Being Moved by Sad Music Across Countries: Characterizing the Experience in Finland, Germany, and France

Abstract

Feeling moved by music is one of the most common, yet most profound, emotional responses reported by listeners. This emotion also explains why people enjoy listening to sad-sounding music. However, cultural comparisons of this phenomenon are lacking. The present study compared the emotional experience of being moved by sad music across three countries. Participants from Finland (N = 102), Germany (N = 113), and France (N = 116) listened to a pretested sadness-inducing music piece. Afterward, they reported their perceived and felt emotional experiences which were analyzed for interconnections in a network analysis for each country. The results show that the associations between diverse emotional experiences differ between listeners from different countries. However, we find one cluster of emotional experiences that replicates across all countries and that we identify as the experience of being moved. It consists of liking, emotional intensity, feeling moved, and feeling sad. Psychological moderators of the being moved experience evoked by sad music differ between countries. We present the first cultural comparison of the experience of being moved by sad-sounding music, and identify a culturally robust cluster of emotional experiences that constitute this emotion.