Emotions, Mechanisms, and Individual Differences in Music Listening

Abstract

Emotions have been found to play a paramount role in both everyday music experiences and health applications of music, but the applicability of musical emotions depends on: 1) which emotions music can induce, 2) how it induces them, and 3) how individual differences may be explained. These questions were addressed in a listening test, where 44 participants (aged 19–66 years) reported both felt emotions and subjective impressions of emotion mechanisms (Mec Scale), while listening to 72 pieces of music from 12 genres, selected using a stratified random sampling procedure. The results showed that: 1) positive emotions (e.g., happiness) were more prevalent than negative emotions (e.g., anger); 2) Rhythmic entrainment was the most and Brain stem reflex the least frequent of the mechanisms featured in the BRECVEMA theory; 3) felt emotions could be accurately predicted based on self-reported mechanisms in multiple regression analyses; 4) self-reported mechanisms predicted felt emotions better than did acoustic features; and 5) individual listeners showed partly different emotion-mechanism links across stimuli, which may help to explain individual differences in emotional responses. Implications for future research and applications of musical emotions are discussed.