Being Moved by Unfamiliar Sad Music Is Associated with High Empathy

Abstract

The paradox of enjoying listening to music that evokes sadness is yet to be fully understood. Unlike prior studies that have explored potential explanations related to lyrics, memories, and mood regulation, we investigated the types of emotions induced by unfamiliar, instrumental sad music, and whether these responses are consistently associated with certain individual difference variables. One hundred and two participants were drawn from a representative sample to minimize self-selection bias. The results suggest that the emotional responses induced by unfamiliar sad music could be characterized in terms of three underlying factors: Relaxing sadness, Moving sadness, and Nervous sadness. Relaxing sadness was characterized by felt and perceived peacefulness and positive valence. Moving sadness captured an intense experience that involved feelings of sadness and being moved. Nervous sadness was associated with felt anxiety, perceived scariness and negative valence. These interpretations were supported by indirect measures of felt emotion. Experiences of Moving sadness were strongly associated with high trait empathy and emotional contagion, but not with other previously suggested traits such as absorption or nostalgia-proneness. Relaxing sadness and Nervous sadness were not significantly predicted by any of the individual difference variables. The findings are interpreted within a theoretical framework of embodied emotions.

The Pleasure Evoked by Sad Music Is Mediated by Feelings of Being Moved

“…Furthermore, the association between trait empathy and being moved provides further support and explanation for previous findings that have linked trait empathy with the enjoyment of sad music (e.g., Garrido and Schubert, 2011; Vuoskoski et al, 2012; Taruffi and Koelsch, 2014; Eerola et al, 2016). The findings of the present study suggest that trait empathy contributes directly to the intensity of felt sadness and movingness (and thus enjoyment), but does not modulate the relationships between felt sadness, being moved, and liking.…”

An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

“…[134,135] even at the level of psychophysiology [135]. Furthermore, stronger empathy appears to be consistently associated with more intense music-induced sadness, and greater enjoyment of 525 sad music [136,134,137].…”

Towards a more explicit account of the transformation

“…We also agreed with Nussbaum's [7] notion that music is able to add the kind of conceptual input to the experience that text alone cannot produce, but this also works vice versa: lyrics provide their own conceptual input that can strengthen or alter the impact of expressive musical cues. In our own empirical studies we have typically been careful not to conflate the two, and have carried out studies using either instrumental music exclusively [8,9], or compared the e↵ects of instrumental, unfamiliar musc with those of self-selected, familiar music containing lyrics [10]. We agree that di↵erent domains (i.e., musical features and lyrics) need to be related to their respective mechanisms [11,12].…”

“…Empirical evidence from several (but not all) listening experiments also demonstrate that listeners rate sadness as the most intense emotion when listening to either selfselected sad music [10] or unfamiliar music chosen by experimenters [8,10] -even when using the GEMS to rate their emotional responses [9]. As Zentner points out with refer-ence to Taru and Koelsch's survey study, nostalgia and peacefulness might be the most prevalent emotions when broad survey methods are used to probe the experiences.…”