This study deals with the strong relationship between emotions and music, investigating three main research questions: (RQ1) Are there differences in human music perception (e.g., emotions, tempo, instrumentation, and complexity), according to musical education, experience, demographics, and personality traits?; (RQ2) Do certain perceived music characteristics correlate (e.g., tension and sadness), irrespective of a particular listener's background or personality?; (RQ3) Does human perception of music characteristics, such as emotions and tempo, correlate with descriptors extracted from music audio signals?To investigate our research questions, we conducted two user studies focusing on different groups of subjects. We used web-based surveys to collect information about demographics, listening habits, musical education, personality, and perceptual ratings with respect to perceived emotions, tempo, complexity, and instrumentation for 15 segments of Beethoven's 3 rd symphony, "Eroica". Our experiments showed that all three research questions can be affirmed, at least partly. We found strong support for RQ2 and RQ3, while RQ1 could be confirmed only for some perceptual aspects and user groups.

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Parental threatening behaviors have emerged as a subset of negative parental behaviors strongly related to internalizing symptoms among youth, yet the underlying mechanisms in this association have remained unexplored. The current investigation examined the role of difficulties engaging in goal-directed behavior while emotionally distressed in the association between exposure to maternal threatening behaviors and internalizing symptoms among trauma-exposed inpatient psychiatric youth. Participants (N = 50; mean [SD] age, 15.1 [0.51] years; age range, 12–17 years) completed measures of emotion dysregulation, exposure to maternal threatening behaviors, depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, as well as trauma-related functional impairment. Results revealed that inability to engage in goal-directed behavior while distressed significantly explained associations between exposure to maternal threatening behaviors and each of the three symptom classes, but not the association between exposure to maternal threatening behaviors and trauma-related functional impairment. These novel findings underscore the need for interventions that target the capacity for goal-directed behavior in the context of emotional distress, especially among trauma-exposed youth who have experienced parental threatening behaviors.