Negative Emotion Responses to Heavy-Metal and Hip-Hop Music with Positive Lyrics

Abstract

This research investigated whether negative emotional responses to heavy-metal and hip-hop music could be stereotypes of the music genres. It was hypothesized that heavy-metal and hip-hop music with positive lyrics would be perceived as expressing more negative (negative valence/high arousal) emotions, compared with pop music excerpts with identical lyrics. Participants listened to either two heavy-metal or two hip-hop test stimuli and two pop control stimuli. They then responded by stating what emotion they perceived that the music expressed. Results indicated that heavy-metal and hip-hop stimuli were perceived as expressing more negative emotions than pop stimuli. Lyrics were recognized above chance in both heavy metal and hip hop, suggesting that the negative emotion bias was not a result of misunderstanding the lyrics. The Stereotype Theory of Emotion in Music (STEM) explains the findings in terms of an emotion filter which is activated to simplify emotion perception processing. The conclusions provide a novel way of understanding the cultural and social contribution of emotion in music.

Musical emotions in the absence of music: A cross-cultural investigation of emotion communication in music by extra-musical cues

“…High fandom listeners reported the highest number of above threshold emotion words, compared to low fandom and average fandom. Participants with different fandom levels have been observed to report different emotions to the same music [16,26,31,69]. This explanation might also illustrate the anomaly observed in responses to Son (mentioned above) because Cuban listeners were likely to have high fandom for Son.…”

“…Another study tested for emotional stereotypes in music when controlled for lyrics [16]. This study focused on Heavy Metal and Hip Hop music, often stereotyped as negative [30].…”

“…Furthermore, the specifics of the cultural component remain to be understood. Learned sources of culture-specific knowledge are not bound only to psychoacoustic features (for instance tempo and timbre), but also to extra-musical cues, such as genre labels [15,16]. It is argued, therefore, that emotion responses to music can be informed by extra-musical information detached from auditory music signals, and that this information might differ between cultures.…”

Measuring Stereotypes in Music: A Commentary on Susino and Schubert (2019)

“…The target paper makes an important contribution by investigating negative emotion stereotyping of music genres. Susino and Schubert (2019) allocated participants (238 undergraduate students) randomly to two groups. Both groups of participants listened to four music excerpts: two test stimuli (either excerpts of heavy metal or hip hop music, depending on the group) and two control stimuli (excerpts of pop music).…”

“…A potentially problematic aspect of the design used by Susino and Schubert (2019) is that lyrics in some music stimuli were more difficult to understand than in others. However, the authors came up with a very practical way of measuring the extent to which lyrics were understood.…”