Abstract
Some people experience pleasant emotion when listening to sad music. Therefore, they can enjoy listening to it. In the current study, we aimed to investigate such apparently paradoxical emotional mechanisms and focused on the influence of individuals’ trait empathy, which has been reported to associate with emotional responses to sad music and a preference for it. Eighty-four elementary school children (42 males and 42 females, mean age 11.9 years) listened to two kinds of sad music and rated their emotional state and liking toward them. In addition, trait empathy was assessed using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index scale, which comprises four sub-components: Empathic Concern, Personal Distress, Perspective Taking, and Fantasy (FS). We conducted a path analysis and tested our proposed model that hypothesized that trait empathy and its sub-components would affect the preference for sad music directly or indirectly, mediated by the emotional response to the sad music. Our findings indicated that FS, a sub-component of trait empathy, was directly associated with liking sad music. Additionally, perspective taking ability, another sub-component of trait empathy, was correlated with the emotional response to sad music. Furthermore, the experience of pleasant emotions contributed to liking sad music.
Highlights
Some people like listening to sad music, while others dislike it
The correlation analyses revealed that three sub-components of trait empathy (EC, PT, and FS) were significantly correlated with liking sad music (r = 0.28, p < 0.05 for Empathic Concern (EC); r = 0.35, p < 0.01 for PT; and r = 0.27, p < 0.05 for FS)
Relationships between the Sub-components of Trait Empathy and Liking Sad Music Previous studies have suggested that trait empathy was associated with liking sad music
Summary
Given that sadness is an unpleasant emotion (Russell, 1980), it seems paradoxical that some people want to listen to sad music in the first place. This mystery has been an important issue in esthetics since ancient times (Aristotle, 1986), and it continues to attract attention (Kivy, 1989; Robinson, 1994; Davies, 1997; Levinson, 1997). We have been trying to clarify this paradoxical phenomenon with an empirical approach, through a set of experiments (Kawakami et al, 2013a,b) In these studies, we differentiated emotion into perceived and felt aspects, which enabled us to explain the paradox noted above. Based on Gabrielsson’s (2002) notion of a negative relationship, it is possible to explain the paradox of why people listen to music that evokes sadness in listeners
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