Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody. In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist account. This approach proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music’s ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener’s mind. We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it. We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically pre-determined basic emotions. We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence). Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information. Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings. We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur.

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Listening to music can arouse a variety of affective responses. The study of this phenomenon has flourished during the last two decades, particularly thanks to the contribution of the BRECVEMA theory and the Multifactorial Process Model. Nevertheless, these theoretical frameworks have neglected the symbolic dimension of music, and the effect of situational factors. The first aim of this article is to overcome these shortcomings by proposing a model based on contemporary constructionist theories of emotion. This novel approach proposes that listening to music activates automatic perceptual mechanisms that produce fluctuations of affect, and that the activation of associative and appraisal mechanisms transform the fluctuations of affect into a variety of emotional and nonemotional responses. The main proposal is that adopting this constructionist model constitutes a fruitful approach, as it provides a holistic heuristic framework that produces new hypotheses for future investigation of affective experiences with music.

Emotional contagion has been explained as arising from embodied simulation. The two most accepted theories of music-induced emotions presume a mechanism of internal mimicry: the BRECVEMA framework proposes that the melodic aspect of music elicits internal mimicry leading to the induction of basic emotions in the listener, and the Multifactorial Process Model proposes that the observation or imagination of motor expressions of the musicians elicits muscular and neural mimicry, and emotional contagion. Two behavioral studies investigated whether, and to what extent, mimicry is responsible for emotion contagion, and second, to what extent context for affective responses in the form of visual imagery moderates emotional responses. Experiment 1 tested whether emotional contagion is influenced by mimicry by manipulating explicit vocal and motor mimicry. In one condition, participants engaged in mimicry of the melodic aspects of the music by singing along with the music, and in another, participants engaged in mimicry of the musician’s gestures when producing the music, by playing along (“air guitar”-style). The experiment did not find confirmatory evidence for either hypothesized simulation mechanism, but it did provide evidence of spontaneous visual imagery consistent with the induced and perceived emotions. Experiment 2 used imagined rather than performed mimicry, but found no association between imagined motor simulation and emotional intensity. Emotional descriptions read prior to hearing the music influenced the type of perceived and induced emotions and support the prediction that visual imagery and associated semantic knowledge shape listeners’ affective experiences with music. The lack of evidence for the causal role of embodied simulation suggests that current theorization of emotion contagion by music needs refinement to reduce the role of simulation relative to other mechanisms. Evidence for induction of affective states that can be modulated by contextual and semantic associations suggests a model of emotion induction consistent with constructionist accounts.

This article reports a two-part study into the prosocial impacts of third sector cultural activities with children and adolescents in impoverished and violence-stricken urban neighbourhoods in Cali, Colombia. First, a year-long field study set out to compare a pre-existing music-training programme with a dance-training programme and a football-training programme with 9–14 year olds, to determine the extent to which each affords the development of empathic attitudes and prosocial behaviours. The music and dance programmes produced few significant changes in participants’ empathy or prosociality, and there were few significant differences between the empathy and prosociality of the participants in the two groups. Participant dropout prevented comparison with the football-training programme. Second, an interview study was used to understand the place of prosociality in the aims and work of policymakers, funders and third-sector practitioners running cultural activities for social impacts in the Cali region. The study revealed that the organisations aimed to achieve individual and social transformation by creating the conditions for transformation, evidenced as positive outcomes. Neither the measures used by the organisations themselves nor the psychosocial constructs of prosociality and empathy used by the researchers adequately evidenced some of the intended outcomes, such as enabling individuals to build a life project, practising and sustaining social inclusion and transforming communities, nor a path from individual to social transformation. Differences between the structure of cultural activities and their associated values meant that different activities were believed to lend themselves to social transformation more or less well. This highlights the need for critically reflective, co-constructed research using a fuller range of constructs that can capture the outcomes of these programmes for both individuals and groups.