Age-related patterns in emotions evoked by music.

Abstract

We presented older and younger nonmusician adult listeners with (mostly) unfamiliar excerpts of film music. All listeners rated their emotional reaction using the Geneva Emotional Music Scale 9 (GEMS-9; Zentner, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2008), and also rated familiarity and liking. The GEMS-9 was factoranalyzed into 3 factors of Animacy, Valence, and Arousal. Although the 2 age groups liked the music equally well, and showed roughly the same pattern of responses to the different emotion categories, the younger group showed a wider range of emotional reactivity on all the factors. We found support for a type of positivity effect, in that older people found Happy music somewhat less happy than did younger people, but found Sad music much less sad than did younger people. Older people also rated Fearful music more positively than did younger people. We propose that the GEMS-9 scale is an efficient and effective device to collect evoked emotion data for a wide age range of listeners.

That note sounds wrong! Age-related effects in processing of musical expectation

“…However, to the extent that increasing experience selectively affects the more cognitive (integrative) aspects of processing, rather than more basic perceptual responses, older adults might show increased amplitude (compared to younger adults) only in late positive ERP components. As older adults do seem to have somewhat reduced behavioral emotional responses to music (Pearce & Halpern, 2015;Vieillard & Bigand, 2014), it is also possible that the overall reduction in neural response would result in smaller differentiations between melodic ending types. A third possibility is that a threshold of cultural knowledge is reached by young adulthood, and we might see no differences in response by older and younger listeners.…”

“Music is my drug”: Alexithymia, empathy, and emotional responding to music

“…Listening to music is a common means of manipulating emotional feelings (Allen, Hill, & Heaton 2009; Juslin, Harmat, & Eerola, 2014; Juslin & Laukka, 2004; Sloboda & O’Neill, 2001). The physiological reactions that occur in response to music engagement have been likened to the reward system activation induced by psychoactive drugs (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Chanda & Levitin, 2013; Mallik, Chanda, & Levitin, 2017), and like alcohol or other drugs, music can alleviate psychological discomfort (Dingle & Fay, 2016; Pearce & Halpern, 2015). Although physiological responses to rhythm have been identified as a universal human experience (Zentner, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2008), emotional responses to music do not occur in such a uniform way across individuals.…”

Testing, Testing, 1 2 3: Exploring the Mitigating Effects of Sound on Test Performance

“…Although music/sound has been shown in some cases to drive behavior and in other cases, inhibit memory, these types of behaviors seem to be mediated by an overarching factor of participant emotionality, which is not necessarily a factor of sound, but does influence how sounds are perceived. Music and sound have been shown to have an impact on a person's affective state (McCraty, Barrios-Choplin, Atkinson, & Tomasino, 1998) and younger people have been shown to be more impacted by these sound mediated mood changes produced through music (Pearce & Halpern, 2015). These sounds/music can make people happy, sad, angry, or calm and people will often make selections of what they want to listen to based on how they are feeling (Lee, Andrade, & Palmer, 2013).…”