Abstract
Group emotional dynamics are a central concern in the study of human interaction and communication. To study group emotions, the social context of a musical event in natural conditions may overcome several limits of laboratory experiments and could provide a suitable framework. This study aimed to evaluate if cultural events such as a conductor competition could welcome scientific research for the study of group emotional sharing. We led an observational study, which suggests that in this particular context, public, musicians and jury would agree to participate and to wear neurophysiological and physiological devices to monitor their emotional state during the competition. Self-administrated scales showed that, in the context of a musical competition, members of the public felt strong musical emotions such as music chills. Our results suggest that such a specific competition design is a suitable experimental model to lead an experiment under ecological conditions to effectively investigate collective emotional synchronization. In the future, with the implementation of an acquisition system recording synchronous neurophysiological data for a large group of participants, we may be able to highlight mechanisms involved in emotional synchronization in a natural musical setting.
Highlights
Most people listen to music for its emotional effect (Nieminen et al, 2012) and research has shown the pleasurable effect of music (Grewe et al, 2007; Salimpoor et al, 2009, 2011)
91% of people interviewed agreed to wear sensors to participate in a future study during the conductor competition
The results of this study show the suitability of using a conductor competition as a testbed to study emotional synchronization within and between groups in a natural setting
Summary
Most people listen to music for its emotional effect (Nieminen et al, 2012) and research has shown the pleasurable effect of music (Grewe et al, 2007; Salimpoor et al, 2009, 2011). Considering research that has investigated the effect of music listening in groups, some points out that context (laboratory or natural conditions) and the social environment (being alone or with other people) could greatly influence the experience of listening to music (Lamont, 2009; Liljeström et al, 2013). The social context, in this laboratory setting experiment, influenced participants’ concentration, altering the emotional arousal (Egermann et al, 2011; Koehler and Broughton, 2017). These studies in laboratory or natural contexts with dyads or groups involved major differences in implementation
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