The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a large impact on various aspects of life, but questions about its effects on close relationships remain largely unanswered. In the present study, we examined perceived changes in relationship satisfaction at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic by using an international sample of 3,243 individuals from 67 different countries, mostly from Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In April and May 2020, participants responded to an online survey that included questions about relationship satisfaction, their satisfaction before the pandemic, other relationship aspects (e.g., shared time), special circumstances (e.g., mobility restrictions), and enduring dispositions (e.g., insecure attachment). A decline in time shared with one’s partner was most strongly associated with perceived decreases in relationship satisfaction, resulting in a different pattern of findings for cohabiting and non-cohabiting individuals. Among the most influential moderators were anxious and avoidant attachment. The findings offer insights into both aggravating and protecting factors in couples’ responses to pandemic-related stressors.

One of the challenges in the study of music and emotion is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the role of listener attributes involved in musical emotion induction. Studies have typically focused on one class of listener features, such as particular personality traits or musicianship status. Drawing from the induction rule model (Scherer & Zentner, 2001), which accords special significance to expertise, stable dispositions, and current mood state, we adopted a systematic approach to the study of listener attributes by examining the relative influence of musical expertise, objectively assessed musical aptitude, the Big Five personality traits, and positive and negative mood on musical emotion induction. To this end, 113 participants (45% musicians, 55% nonmusicians) provided ratings of felt emotion in response to 12 excerpts of Western classical music, selected to evoke different types of emotions. Ratings were obtained with Geneva Emotion Music Scale (GEMS)-25, a domain-specific scale for the assessment of music-evoked emotion, and analyzed according to their intensity and their granularity. Findings suggest that expertise mattered most, whereas the effects of mood and personality traits were more dependent on the type of outcome, such as the type of experienced emotion and the type of emotional responding (intensity vs. granularity), as well as on the presence of other listener factors. In total, listener features accounted for around 30% of the variance in musically evoked emotions. The significance of these findings, beyond their contribution to research on musical emotion induction, may extend to applications in which personalization of musical listening is desirable.

Mental imagery plays an important role in various contexts of life, involving cognitive resources such as memory, learning, spatial representation, and reasoning. The vividness of mental images depends on different factors, including personal expertise in a certain field. For instance, musicians have been found to possess better auditory imagery abilities than non-musicians for both musical and non-musical sounds. Only a few studies have tried to find out if this advantage is selective for auditory stimuli, however, with contradictory results so far (i.e., some studies supporting an advantage for mental imagery in general and some supporting an advantage for auditory mental imagery in particular). This study therefore investigated auditory and visual mental imagery in individuals with and without formal musical training. Thirty-six formally trained musicians, 33 self-taught musicians, and 33 non-musicians completed two questionnaires assessing the vividness of their auditory and visual mental imagery. They also completed measures of aptitude for music and general cognitive abilities. Both groups of musicians reported greater vividness of auditory (non-musical) imagery, but not visual imagery, than non-musicians. Thus musical experience, regardless of the type of training undergone by musicians, is linked to superior self-reported auditory mental imagery for everyday sounds, but not mental imagery in general.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a large impact on various aspects of life, but questions about its effect on close relationships remain largely unanswered. In the present study, we examined changes in relationship satisfaction at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic by using a sample of 3,243 individuals from 68 different countries. Participants responded to an online survey that included questions about relationship aspects (e.g., shared time, housework division), special circumstances (e.g., exit restrictions), and enduring dispositions (e.g., insecure attachment). A decline in time shared with one’s partner was the strongest predictor of decreases in relationship satisfaction, resulting in a different pattern of findings for cohabiting and non-cohabiting individuals. Among the most influential moderators were lockdown policies and insecure attachment. Differential involvement of men and women in household duties remained largely unchanged. The findings offer insights into aggravating and/or protecting factors in couples’ responses to pandemic-related stressors.

Music is widely known for its ability to evoke emotions. However, assessing specific music-evoked emotions other than through verbal self-reports has proven difficult. In the present study, we explored whether mood-congruency effects could be used as indirect measures of specific music-evoked emotions. First, participants listened to 15 music excerpts chosen to induce different emotions; after each excerpt, they were required to look at four different pictures. The pictures could either: (1) convey an emotion congruent with that conveyed by the music (i.e., congruent pictures); (2) convey a different emotion than that of the music, or convey no emotion (i.e., incongruent pictures). Second, participants completed a recognition task that included new pictures as well as already seen congruent and incongruent pictures. From previous findings about mood-congruency effects, we hypothesized that if music evokes a given emotion, this would facilitate memorization of pictures that convey the same emotion. Results revealed that accuracy in the recognition task was indeed higher for emotionally congruent pictures than for emotionally incongruent ones. The results suggest that music-evoked emotions have an influence on subsequent cognitive processing of emotional stimuli, suggesting a role of mood-congruency based recall tasks as non-verbal methods for the identification of specific music-evoked emotions.