Emotions during live music performance: Links with individual differences in empathy, visual imagery, and mood.

Abstract

Emotional responses to music involve the interplay of multiple factors related to music, listener, and situation (Gabrielsson, 2001; Scherer & Zentner, 2001). For instance, individuals differ in their capacity to understand and respond to the emotions they perceive in the environment (i.e., empathy), as well as to associate stimuli from any sensory modality with vivid images in the mind (i.e., visual imagery). Such stable individual differences (i.e., traits) may interact with more transient psychological characteristics (e.g., mood) and contextual features (e.g., location, the presence of others) in influencing emotional reactivity to music (Scherer & Coutinho, 2013). Therefore, real-life situations in which people come together to listen to music offer valuable opportunities to study the psychological underpinnings of emotional responses to music (Zentner & Eerola, 2010). The present study investigates the influence of individual differences in empathy, visual imagery, and mood on emotional responses to music during a live opera performance.Empathy and Visual Imagery in Music-Induced EmotionsProcess theories have identified empathy and visual imagery as two of the most important central or mechanisms by which music may induce emotions in listeners. For instance, Scherer and Zentner (2001) hypothesized that mirroring the emotions perceived in music through controlled and automatic processes of empathy, as well as associating music with images through memory-dependent processes of visual imagery are two important routes by which listeners may experience emotions in response to music (see also Garrido & Schubert, 2010; Scherer & Coutinho, 2013; Walton, 1999). These hypotheses were supported by the results of an experience-sampling study (Juslin, Liljestrom, Vastfjall, Barradas, & Silva, 2008), in which listeners identified emotional contagion (i.e., an automatic form of empathy; Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993) and visual imagery as among the most important mechanisms by which music induced emotions in their everyday life. Following this study, a theoretical framework known as BRECVEM (i.e., an acronym for seven mechanisms by which music may induce emotions) was developed (Juslin, Liljestrom, Vastfjall, & Lundquist, 2010), which further emphasized the role of emotional contagion and visual imagery in emotional reactivity to music.Recent laboratory research supports the involvement of empathy and visual imagery in emotional reactivity to music. Several studies reported significant associations between listeners' trait empathy and their capacity to understand the expressive intentions of music performers (Wollner, 2012), as well as to develop emotions such as sadness or tenderness in response to music (Garrido & Schubert, 2011; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011a). The causal involvement of empathy in the generation of emotions to music was supported in an experiment in which the manipulation of empathy resulted in emotional reactivity changes to sad and joyful music, at the subjective and physiological levels (Miu & Baltes, 2012). There is indirect support for the link between visual imagery and music-induced emotions, given that empathy was assessed in several studies (Garrido & Schubert, 2011; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011a, 2012) using multidimensional measures that included imagination and fantasy subscales. Also, an experimental study using the Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music (Bonny, 1995) showed that encouraging participants to experience visual images during music listening improved mood and decreased basal cortisol (McKinney, Antoni, Kumar, Tims, & McCabe, 1997).Mood and Emotional Responses to MusicThe potential influence of listeners' background mood (i.e., a diffuse and relatively long affective state, often without apparent cause) has also been suggested in process theories of emotional responses to music (Scherer & Coutinho, 2013; Scherer & Zentner, 2001). …