisms through which adolescents’ musical behavior connects to their general socio-emotional behavior and adjustment. The current study focused on abilities of emotional communication and investigated whether adolescents’ abilities in both perceiving and expressing emotions through music would be reflective of their general abilities of socio-emotional communication and interaction, measured through empathy and conduct problems. Due to the lack of previous research the study was mainly exploratory, but we e…
Towards a more explicit account of the transformation
2018
Enhancing genre-based measures of music preference by user-defined liking and social tags
2012
Musical preferences are typically determined by asking participants to indicate their favourite musical genres. These genre-based measures have some considerable pitfalls, since specific pieces of music in a genre might be liked more than the genre itself, and finding consensus to define a genre is often a challenging task. The aims of the present study were to (1) assess how effective genre-based measures are at identifying musical preferences, by comparing them to free responses; (2) demonstrate how the fit can be improved between the genre-based measures and sampled population; and (3) suggest and evaluate methods that use lists of liked and disliked artists to define musical preference…
Guest Editors' Introduction: Music as Embodied Experience
2020
Technology has impacted music’s role in contemporary society in extraordinary ways. In addition to how people use music for professional and artistic pursuits, technology has opened a wide variety of new avenues for research and application, particularly as a reliable therapeutic and salutogenic tool. Recently, a useful framework for studying this shifting perspective surrounding musical experience has emerged: embodied music cognition, which conceptualizes the body as being at the center of music experiences. The papers in this thematic issue highlight how music technologies have matured to the point where they affect the way music is created, performed, enjoyed, and researched.
Being Moved by Unfamiliar Sad Music Is Associated with High Empathy
2016
The paradox of enjoying listening to music that evokes sadness is yet to be fully understood. Unlike prior studies that have explored potential explanations related to lyrics, memories, and mood regulation, we investigated the types of emotions induced by unfamiliar, instrumental sad music, and whether these responses are consistently associated with certain individual difference variables. One hundred and two participants were drawn from a representative sample to minimize self-selection bias. The results suggest that the emotional responses induced by unfamiliar sad music could be characterized in terms of three underlying factors: Relaxing sadness, Moving sadness, and Nervous sadness. Re…
The pleasure evoked by sad music is mediated by feelings of being moved
2017
Why do we enjoy listening to music that makes us sad? This question has puzzled music psychologists for decades, but the paradox of “pleasurable sadness” remains to be solved. Recent findings from a study investigating the enjoyment of sad films suggest that the positive relationship between felt sadness and enjoyment might be explained by feelings of being moved (Hanich et al., 2014). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether feelings of being moved also mediated the enjoyment of sad music. In Experiment 1, 308 participants listened to five sad music excerpts and rated their liking and felt emotions. A multilevel mediation analysis revealed that the initial positive relations…
A comparison of the discrete and dimensional models of emotion in music
2010
The primary aim of the present study was to systematically compare perceived emotions in music using two different theoretical frameworks: the discrete emotion model, and the dimensional model of affect. A secondary aim was to introduce a new, improved set of stimuli for the study of music-mediated emotions. A large pilot study established a set of 110 film music excerpts, half were moderately and highly representative examples of five discrete emotions (anger, fear, sadness, happiness and tenderness), and the other half moderate and high examples of the six extremes of three bipolar dimensions (valence, energy arousal and tension arousal). These excerpts were rated in a listening experime…
Tears evoke the intention to offer social support: A systematic investigation of the interpersonal effects of emotional crying across 41 countries
2021
Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were prese…
Explaining the enjoyment of negative emotions evoked by the arts : the need to consider empathy and other underlying mechanisms of emotion induction.
2017
AbstractAny model aiming to explain the enjoyment of negative emotions in the context of the arts should consider how works of art are able to induce emotional responses in the first place. For instance, research on empathy and the arts suggests that the psychological processes that mediate the enjoyment of sadness and horror may be fundamentally different.
The role of mood and personality in the perception of emotions represented by music.
2009
Neuroimaging studies investigating the processing of emotions have traditionally considered variance between subjects as statistical noise. However, according to behavioural studies, individual differences in emotional processing appear to be an inherent part of the process itself. Temporary mood states as well as stable personality traits have been shown to influence the processing of emotions, causing trait- and mood-congruent biases. The primary aim of this study was to explore how listeners' personality and mood are reflected in their evaluations of discrete emotions represented by music. A related aim was to investigate the role of personality in music preferences. An experiment was ca…
A Review of Music and Emotion Studies: Approaches, Emotion Models, and Stimuli
2012
The field of music and emotion research has grown rapidly and diversified during the last decade. This has led to a certain degree of confusion and inconsistency between competing notions of emotions, data, and results. The present review of 251 studies describes the focus of prevalent research approaches, methods, and models of emotion, and documents the types of musical stimuli used over the past twenty years. Although self-report approaches to emotions are the most common way of dealing with music and emotions, using multiple approaches is becoming increasingly popular. A large majority (70%) of the studies employed variants of the discrete or the dimensional emotion models. A large prop…
Interaction of sight and sound in the perception and experience of musical performance
2016
Recently, Vuoskoski, Thompson, Clarke, and Spence (2014) demonstrated that visual kinematic performance cues may be more important than auditory performance cues in terms of observers’ ratings of expressivity perceived in audiovisual excerpts of piano playing, and that visual kinematic performance cues had crossmodal effects on the perception of auditory expressivity. The present study was designed to extend these findings, and to provide additional information about the roles of sight and sound in the perception and experience of musical performance. Experiment 1 investigated the relative contributions of auditory and visual kinematic performance features to participants’ subjective emotio…
Being moved by listening to unfamiliar sad music induces reward‐related hormonal changes in empathic listeners
2021
Many people enjoy sad music, and the appeal for tragedy is widespread among the consumers of film and literature. The underlying mechanisms of such aesthetic experiences are not well understood. We tested whether pleasure induced by sad, unfamiliar instrumental music is explained with a homeostatic or a reward theory, each of which is associated with opposite patterns of changes in the key hormones. Sixty-two women listened to sad music (or nothing) while serum was collected for subsequent measurement of prolactin (PRL) and oxytocin (OT) and stress marker (cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone) concentrations. Two groups of participants were recruited on the basis of low and high trait e…
Who enjoys listening to sad music and why?
2011
although people generally avoid negative emotional experiences in general, they often enjoy sadness portrayed in music and other arts. The present study investigated what kinds of subjective emotional experiences are induced in listeners by sad music, and whether the tendency to enjoy sad music is associated with particular personality traits. One hundred forty-eight participants listened to 16 music excerpts and rated their emotional responses. As expected, sadness was the most salient emotion experienced in response to sad excerpts. However, other more positive and complex emotions such as nostalgia, peacefulness, and wonder were also evident. Furthermore, two personality traits – Opennes…
Towards a more explicit account of the transformation: Reply to comments on "An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music"
2018
Our integrative framework for explaining the enjoyment of sadness associated with music sparked a delightful number (13) of commentaries which challenge, stimulate, strengthen and shape the ideas we initially put forward. Here we organize our response around five central themes brought up by several commentators. These relate to questions about (a) the nature of sad music, (b) whether music can induce genuine sadness, (c) details of the transformation, (d) music as a technology for emotion regulation, and (e) broader implications and extensions. nonPeerReviewed
sj-pdf-1-pom-10.1177_03057356211065061 ��� Supplemental material for Maladaptive music listening strategies are modulated by individual traits
2022
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-pom-10.1177_03057356211065061 for Maladaptive music listening strategies are modulated by individual traits by Vinoo Alluri, Anant Mittal, Azhagammal SC, Jonna K. Vuoskoski and Suvi Saarikallio in Psychology of Music
Music as embodied experience
2020
sj-pdf-1-pom-10.1177_03057356211065061 ��� Supplemental material for Maladaptive music listening strategies are modulated by individual traits
2022
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-pom-10.1177_03057356211065061 for Maladaptive music listening strategies are modulated by individual traits by Vinoo Alluri, Anant Mittal, Azhagammal SC, Jonna K. Vuoskoski and Suvi Saarikallio in Psychology of Music
Relationships Between Audio and Movement Features, and Perceived Emotions in Musical Performance
2023
A core aspect of musical performance is communicating emotional and expressive intentions to the audience. Recognition of the musician's intentions is constructed from a combination of visual and auditory performance cues, as well as compositional features. The current study attempted to quantify these contributions by measuring relationships between ratings of perceived emotion, and motion and auditory performance features. A pianist and violinist with advanced degrees in music performance individually performed four short western tonal pieces. The musicians were tasked with performing the pieces while invoking different expressive intentions: sad, happy, angry, and as a control, deadpan. …