This study was conducted to determine how listeners derive global evaluations of past musical durations from moment-to-moment experience. Participants produced moment-to-moment affective intensity ratings by pressing a pressure-sensitive button while listening to various selections. They later reported the remembered affective intensity of each example. The data suggest that the assumption that remembered affect equals the sum of all momentary affects fundamentally misrepresents how listeners encode and label past affective experiences. The duration of particular rather than uniform episodes contributes minimally to remembered affect (duration neglect). Listeners rely on the peak of affective intensity during a selection, the last moment, and moments that are more emotionally intense than immediately previous moments to determine postperformance ratings. The peak proves to be the strongest predictor of remembered affect. We derive a formula that takes moment-to-moment experience as input and predicts how listeners will remember musical affect. The formula is a better predictor of postperformance affect than any other on-line characteristic considered. Last, the utility of the formula is demonstrated through a brief examination of compositional decisions in a string quartet movement by Borodin and one typical format of four-movement symphonies from the classical period.

The AAB pattern consists of two similar events followed by a third dissimilar event. The prevalence of this pattern in the aesthetic domain may be explained as violation of expectation: A minimum of two iterations is required to establish a repetitive pattern; once established, it is most efficient to promptly violate the expected continuance of the pattern to produce the maximal aesthetic effect. We demonstrate the prevalence of this pattern (in comparison to AB or AAAB) in a representative sample of a variety of musical genres and in a representative sample of repetitive genre of jokes. We also provide experimental evidence that the AAB pattern in jokes is maximally effective in producing a humor response in participants.

We provide systematic evidence for the range and importance of hedonic reversals as a major source of pleasure, and incorporate these findings into the theory of benign masochism. Twenty-nine different initially aversive activities are shown to produce pleasure (hedonic reversals) in substantial numbers of individuals from both college student and Mechanical Turk samples. Hedonic reversals group, by factor analysis, into sadness, oral irritation, fear, physical activity/exhaustion, pain, strong alcohol-related tastes, bitter tastes, and disgust. Liking for sad experiences (music, novels, movies, paintings) forms a coherent entity, and is related to enjoyment of crying in response to sad movies. For fear and oral irritation, individuals also enjoy the body’s defensive reactions. Enjoyment of sadness is higher in females across domains. We explain these findings in terms of benign masochism, enjoyment of negative bodily reactions and feelings in the context of feeling safe, or pleasure at “mind over body”. In accordance with benign masochism, for many people, the favored level of initially negative experiences is just below the level that cannot be tolerated.

We consider how to optimize remembered aesthetic pleasure resulting from temporal sequences of events such as music and meals. We examine what psychology and music can learn from each other and how this knowledge might be applied to tasting menus and other temporal sequences. Common practices in longer musical works suggest the importance of (a) beginnings and endings, (b) variations in affective intensity over time, (c) repetitions, (d) variations on a theme, and (e) a return to prior material at the end of a piece. Results from psychology suggest that for affective memory, the final and peak experiences are most critical. For example, because a strong positive ending may be important for affective memory, and because return is a major feature of the ending of musical works, it may be an error to end meals with desserts, which are not the favorite courses for most people and typically bear no relation to prior courses (hence no return).

Research indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes. Yet, the notion of musical emotions remains controversial, and researchers have so far been unable to offer a satisfactory account of such emotions. We argue that the study of musical emotions has suffered from a neglect of underlying mechanisms. Specifically, researchers have studied musical emotions without regard to how they were evoked, or have assumed that the emotions must be based on the "default" mechanism for emotion induction, a cognitive appraisal. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework featuring six additional mechanisms through which music listening may induce emotions: (1) brain stem reflexes, (2) evaluative conditioning, (3) emotional contagion, (4) visual imagery, (5) episodic memory, and (6) musical expectancy. We propose that these mechanisms differ regarding such characteristics as their information focus, ontogenetic development, key brain regions, cultural impact, induction speed, degree of volitional influence, modularity, and dependence on musical structure. By synthesizing theory and findings from different domains, we are able to provide the first set of hypotheses that can help researchers to distinguish among the mechanisms. We show that failure to control for the underlying mechanism may lead to inconsistent or non-interpretable findings. Thus, we argue that the new framework may guide future research and help to resolve previous disagreements in the field. We conclude that music evokes emotions through mechanisms that are not unique to music, and that the study of musical emotions could benefit the emotion field as a whole by providing novel paradigms for emotion induction.