Sad music induces pleasant emotion
In general, sad music is thought to cause us to experience sadness, which is considered an unpleasant emotion. As a result, the question arises as to why we listen to sad music if it evokes sadness. One possible answer to this question is that we may actually feel positive emotions when we listen to...
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2013
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| Online Access: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3682130/ |
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pubmed-36821302013-06-19 Sad music induces pleasant emotion Kawakami, Ai Furukawa, Kiyoshi Katahira, Kentaro Okanoya, Kazuo Psychology In general, sad music is thought to cause us to experience sadness, which is considered an unpleasant emotion. As a result, the question arises as to why we listen to sad music if it evokes sadness. One possible answer to this question is that we may actually feel positive emotions when we listen to sad music. This suggestion may appear to be counterintuitive; however, in this study, by dividing musical emotion into perceived emotion and felt emotion, we investigated this potential emotional response to music. We hypothesized that felt and perceived emotion may not actually coincide in this respect: sad music would be perceived as sad, but the experience of listening to sad music would evoke positive emotions. A total of 44 participants listened to musical excerpts and provided data on perceived and felt emotions by rating 62 descriptive words or phrases related to emotions on a scale that ranged from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very much). The results revealed that the sad music was perceived to be more tragic, whereas the actual experiences of the participants listening to the sad music induced them to feel more romantic, more blithe, and less tragic emotions than they actually perceived with respect to the same music. Thus, the participants experienced ambivalent emotions when they listened to the sad music. After considering the possible reasons that listeners were induced to experience emotional ambivalence by the sad music, we concluded that the formulation of a new model would be essential for examining the emotions induced by music and that this new model must entertain the possibility that what we experience when listening to music is vicarious emotion. Frontiers Media S.A. 2013-06-13 /pmc/articles/PMC3682130/ /pubmed/23785342 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00311 Text en Copyright © 2013 Kawakami, Furukawa, Katahira and Okanoya. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc. |
| repository_type |
Open Access Journal |
| institution_category |
Foreign Institution |
| institution |
US National Center for Biotechnology Information |
| building |
NCBI PubMed |
| collection |
Online Access |
| language |
English |
| format |
Online |
| author |
Kawakami, Ai Furukawa, Kiyoshi Katahira, Kentaro Okanoya, Kazuo |
| spellingShingle |
Kawakami, Ai Furukawa, Kiyoshi Katahira, Kentaro Okanoya, Kazuo Sad music induces pleasant emotion |
| author_facet |
Kawakami, Ai Furukawa, Kiyoshi Katahira, Kentaro Okanoya, Kazuo |
| author_sort |
Kawakami, Ai |
| title |
Sad music induces pleasant emotion |
| title_short |
Sad music induces pleasant emotion |
| title_full |
Sad music induces pleasant emotion |
| title_fullStr |
Sad music induces pleasant emotion |
| title_full_unstemmed |
Sad music induces pleasant emotion |
| title_sort |
sad music induces pleasant emotion |
| description |
In general, sad music is thought to cause us to experience sadness, which is considered an unpleasant emotion. As a result, the question arises as to why we listen to sad music if it evokes sadness. One possible answer to this question is that we may actually feel positive emotions when we listen to sad music. This suggestion may appear to be counterintuitive; however, in this study, by dividing musical emotion into perceived emotion and felt emotion, we investigated this potential emotional response to music. We hypothesized that felt and perceived emotion may not actually coincide in this respect: sad music would be perceived as sad, but the experience of listening to sad music would evoke positive emotions. A total of 44 participants listened to musical excerpts and provided data on perceived and felt emotions by rating 62 descriptive words or phrases related to emotions on a scale that ranged from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very much). The results revealed that the sad music was perceived to be more tragic, whereas the actual experiences of the participants listening to the sad music induced them to feel more romantic, more blithe, and less tragic emotions than they actually perceived with respect to the same music. Thus, the participants experienced ambivalent emotions when they listened to the sad music. After considering the possible reasons that listeners were induced to experience emotional ambivalence by the sad music, we concluded that the formulation of a new model would be essential for examining the emotions induced by music and that this new model must entertain the possibility that what we experience when listening to music is vicarious emotion. |
| publisher |
Frontiers Media S.A. |
| publishDate |
2013 |
| url |
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3682130/ |
| _version_ |
1611986443411914752 |