An SEM approach to validating the psychological model of musical groove.

Abstract

In music psychology, the experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. According to the psychological model of musical groove by Senn et al., the causes for the urge to move are linked to the properties of the music itself, to the personal background of the listener, to the listening situation, and to feedback loops between body movement and cognition. The model formulates eight hypotheses stating that the music affects a listener's urge to move mediated through a variety of cognitive processes. This study develops a method based on structural equation modeling (SEM) to empirically test the model hypotheses. It evaluates five of the model hypotheses using data from an online listening experiment with 135 participants and 16 stylistically diverse musical stimuli (n = 2,160 observations). The SEM model had a good fit with the data (CFI = 0.958, RMSEA = 0.051) and explained a large proportion of the variance in the latent urge to move variable (R 2 = .737). Results show that music affects the urge to move mediated through listeners' experiences of energetic arousal, listening pleasure, and temporal regularity. The stimuli themselves showed direct effects on the urge to move that were not mediated through the hypothesized mediation pathways. This suggests that the model is incomplete. The current study demonstrates that the mediation structure of the psychological groove model can successfully be implemented using an SEM approach. The methodology may be adapted to investigate different repertoires, populations, and hypotheses in the future. Public Significance StatementMusic has the wonderful capacity to motivate body movement in humans. This study presents an empirical validation of a psychological model that aims at explaining how music makes us dance.

Groove as a multidimensional participatory experience

“…This might also be related to why people embody music in various ways during spontaneous dance (Toiviainen & Carlson, 2022;Toiviainen et al, 2010). Therefore, we might suggest that groove is not necessarily limited to a typical tempo nor solely to experiences of pleasure and an urge to move, but instead to a combination of several factors (similarly as suggested with the groove model: Senn et al, 2019Senn et al, , 2023. Thus, it is clear that more research investigating different kinds of groove experiences is needed.…”

“…Only in a recent preprint Senn and colleagues (2022) reported additional scales: "temporal regularity", "time-related interest" and "energetic arousal". Yet, in another recent paper, Senn et al (2023) highlighted that the current groove model is incomplete, and that significant causal pathways which influence the groove experience are yet to be discovered. A revised definition of groove and careful consideration of its dimensions could, for instance, provide more substantial scale developments and help researchers to accurately measure the intensity of groove experiences.…”

“…Although previous groove models consider the influence of personal background and concrete listening situation for groove experience (Senn et al, 2019(Senn et al, , 2023, current mood of the listeners is a rather novel finding in the groove literature. Its contribution requires further investigation and might shed light on the personal and interindividual variance in experience of groove.…”

Three Psychometric Scales for Groove Research: Inner Representation of Temporal Regularity, Time-Related Interest, and Energetic Arousal

“…The three new scales have been shown to be reliable, and they appear to be valid operationalizations of the corresponding latent constructs outlined in the groove model (Senn et al, 2019(Senn et al, , 2023. The content validity of the composite inner representation of temporal regularity and time-related interest scales was established in a pretest with music psychologists and rhythm and groove researchers.…”

“…We base this hypothesis on the results of an earlier study which suggest that pleasure is a precondition for the urge to move (Senn et al, 2020, p. 58). The hypothesized causal relationship between pleasure and the urge to move contrasts with Janata et al's non-hierarchical definition, which describes the Senn et al, 2023). For the first version, see Senn et al (2019).…”