Abstract
Pupillary responses are a well-known indicator of emotional arousal but have not yet been systematically investigated in response to music. Here, we measured pupillary dilations evoked by short musical excerpts normalized for intensity and selected for their stylistic uniformity. Thirty participants (15 females) provided subjective ratings of music-induced felt arousal, tension, pleasantness, and familiarity for 80 classical music excerpts. The pupillary responses evoked by these excerpts were measured in another thirty participants (15 females). We probed the role of listener-specific characteristics such as mood, stress reactivity, self-reported role of music in life, liking for the selected excerpts, as well as of subjective responses to music, in pupillary responses. Linear mixed model analyses showed that a greater role of music in life was associated with larger dilations, and that larger dilations were also predicted for excerpts rated as more arousing or tense. However, an interaction between arousal and liking for the excerpts suggested that pupillary responses were modulated less strongly by arousal when the excerpts were particularly liked. An analogous interaction was observed between tension and liking. Additionally, males exhibited larger dilations than females. Overall, these findings suggest a complex interplay between bottom-up and top-down influences on pupillary responses to music.
Highlights
Music is a powerful elicitor of emotions (Blood et al, 1999), and there is cumulative empirical evidence that emotions induced by music share many components typical of emotions induced by other types of sensory stimuli (Scherer, 2004; Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008)
Except for a marginal tendency for positive/negative mood scores to be lower for the subjective rating group, F(1,58) = 3.45, p = 0.069, no significant differences were observed between the two groups on the subscales
Tension, and Pleasantness To evaluate whether participants rated the excerpts in a consistent manner, inter-rater reliability was assessed by computing the average measure intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) using the ICC(2,k) form (Shrout and Fleiss, 1979), which corresponds to a two-way random effects model for consistency (McGraw and Wong, 1996)
Summary
Music is a powerful elicitor of emotions (Blood et al, 1999), and there is cumulative empirical evidence that emotions induced by music share many components typical of emotions induced by other types of sensory stimuli (Scherer, 2004; Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008). Musical emotions can be evoked by various mechanisms that vary in their degree of relatedness to acoustical and musical properties (Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008). Emotion-inducing mechanisms such as evaluative conditioning or episodic memory do not depend on the music’s acoustical and musical features but rather on the type of emotions induced by real-life events that were coupled with the experience of music (Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008). Induced emotions are conveyed by two types of cues, comprising basic acoustic cues, such as those related to intensity (Juslin and Laukka, 2003; Ilie and Thompson, 2006), timbre
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