The emotion trajectory of self-selected jazz music with lyrics: A psychophysiological perspective

Abstract

This study explored how lyrics, participant-selected music, and emotion trajectory impact self-reported emotional (happiness, sadness, arousal, and valence) and physiological (heart, respiration, and skin conductance rates) responses. Participants were matched (based on sex, age, musicianship, and lyric preference) and assigned to a lyric or instrumental group. Each participant experienced one emotion trajectory (happy-sad or sad-happy), with alternating self- and experimenter-selected jazz music. Emotion trajectory had a significant effect on self-reports, where participants in the sad-happy trajectory reported significantly more sadness overall compared to participants in the happy-sad trajectory. There were also several interaction effects between the independent variables, which indicate the relevance of order as well as differences in processing musical emotions depending on whether music is instrumental or contains lyrics.

Music listening according to the iso principle modulates affective state

“…Our results confirm those of previous studies investigating the effectiveness of the iso principle for modulating affective state. Heiderscheit and Madson (2015) in their single-case study, and Shatin (1970) and Warmbrodt et al (2021) in their experimental studies, demonstrated similar affect trajectories in listeners exposed to music according to the iso principle but made no direct comparison of the iso and compensatory principles. Somewhat undermining the iso principle, Warmbrodt et al (2021) showed that listening to a sad song could induce lingering sadness.…”

“…Heiderscheit and Madson (2015) in their single-case study, and Shatin (1970) and Warmbrodt et al (2021) in their experimental studies, demonstrated similar affect trajectories in listeners exposed to music according to the iso principle but made no direct comparison of the iso and compensatory principles. Somewhat undermining the iso principle, Warmbrodt et al (2021) showed that listening to a sad song could induce lingering sadness. The design of their study differed from the current study, however, as non-iso conditions were not included.…”

“…Experiments have been conducted with healthy participants to demonstrate the shift from one affective state to another (i.e., affect trajectory ), for example, from sad to happy or from restless to serene (Shatin, 1970). In a more recent study (Warmbrodt et al, 2021), participants listened first to happy music and then to sad music, and vice versa. While these experiments demonstrated that it is possible to create affect trajectory, they did not include a compensatory-principle control condition to investigate whether the iso principle is more powerful than the compensatory principle.…”

Through the lens of music: Instrumental soundtrack listening elicits extra-musical meaning

“…The results discussed so far identify correspondences between acoustic features and movie scene properties. Previously reported relationships between music and emotional response [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]95 and between emotions and visual imagery 8,33,[45][46][47][48][49] raise the question of whether the ability of soundtrack music to evoke mental imagery could be fully and uniquely explained by the emotions conveyed by music and perceived by the listener. In this vein, research consistently shows that the processing of emotional information can affect the representation of information in different sensory modalities (e.g., associations between music and color are mediated by specific emotions 33,[96][97][98] ), stressing the importance of affective valence in semantic processing 99 .…”

“…To narrate a story and convey emotions, movies capitalize on the interplay between video, environmental sounds, dialogue, and soundtrack music, among others. Music is well-known to evoke powerful and diverse emotions across individuals [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and has thus been extensively used to convey emotions in film 15 . Less is known about whether instrumental music (such as soundtrack music) can evoke extra-musical information in a listener's mind beyond emotions and in the absence of visual information.…”