Developing individual in society Lecture 18: 26/04/2021 Music Psychology II Lecturer: Annemieke van Den Tol - Music has been observed to cause physiological responses in humans. - It can affect how we are feeling, or even reduce heart rate, blood pressure, and how quickly we breathe. - Sedative music: Slow, soft, with legato passages. - Stimulative music: Fast, staccato passages. - This can be useful in various settings, such as hospitals, when attempting to reduce anxiety in patients. Sedative music activates the parasympathetic nervous system, whereas stimulative music stimulates the sympathetic nervous system. However, personal preferences also play a role. Self-selected music has been found more relaxing and even reduce pain, and live music increases responsiveness. Sedative decreases, stimulative increases: - Heart rate and blood pressure. - Breathing rate. - Muscular tension. As well as this, a galvanic skin responses ttsweating) has been found during an emotional reaction to music. Temperature has also been found to fluctuate, but there is little consistency in results. - When asked to indicate the emotions portrayed by music, various studies have found people are able to accurately tell which emotions are expressed and portrayed by music. - Tempo, mode, sequence of tone use, instrument choice, dynamics and volume. The expressions of happiness and sadness are more accurately attributed to music than other emotions. - Sadness: Slow pace, low sound level, acoustic instruments and minor chords. - Happiness: Fast tempo, high sound level, electrical instruments, generated sounds and major chords. Lyrics can influence perception of music.
Why does music induce the emotions it portrays? - Emotional contagion, listener perceives the emotional expression of the music and then mimics this expression internally. By means of either peripheral feedback from muscles or a direct activation of the emotional representations in the brain. - Brain stem reflexes, these refer to when the fundamental acoustical characteristics of the music are taken by the brain stem to signal a potentially important and urgent event. - Episodic memory, music evokes a memory of a particular event in the listener's and therefore results in emotion. - Evaluative conditioning, music has been paired repeatedly with other positive or negative stimuli. - Musical expectancy, a specific feature of the music violates, delays or confirms the expectations of the listener, and results in experiencing emotions. - Visual imagery, when a listener experiences emotions because he or she conjures up visual images while listening to music. Emotions experiences are the result of a close interaction between the music and the images. Rhythmic Entrainment Music evokes an emotion because a powerful rhythm has an effect on the persons physiology, such as on their heartbeat. A Aesthetic judgement (Juslin, 2013) Music can be beautiful (or not) and therefor evoke emotions such as 'awe' . Cognitive appraisal Listening to the music somehow fulfilled a goal and therefore induced an emotion. Regulation implies the modulation of thoughts, affect, behaviour or attention via the use of strategies. Therefore, mood regulation refers to the set of processes by which mood states are