Feelings and perceptions of happiness and sadness induced by music: Similarities, differences, and mixed emotions.

The authors examined similarities and differences between (1) listeners’ perceptions of emotions conveyed by 30-s pieces of music and (2) their emotional responses to the same pieces. Using identical scales, listeners rated how happy and how sad the music made them feel, and the happiness and the sadness expressed by the music. The music was manipulated to vary in tempo (fast or slow) and mode (major or minor). Feeling and perception ratings were highly correlated but perception ratings were higher than feeling ratings, particularly for music with consistent cues to happiness (fast-major) or sadness (slow-minor), and for sad-sounding music in general. Associations between the music manipulations and listeners’ feelings were mediated by their perceptions of the emotions conveyed by the music. Happiness ratings were elevated for fast-tempo and major-key stimuli, sadness ratings were elevated for slow-tempo and minor-key stimuli, and mixed emotional responses (higher happiness and sadness ratings) were elevated for music with mixed cues to happiness and sadness (fast-minor or slow-major). Listeners also exhibited ambivalence toward sad-sounding music. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional intelligence, not music training, predicts recognition of emotional speech prosody.

Is music training associated with greater sensitivity to emotional prosody in speech? University undergraduates (n = 100) were asked to identify the emotion conveyed in both semantically neutral utterances and melodic analogues that preserved the fundamental frequency contour and intensity pattern of the utterances. Utterances were expressed in four basic emotional tones (anger, fear, joy, sadness) and in a neutral condition. Participants also completed an extended questionnaire about music education and activities, and a battery of tests to assess emotional intelligence, musical perception and memory, and fluid intelligence. Emotional intelligence, not music training or music perception abilities, successfully predicted identification of intended emotion in speech and melodic analogues. The ability to recognize cues of emotion accurately and efficiently across domains may reflect the operation of a cross-modal processor that does not rely on gains of perceptual sensitivity such as those related to music training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Speaking to the trained ear: Musical expertise enhances the recognition of emotions in speech prosody.

Language and music are closely related in our minds. Does musical expertise enhance the recognition of emotions in speech prosody? Forty highly trained musicians were compared with 40 musically untrained adults (controls) in the recognition of emotional prosody. For purposes of generalization, the participants were from two age groups, young (18–30 years) and middle adulthood (40–60 years). They were presented with short sentences expressing six emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise—and neutrality, by prosody alone. In each trial, they performed a forced-choice identification of the expressed emotion (reaction times, RTs, were collected) and an intensity judgment. General intelligence, cognitive control, and personality traits were also assessed. A robust effect of expertise was found: musicians were more accurate than controls, similarly across emotions and age groups. This effect cannot be attributed to socioeducational background, general cognitive or personality characteristics, because these did not differ between musicians and controls; perceived intensity and RTs were also similar in both groups. Furthermore, basic acoustic properties of the stimuli like fundamental frequency and duration were predictive of the participants' responses, and musicians and controls were similarly efficient in using them. Musical expertise was thus associated with cross-domain benefits to emotional prosody. These results indicate that emotional processing in music and in language engages shared resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Communication of emotions in vocal expression and music performance: Different channels, same code?

Many authors have speculated about a close relationship between vocal expression of emotions and musical expression of emotions, but evidence bearing on this relationship has unfortunately been lacking. This review of 104 studies of vocal expression and 41 studies of music performance reveals similarities between the 2 channels concerning (a) the accuracy with which discrete emotions were communicated to listeners and (b) the emotion-specific patterns of acoustic cues used to communicate each emotion. The patterns are generally consistent with K. R. Scherer's (1986) theoretical predictions. The results can explain why music is perceived as expressive of emotion, and they are consistent with an evolutionary perspective on vocal expression of emotions. Discussion focuses on theoretical accounts and directions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Change detection in multi-voice music: The role of musical structure, musical training, and task demands.

This study evaluated the relationship between primitive and scheme-driven grouping (A. S. Bregman, 1990) by comparing the ability of different listeners to detect single note changes in 3-voice musical compositions. Primitive grouping was manipulated by the use of 2 distinctly different compositional styles (homophony and polyphony). The effects of scheme-driven processes were tested by comparing performance of 2 groups of listeners (musicians and nonmusicians) and by varying task demands (integrative and selective listening). Following previous studies, which had tested only musically trained participants, several variables were manipulated within each compositional style. The results indicated that, although musicians demonstrated a higher sensitivity to changes than did nonmusicians, the 2 groups exhibited similar patterns of sensitivity under a variety of conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Shifting perceptions: Developmental changes in judgments of melodic similarity.

Musical melodies are recognized on the basis of pitch and temporal relations between consecutive tones. Although some previous evidence (e.g., Saffran & Griepentrog, 2001) points to an absolute-to-relative developmental shift in listeners' perception of pitch, other evidence (e.g., Plantinga & Trainor, 2005; Schellenberg & Trehub, 2003) suggests that both absolute- and relative-pitch processing are evident among listeners of all ages (infants, children, and adults). We attempted to resolve this apparent discrepancy by testing adults as well as children 5–12 years of age. On each trial, listeners rated how similar or how different 2 melodies sounded. The melodies were identical, transposed (all tones shifted in pitch by the same amount), different (same tones reordered, changing pitch relations between successive tones), or transposed and different. Listeners of all ages were sensitive to both changes, but younger listeners attended selectively to transpositions as a source of perceived differences. With increasing age, melodic differences played an increasingly important role, whereas transpositions became less relevant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The experience of anger and sadness in everyday problems impacts age differences in emotion regulation.

The authors examined regulation of the discrete emotions anger and sadness in adolescents through older adults in the context of describing everyday problem situations. The results support previous work; in comparison to younger age groups, older adults reported that they experienced less anger and reported that they used more passive and fewer proactive emotion-regulation strategies in interpersonal situations. The experience of anger partially mediated age differences in the use of proactive emotion regulation. This suggests that at least part of the reason why older adults use fewer proactive emotion-regulation strategies is their decreased experience of anger. Results are discussed in the context of lifespan theories of emotional development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Role of Melodic and Temporal Cues in Perceiving Musical Meter.

A number of different cues allow listeners to perceive musical meter. Three experiments examined effects of melodic and temporal accents on perceived meter in excerpts from folk songs scored in 6/8 or 3/4 meter. Participants matched excerpts with 1 of 2 metrical drum accompaniments. Melodic accents included contour change, melodic leaps, registral extreme, melodic repetition, and harmonic rhythm. Two experiments with isochronous melodies showed that contour change and melodic repetition predicted judgments. For longer melodies in the 2nd experiment, variables predicted judgments best at the beginning of excerpts. The final experiment, with rhythmically varied melodies, showed that temporal accents, tempo, and contour change were the strongest predictors of meter. The authors' findings suggest that listeners combine multiple melodic and temporal features to perceive musical meter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of linguistic experience on the cognitive processing of pitch in speech and nonspeech sounds.

In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however, performance did not differ across the listener groups on a pitch discrimination task requiring fine-grained discrimination of simple nonspeech sounds. The crucial finding was that cross-language differences emerged on a nonspeech pitch contour identification task: The Mandarin listeners more often misidentified flat and falling pitch contours than the English listeners in a manner that could be related to specific features of the sound structure of Mandarin, which suggests that the effect of linguistic experience extends to nonspeech processing under certain stimulus and task conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The efficacy of using music in children of divorce groups: Impact on anxiety, depression, and irrational beliefs about divorce.

This study examined the efficacy of a children of divorce group using music as an intervention in comparison to a more traditional psychoeducational children of divorce group. It was predicted that children of divorce groups that utilized music would have a significantly greater impact on the children's levels of anxiety, depression, and irrational beliefs about divorce after the group ended and at a 3-month follow-up assessment. Both interventions significantly decreased cognitive and social anxiety and all irrational beliefs about divorce, except hope of reunification. Depression did not decrease for all participants but when the relationship between depression and irrational beliefs was examined, irrational beliefs were found to be mediators of depression for children of divorce. These results suggest that current interventions for children of divorce do decrease anxiety and irrational beliefs in general, but specifically addressing irrational beliefs may also decrease depressive symptoms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the reconstruction of dissociated schemas; converging perspectives from psychoanalysis, cognitive science and affective neuroscience.

Therapeutic change involves integration of emotion schemas that have been dissociated. Two types of avoidant dissociation are distinguished: primary dissociation dominated by fragmentary emotional memories; and secondary dissociation involving initial encoding of more organized memories whose meaning is avoided. Reconstruction of dissociated emotion schemas occurs through the referential process which includes three basic components: arousal of the subsymbolic affective core of a dissociated schema in the treatment relationship; connections of subsymbolic processes to symbolic representations in narratives and interactions in the session; and reflection leading to reorganization of the schema. The role of enactive perception and embodied communication as underlying intersubjectivity in the referential process is reviewed. Variations in states of awareness associated with each phase of the process, in both analyst and patient, and their effects on therapeutic change are examined. Current work in cognitive science and affective neuroscience supporting this process model is reviewed. This formulation is largely compatible with Freud's early theory of recollection and “associative working-over” with new emphasis on subjective state and the relational context. Studies of the referential process provide a potential interface between investigations of psychotherapy process and basic cognitive science and neuroscience research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)