Do you chill when I chill? A cross-cultural study of strong emotional responses to music.

Abstract

While listeners can infer the mood expressed by the music of a different culture, the question of whether strong felt emotional responses can also be induced cross-culturally remains unanswered. We address this question by measuring chill responses, sudden increases in emotional arousal, through self-report and skin conductance measures. Excerpts of Western classical, traditional Chinese, and Hindustani classical music were presented to 3 groups of participants, each familiar with one of these styles. Participants felt a similar number of chills to both familiar and unfamiliar musical styles, but significantly fewer chills to scrambled music, which acted as a control. Acoustic analyses revealed that sudden peaks in loudness, brightness, and roughness were correlated with chills across styles, suggesting that similar acoustic elements induced emotional responses cross-culturally. The number of chills was also related to the degree to which participants paid attention to the music, rated the music as emotional and as having affected their own mood, but not to how much participants liked the music. Overall, this research counters the idea of musical emotional meaning as being entirely generated within cultural conventions and supports the claim that some aspects of the way music conveys emotion may be shared across cultures.

Augmenting aesthetic chills using a wearable prosthesis improves their downstream effects on reward and social cognition

“…This account is coherent with current accounts of emotional valence in terms of error dynamics 46 , 47 . Crucially, and even though their prevalence across human populations is still an open question, psychogenic shivers seem to present a high degree of universality, making them a useful somatic marker for affective neuroscience in light of their myriad emotional links 38 , 43 , 44 , 48 , 49 .…”

Chills in music: A systematic review

“…This has been consistently demonstrated not to be the case (Bannister, 2020b;Colver & El-Alayli, 2016;Grewe et al, 2011;Grewe et al, 2009a;Grewe et al, 2007;Guhn et al, 2007;Mori & Iwanaga, 2014bRickard, 2004;Salimpoor et al, 2009). Relatedly, several studies have validated button presses by only including the reported MECs in the analysis if they are accompanied by an increase in skin conductance response (Bannister, 2020b;Beier et al, 2020;Colver & El-Alayli, 2016;Egermann et al, 2011;Grewe et al, 2007;Mori & Iwanaga, 2014b). This approach has the advantage of not exclusively relying on self-reports, but considering the current lack of understanding regarding the exact relationship between MECs and skin conductance response (see Subsection 3.4.1), it might also lead to valid occurrences of MECs being discarded, depending on the chosen threshold.…”

“…MECs have repeatedly been linked with dynamic acoustic changes, and most often when such changes are sudden (Auricchio, 2017;Guhn et al, 2007;Nagel et al, 2008;Polo, 2017;Sloboda, 1991). More specifically, increased loudness or more frequent peaks in loudness were found around the onset of MECs (Beier et al, 2020;Grewe et al, 2007;Guhn et al, 2007;Honda et al, 2020;Nagel et al, 2008), particularly in the 920-4400 Hz band (Nagel et al, 2008). Loudness was also associated with continuous ratings of MECs intensity (Bannister & Eerola, 2018), and experimentally increasing the loudness of a musical passage known to often induce MECs and likely to engage auditory looming (see Subsection 3.8.4) resulted in more frequent experiences of MECs (Bannister, 2020b).…”

“…Correlations with age have been found (Williams et al, 2018), including for some (e.g., goose pimples) but not all (e.g., shivers down the spine) reactions to music related to MECs (Mlejnek, 2013), and age positively predicted a small amount of variance in the number of MECs experienced during an opera performance (Baltes , & Miu, 2014), whereas no effect of age was identified by Grewe et al (2009a), Mori and Iwanaga (2014b), Starcke et al (2019), andZickfeld, Schubert, Seibt, Blomster, et al (2019). Regarding effects of musical training, Nusbaum and Silvia (2011) found that playing an instrument is a significant predictor of the frequency of experiences of MECs, while Beier et al (2020) reported effects of Western music theory knowledge on MECs experienced when listening to Western, Indian, but not Chinese music. However, other empirical evidence does not support an effect of musical training or musical sophistication (Müllensiefen et al, 2014) on MECs (Bannister & Eerola, 2018;Grewe et al, 2009a;Guhn et al, 2007;Polo, 2017;Rickard, 2004).…”

“…Auricchio (2017),Guhn et al (2007),Nagel et al (2008),Polo (2017),Sloboda (1991) Increase or more frequent peaks:Bannister and Eerola (2018),Bannister (2020b),Beier et al (2020),Grewe et al (2007),Guhn et al (2007),Honda et al (2020),Nagel et al (2008) Event densityHigh levels: Bannister and Eerola (2018), Nagel et al (2008), Polo (2017) Frequency range Expansion in high or low register: Guhn et al (2007), Polo (2017) Spectral centroid or flux High levels: Bannister and Eerola (2018) Roughness, dissonance, or fluctuation strength Increase: Bannister and Eerola (2018), Beier et al (2020), Grewe et al (2007), Nagel et al (2008), Park et al (2019) Brightness or sharpness Increase: Bannister and Eerola (2018), Beier et al (2020), Grewe et al (2007), Honda et al ), Bannister and Eerola (2018), Bannister (2020a), Guhn et al (2007), Mlejnek (2013), Schurtz et al (2012), Sloboda (1991) Rhythmic properties Schurtz et al (2012), Solberg and Dibben (2019) Textural changes In general: Auricchio (2017), Polo (2017), Sloboda (1991), Solberg and Dibben (2019) Entrance or interplay between instruments: Auricchio (2017), Bannister and Eerola (2018), Bannister (2020a), Goodchild et al (2019), Guhn et al (2007), Mlejnek (2013) Voice and lyrics Bannister (2020a), Schurtz et al Bannister (2020a), Craig (2009),Goldstein (1980),Mlejnek (2013),Schoeller and Perlovsky (2016), Schoeller, Eskinazi, andGarreau (2018) No effect:Konečni et al (2007) …”