Abstract
It is now widely accepted that the perception of emotional expression in music can be vastly different from the feelings evoked by it. However, less understood is how the locus of emotion affects the experience of music, that is how the act of perceiving the emotion in music compares with the act of assessing the emotion induced in the listener by the music. In the current study, we compared these two emotion loci based on the psychophysiological response of 40 participants listening to 32 musical excerpts taken from movie soundtracks. Facial electromyography, skin conductance, respiration and heart rate were continuously measured while participants were required to assess either the emotion expressed by, or the emotion they felt in response to the music. Using linear mixed effects models, we found a higher mean response in psychophysiological measures for the “perceived” than the “felt” task. This result suggested that the focus on one’s self distracts from the music, leading to weaker bodily reactions during the “felt” task. In contrast, paying attention to the expression of the music and consequently to changes in timbre, loudness and harmonic progression enhances bodily reactions. This study has methodological implications for emotion induction research using psychophysiology and the conceptualization of emotion loci. Firstly, different tasks can elicit different psychophysiological responses to the same stimulus and secondly, both tasks elicit bodily responses to music. The latter finding questions the possibility of a listener taking on a purely cognitive mode when evaluating emotion expression.
Highlights
The assumption that the emotion a musical piece expresses is the same as the emotion felt in response to listening to it was long the cornerstone of Western music pedagogy and music-aesthetic discourse (Plato: Republic, Laws; Aristotle: Politics; see [1])
The current study aimed to investigate potential differences in psychophysiological measures during music listening between two emotion loci: an external and an internal locus, or, in other words, the perceived emotion and the felt emotion
The current study investigated differences between the external and internal emotion locus in music with regard to psychophysiological measures that index subjective experiences
Summary
The assumption that the emotion a musical piece expresses is the same as the emotion felt in response to listening to it was long the cornerstone of Western music pedagogy and music-aesthetic discourse (Plato: Republic, Laws; Aristotle: Politics; see [1]). A possible dissociation of the two phenomena has long been theoretically discussed [2,3,4] and more recently has begun to be empirically examined In his seminal work, Gabrielsson [5] developed a model of this relationship drawing the distinction between perceived and felt emotions in music. Gabrielsson [5] developed a model of this relationship drawing the distinction between perceived and felt emotions in music The former is the expression ascribed to a piece of music while the latter is the feeling that it sparks in the listener ( known as “external locus” and “internal locus”, respectively, [6]). The current study aims to identify underlying mechanisms of both loci using continuously measured
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