Individual Differences in Music-Perceived Emotions

Abstract

Previous music and emotion research suggests that individual differences in empathy, alexithymia, personality traits, and musical expertise might play a role in music-perceived emotions. In this study, we investigated the relationship between these individual characteristics and the ability of participants to recognize five basic emotions (happiness, sadness, tenderness, fear, and anger) conveyed by validated excerpts of film music. One hundred and twenty participants were recruited through an online platform and completed an emotion recognition task as well as the IRI (Interpersonal Reactivity Index), TAS-20 (Toronto Alexithymia Scale), BFI (Big Five Inventory), and Gold-MSI (Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index). While participants recognized the emotions depicted by the music at levels that were better than chance, their performance accuracy was negatively associated with the externally oriented thinking subscale from the TAS-20. Our results suggest that alexithymia, previously linked to a deficit in perception of facial and vocal expressions of emotion, is also associated with difficulties in perception of emotions conveyed by music.

Understanding music-selection behavior via statistical learning

“…It is likely that highly relevant traits for these outcome variables were not represented by our measures of individual differences. For example, there is some evidence that trait empathy is associated with the selection of sad music (e.g., Vuoskoski, Thompson, McIlwain, & Eerola, 2012) and that alexithymia may explain individual differences in the perception of emotions expressed by music (Taruffi, Allen, Downing, & Heaton, 2017).…”

Neurophysiological Effects of Trait Empathy in Music Listening

“…Corroborating this view, in a large web-based experiment Egermann and McAdams ( 2013 ) found that “empathy for the musician” moderated between recognized and induced emotions in music: the greater the empathy, the more likely an individual was to exhibit a strong affective response when listening. In a related study, Wöllner ( 2012 ) presented participants with video of a string quartet performance in three conditions—audio/visual, visual only, and audio only—and reported a significant correlation between trait empathy measures and perceived expressiveness in both visual conditions (music-only condition was non-significant), leading him to conclude: “since music is the audible outcome of actions, empathic responses to the performer’s movements may enhance the enjoyment of music.” Similarly, Taruffi et al ( 2017 ) found correlations between the EC and FS scales of the IRI and accuracy in emotion recognition relative to musicians’ self-reported expressive encodings in an audio-only task.…”

Do Individual Differences Influence Moment-by-Moment Reports of Emotion Perceived in Music and Speech Prosody?

“…Personality traits are associated with affective biases in emotion judgments (Rusting, 1998) due to the interaction of personality with attention, motivation and mood (Edgar et al, 2012): there is evidence that Extraversion and Agreeableness predispose people to perceive positive affect in emotional stimuli, whereas Neuroticism (low Emotional Stability) is associated with sensitivity to negative emotional stimuli (Knyazev et al, 2008), and may be instantiated at a neural level (Brück et al, 2011). These affective biases have been found for discrete, summative judgments of emotion in music (Vuoskoski and Eerola, 2011; Taruffi et al, 2017) and in speech prosody (Burton et al, 2013), but it is unknown whether they influence moment-by-moment judgments of emotion.…”