Emotional responses to music: The need to consider underlying mechanisms

Abstract

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.

Experiences of pregnant women attending a lullaby programme in Limerick, Ireland: A qualitative study

“…This image had the effect of reproducing feelings of relaxation and safety linked with singing the lullabies and Donna recalls feeling safe and confident that all would be well. A possible explanation of this phenomenon presents in the work of Juslin and Västfjäll (2008). These authors discussed a process whereby a particular emotion, such as pleasure or relaxation, is evoked in response to visual imagery, (like the ocean), while listening to music.…”

“…The notion of meaningful lyrics or words is more difficult to locate in the literature where the greatest emphasis is on musical type such as classical or popular music. However, the impact of the lullaby lyrics may be explained by drawing on the work of Juslin and Västfjäll (2008) as above. These authors discussed the capacity of music to evoke visual imagery and it may be that the visual images of sleeping babies, angels, trees and landscapes conjured up by the words of the lullabies were pleasing and emotional for the women.…”

Indexing music by mood: design and integration of an automatic content-based annotator

“…Similar to psychological studies, there is no real agreement on a common model [16]. Some consider a categorical representation based on mutually exclusive basic emotions such as "happiness", "sadness", "anger", "fear" and "tenderness" [19,26,36,39], while others prefer a multi-labeling approach (i.e., using a rich set of adjectives that are not mutually exclusive) like Wieczorkowska [45].…”

Crossmodal transfer of emotion by music

“…First, the current paradigm of music-induced emotional priming is quite different from other mood-induction procedures which are associated with a longer lasting change of emotional states, whereas our study investigated the effect of emotional changes on a much shorter time scale [11]. Secondly, unlike previous ERP studies of facial emotion processing, we always compared the same facial emotional type but differed only in priming.…”