Abstract
Music therapy intervention manuals suggest that individuals who suffer from affective disorders benefit from listening to music according to the iso principle. The iso principle comprises listening to music that matches the current mood of patients at first, and then to gradually shift to music that represents a desired mood. Within the current study, we investigate whether the sequence of music with different emotional valence can modulate the emotional state. All participants were healthy adults who underwent a sadness induction via a movie clip. They were subsequently divided into four experimental groups. Each was asked to listen to two pieces of music according to a specific sequence: sad-sad; sad-happy; happy-happy; happy-sad. Participants were prompt to rate their current emotional state at different stages of the experiment: prior to and after the movie clip, as well as after each of the two pieces of music. The frame used for the assessment was the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and the Self-Assessment Manikin. The results indicate that the movie clip induced sadness. The group of participants who listened to the sad music first and the happy music afterwards ultimately reported a higher positive affect, a higher emotional valence, and a lower negative affect compared with the other groups. However, not all the between-group differences reached significance. We conclude that the sequence of music with different emotional valence affects the current emotional state. The results are generally in line with the iso principle. Directions for future research are presented.
Highlights
There has been a debate whether music elicits emotions in the listeners or whether listeners recognize the emotion expressed by the piece of music [1]
We aimed to investigate the effects of listening to music with different emotional valence in different sequences
The results indicate that the groups did not differ concerning age (F = 1.41, df = 3103, p = 0.25), gender (X2 = 5.31, df = 6, p = 0.51), music preferences (X2 = 10.63, df = 9, p = 0.30), trait positive affect (F = 1.09, df = 3, 103, p = 0.36), trait negative affect (F = 0.10, df = 3, 103, p = 0.96), neuroticism (F = 0.97, df = 3, 103, p = 0.41), extraversion (F = 1.23, df = 3, 103, p = 0.30), psychoticism (F = 1.29, df = 3, 103, p = 0.28), or openness (F = 1.69, df = 3, 103, p = 0.17)
Summary
There has been a debate whether music elicits emotions in the listeners or whether listeners recognize the emotion expressed by the piece of music [1]. Mechanisms of how exactly music induces emotions have been summarized recently [4], namely through brain stem reflexes (quick and basic auditory sensations mediating arousal, attention, and judgment of consonance and dissonance), evaluative conditioning (repeated pairing of pieces of music with other positive or negative stimuli), emotional contagion (perceiving the emotional expression of the music and mimicking this expression), visual imagery (generating visual images while listening to the music), episodic memory (evoking a memory of a specific event through a piece of music), and expectancy (the music violates, delays, or confirms the expectancy on how the music continues). These mechanisms are not working separately, and specific pieces of music induce emotions by the interplay of
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