Why is Sad Music Pleasurable? A Possible Role for Prolactin

Huron, David

doi:10.1177/102986491101500202

Cited by 66 publications

(101 citation statements)

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“…Only the consoling reaction has the potential of generating pleasure in this context, since the complex endocrine response involved in consoling reaction is associated with strong positive emotions (reviewed in [73]). This is, of course, what Huron's theory [35] about prolactin and 330 the pleasure induced by sad music is all about.…”

Section: A Biological Systems Accountmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…We adopted a constructionist account of emotions, which has simulation as the core mechanism. Simulation, interestingly, is also at the centre of the only explanation specifically geared towards the pleasure generated by music-induced sadness [35]. This conjecture claims that music allows us to simulate the feelings but without qualifying this in any way.…”

Section: Key Processes Involved: Simulation and Hedonic Shift 950mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Music that induces sadness but is nevertheless intensely enjoyed provides a striking example of this phenomenon. It is not just the fact that most cultures have a distinct category for sad music [9], and that listeners frequently report everyday experiences of sadness induced by sad music [10], 35 but these experiences are commonly described to be highly enjoyable [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Huron [35] has offered an interesting conjecture that is indeed specific to sadness. It assumes that listening to sad music is sometimes enough to trigger an endocrine response (prolactin release) relevant for alleviating the mental pain 130 related to the experience of loss.…”

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confidence: 99%

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An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

Eerola

Vuoskoski

Peltola

et al. 2018

Physics of Life Reviews

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Citation for published item:ierolD F nd uoskoskiD tF uF nd eltolD rFEF nd utkinenD F nd h¤ ferD uF @PHIUA 9en integrtive review of the enjoyment of sdness ssoited with musiF9D hysis of life reviewsF F Further information on publisher's website: httpsXGGdoiForgGIHFIHITGjFplrevFPHIUFIIFHIT Publisher's copyright statement:Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractThe recent surge of interest towards the paradoxical pleasure produced by sad music has generated a handful of theories and an array of empirical explorations on the topic. However, none of these have attempted to weigh the existing evidence in a systematic fashion. The present work puts forward an integrative framework laid out over three levels of explanation -biological, psycho-social, and cultural -to compare and integrate the existing findings in a meaningful way. First, we review the evidence pertinent to experiences of pleasure associated with sad music from the fields of neuroscience, psychophysiology, and endocrinology. Then, the psychological and interpersonal mechanisms underlying the recognition and induction of sadness in the context of music are combined with putative explanations ranging from social surrogacy and nostalgia to feelings of being moved. Finally, we address the cultural aspects of the paradox -the extent to which it is embedded in the Western notion of music as an aesthetic, contemplative object -by synthesising findings from history, ethnography, and empirical studies. Furthermore, we complement these explanations by considering the particularly significant life meanings that sadness portrayed in art can evoke in some perceivers. Our central claim is that one cannot attribute the enjoyment of sadness fully to any one of these levels, but to a chain * Corresponding author Email address: tuomas.eerola@durham.ac.uk (Tuomas Eerola)Preprint submitted to Physics of Life Reviews November 10, 2017 of functionalities afforded by each level. Each explanatory level has several putative explanations and its own shift towards positive valence, but none of them deliver the full transformation from a highly negative experience to a fully enjoyable experience alone. The current evidence within this framework ranges from weak to non-existent at the biological level, moderate at the psychological level, and suggestive at the cultural level. We propose a series of focussed topics for future investigation that would allow to deconstruct the drivers and constraints of the processes leading to pleasurable music-related sad...

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Section: A Biological Systems Accountmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Key Processes Involved: Simulation and Hedonic Shift 950mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

Eerola

Vuoskoski

Peltola

et al. 2018

Physics of Life Reviews

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“…One reason for this is that participants were focused on the song and possibly the change between music type creates resentment/unhappiness. Some studies suggest that we may have a preference for sad music (27,28), which may influence the participants' response towards the stimuli. However, a subset of 10 participants reported liking the sad stimulus the least compared to happy and neutral stimuli, suggesting that this is not the case of liking sad music more than others.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion Recognition Using Smart Watch Sensor Data: A Mixed-Design Study (Preprint)

Quiroz¹,

Geangu²,

Yong³

2018

Preprint

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Background: Research in psychology has shown that the way a person walks reflects that person's current mood (or emotional state). Recent studies have started using smartphones to detect emotional states from movement data. Objective: This study investigates the use of movement sensor data from a smart watch to infer an individual's emotional state. We present our findings on a user study with 50 participants. Methods: The experimental design is a mixed-design study; within-subjects (emotions; happy, sad, neutral) and between-subjects (stimulus type: audio visual "movie clips", audio "music clips"). Each participant experienced both emotions in a single stimulus type. All participants walked 250m while wearing a smart watch on one wrist and a heart rate monitor strap on their chest. They also had to answer a short questionnaire (20 items; PANAS) before and after experiencing each emotion. The heart rate monitor serves as a supplementary information to our data. We performed time-series analysis on the data from the smart watch and a t-test on the questionnaire items to measure the change in emotional state. The heart rate data was analyzed using one-way ANOVA. We extracted features from the time-series using sliding windows and used the features to train and validate classifiers that determine an individual's emotion. Results: We had 50 young adults participate in our study, with 49 included for the affective PANAS questionnaire and all for the feature extraction. Participants reported feeling less negative affect after watching sad videos or after listening to the sad music, P < .006. For the task of emotion recognition using classifiers, our results show that the personal models outperformed personal baselines, and achieve median accuracies higher than 78% for all conditions of the design study for the binary classification of happiness vs sadness. Conclusions: Our findings show that we are able to detect the changes in emotional state with data obtained from the smartwatch as well as behavioral responses. Together with the high accuracies achieved across all users for the classification of happy vs sad emotional states, this is further evidence for the hypothesis that movement sensor data can be used for emotion recognition.

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Evaluating BCI for Musical Expression: Historical Approaches, Challenges and Benefits

Williams

2019

Brain Art

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A recurring challenge in the use of BCI (and more generally HCI) for musical expression is in the design and conduct of appropriate evaluation strategies when considering BCI systems for music composition or performance. Assessing the value of computationally assisted creativity is challenging in most artistic domains, and the assessment of computer assisted (or entirely computer generated) music is no different. BCI provides two unique possibilities over traditional evaluation strategies: firstly, the possibility of devising evaluations which do not require conscious input from the listener (and therefore do not detract from the immersive experience of performing, creating, or listening to music), and secondly in devising neurofeedback loops to actively maneuver the creator or listener through an expressive musical experience. Music offers some unusual challenges in comparison to other artistic interfaces: for example, often it is made in ensemble, and there is evidence to suggest neurophysiological differences are evident in ensemble measurement when compared to solo performance activities, for example see (Babiloni et al. 2011). Moreover, a central purpose of music is often to incite movement (swaying, nodding head, dancing) -both in performer and audience -and as such this also offers up challenges for BCI/HCI design. This chapter considers historical approaches as well as making proposals for borrowing solutions from the world of auditory display (also referred to as sonification) and psychoacoustic evaluation techniques, to propose a hybrid paradigm for the evaluation of expression in BCI music applications.

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Why is Sad Music Pleasurable? A Possible Role for Prolactin

Cited by 66 publications

References 50 publications

An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

Emotion Recognition Using Smart Watch Sensor Data: A Mixed-Design Study (Preprint)

Evaluating BCI for Musical Expression: Historical Approaches, Challenges and Benefits

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