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How Does Music Affect Our Emotions? A Cross-Cultural Study

Emotions from Music

Most people know the power of music and the emotions music can invoke. Listen to a happy song with an upbeat tone and you may find yourself tapping your feet. Listen to a sad song and it may bring tears to your eyes.

In fact, research has shown that music can activate our autonomic nervous system and even cause shivers down the spine.

A fascinating new study also suggests that music’s power to unify emotions and movements may have played a role in human evolution, fostering social bonds and community.

Music and Emotion Research

The recent music and emotion research study out of Turku PET Center in Finland reveals that music’s emotional impact transcends cultures, evoking similar bodily sensations around the world.

Researchers found that happy music energizes arms and legs, while sad tunes resonate in the chest.

Credit: Lauri Nummenmaa, University of Turku

The results of the study entitled “Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures” were on 25 January 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This cross-cultural study had a total of 1,500 participants who completed an online survey.

Western and Asian participants rated the emotions and bodily sensations evoked by Western and Asian songs.

The emotions and bodily sensations evoked by music were similar across Western and Asian listeners. The bodily sensations were also linked with the music-induced emotions.

“Certain acoustic features of music were associated with similar emotions in both Western and Asian listeners. Music with a clear beat was found happy and danceable while dissonance in music was associated with aggressiveness. Since these sensations are similar across different cultures, music-induced emotions are likely independent of culture and learning and based on inherited biological mechanisms,” says Professor Lauri Nummenmaa.

Similar to universal facial expressions of emotion, this recent musical study suggests that music’s influence on the body is universal across cultures. It also suggests people moving to music in all cultures and synchronized postures, movements and vocalizations is a universal sign for affiliation.

The researchers suggest that music may have emerged during the evolution of human species to promote social interaction and sense of community by synchronizing the bodies and emotions of the listeners.

Universal Emotions in Music

The idea that music produces universal emotional responses has been studied before.

Research led by Eline Adrianne Smit and colleagues from the MARCS Institute for Brain suggests certain elements of music are hard-wired into the human central nervous system.

Smit and colleagues asked musicians and non-musicians in Sydney, Australia as well as different communities from Papua New Guinea with varying degrees of exposure to Western music, to associate major and minor melodies with either happiness or sadness.

The researchers found that the degree of familiarity with Western music corresponded with the association between major melodies with happiness, and minor melodies with sadness.

 

 

This study suggests that familiarity through cultural exposure plays and important factor when associating major and minor melodies with happiness and sadness respectively.

Interestingly, major chords tend to appear more frequently than minor chords in popular music and research shows that humans are likely to attribute positive emotions to things that we are familiar with.

The post How Does Music Affect Our Emotions? A Cross-Cultural Study first appeared on Humintell.

Can Getting Angry Help You Achieve Your Goals?

When we think about potentially destructive emotions, we often think about anger. And for good reason; anger is probably the most common emotion that leads to feelings of regret later.

Dr. Matsumoto doesn’t believe anger is inherently a “bad” emotion. Getting angry can result in some good in our lives and in society. Anger, and all other basic emotions, exist for a reason.

In fact, according to new research by Heather Lench et al, anger can be a powerful motivator for people to achieve challenging goals in their lives.

Their study entitled Anger Has Benefits for Attaining Goals was recently published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Anger Study Methodology

Lench and her team of researchers conducted a series of 6 different experiments involving more than 1,000 participants and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 respondents.

In each experiment, researchers elicited either an emotional response (such as anger, amusement, desire or sadness) or a neutral emotional state, and then presented participants with a challenging goal.

Participants were then asked to perform various tasks such as solves a series of word puzzles or attain high scores on a skiing video game.

Anger Study Results

Across all the experiments, anger improved people’s ability to reach their goals compared with a neutral condition in a variety of challenging situations.

Here is a summary of the 6 study results taken from the article’s abstract:

  1. Anger resulted in more difficult puzzles solved correctly.
  2. Anger increased cheating rates and numbers of unearned prizes.
  3. With a goal to do well in a video game, Anger increased scores on a game with challenges to be avoided, but not other scores.
  4. In two studies, examining the consequences of anger in response to the challenging task that was the focus of that anger, anger decreased reaction time with goals to win trials.
  5. Anger also predicted making the effort to vote in two contentious elections.
  6. With a goal to protect financial resources, anger increased action taken to prevent loss compared to a physiological arousal condition.

Anger Implications

The functionalist theory of emotion, which has been studied for decades, suggests that all emotions, good or bad, are reactions to events within a person’s environment and serve the purpose of alerting that person to important situations that require actions.

Each emotion may call for a different response. For example, sadness may indicate that a person needs to seek help or emotional support, while anger may suggest they need to take action to overcome an obstacle.

“People often believe that a state of happiness is ideal, and the majority of people consider the pursuit of happiness a major life goal,” said lead author Heather Lench, Ph.D., a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University.

“The view that positive emotion is ideal for mental health and well-being has been prominent in lay and psychological accounts of emotion, but previous research suggests that a mix of emotions, including negative emotions like anger, result in the best outcomes.”

“These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort toward attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success,” said Lench.

Appraisal Theories of Emotion

Indeed, most emotion scientists (including Humintell Director Dr. Matsumoto) believe that emotions are triggered by how we evaluate events.

These events include not only what happens around us, but also thoughts and feelings in our heads, because those thoughts and feelings can themselves trigger emotions.

This evaluation process is known as appraisal, and over the decades there have been tons of research that have led to many different appraisal theories of emotion.

Although there are differences among them, these theories generally state that there are different emotions are triggered (or elicited) by different ways we appraise or evaluate events, and that different emotions are triggered by different appraisals.

We’ve written about this extensively in a past blog entitled “What Triggers Emotions in Humans?”

The results of this study make perfect sense as the universal, psychological theme that triggers anger all around the world is goal obstruction.

That is, anger is the emotion that is triggered when our goals are blocked or obstructed.

When our goals are blocked, anger helps prepare our bodies to fight in order to removal those obstacles. This may perhaps explain why participants performed better on certain tasks when this emotion was elicited.

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The post Can Getting Angry Help You Achieve Your Goals? first appeared on Humintell.

Childhood Maltreatment, Depression, and Emotion Recognition

Could there be a link between childhood maltreatment, depression, and emotion recognition?

Researchers Kristine Kahr Nilsson, et al investigated this question by comparing the emotion decoding abilities of major depressive disorder (MDD) patients with and without a history of childhood maltreatment.

The results of their study suggests that individuals who have experienced childhood maltreatment and suffer from depression tend to have greater difficulty understanding and decoding emotions in others’ faces.

Their findings appeared in their paper entitled “Valence in the eyes: An emotion decoding profile of adults with major depressive disorder and a history of childhood maltreatment” which was published in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy.

What is Major Depressive Disorder?

Also known as Clinical Depression, Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a common mental health condition that affects millions of people worldwide. In fact, over 8% of adults living in the United States have experienced at least one major depressive episode.

MDD is typically characterized by persistent sadness, low energy, and difficulty finding joy in daily life. It can affect how you feel and your ability to function on a day-to-day basis.

While substantial progress has been made in recent years to understand depression, it’s a complex condition with different variations. Researchers have been exploring various factors that may contribute to depression and its severity, and one area of interest is childhood experiences.

What is Childhood Maltreatment?

Childhood maltreatment encompasses various forms of abuse and neglect that some individuals endure during their early years. These experiences can have lasting effects on mental health and well-being.

Child maltreatment is a global problem with serious life-long consequences. International studies reveal that nearly 3 in 4 children aged 2-4 years regularly suffer physical punishment and/or psychological violence at the hands of parents.

Previous studies such at this meta analysis have also suggested a link between childhood maltreatment and a higher risk of developing depression later in life.

However, not all individuals with depression have experienced childhood maltreatment, and researchers want to understand why some individuals with depression may have more severe symptoms and difficulties in their daily lives.

Study Methodology

For their study, the Danish researchers recruited 342 participants who had been formally diagnosed with MDD by medical professionals and were receiving antidepressant medication.

The participants were asked about their experiences of childhood maltreatment using a questionnaire called the Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire (ACE-Q). This questionnaire included questions about different types of maltreatment, such as emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, as well as emotional and physical neglect during their first 18 years of life.

Reading Emotions

To assess their emotion decoding abilities, the participants completed a test known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET).

This test has been widely used to measure theory of mind—the ability to recognize and understand another person’s mental state—or social intelligence by looking at the subtle expressions in people’s eyes. It contains various sub-tests that require participants to determine the emotional state expressed by photos of faces.

The Findings

The study’s findings revealed that individuals with MDD who had a history of childhood maltreatment exhibited poorer emotion decoding abilities compared to those with MDD but no such history.

This suggests that early life experiences, such as childhood maltreatment, can influence an individual’s ability to understand and interpret emotions in others, particularly in the context of facial expressions.

Interestingly, the difficulties in emotion decoding were most pronounced when it came to positive and negative emotions, while no significant differences were observed for neutral emotions.

This suggests that individuals who have experienced childhood maltreatment may struggle more when trying to understand the emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear in others.

Important Implications for Clinical Practice

It’s crucial for healthcare professionals to recognize that individuals with MDD and a history of childhood maltreatment may face additional challenges in their treatment journey.

Understanding their difficulties in emotion decoding can guide tailored interventions to improve their social interactions and overall well-being.

Study Limitations

While this study provides valuable insights, it’s essential to acknowledge its limitations.

One limitation is that childhood maltreatment was measured retrospectively through self-report, which may be subject to memory biases.

Future research can delve deeper into the developmental and neurological processes underlying emotion decoding difficulties in individuals with MDD who have a history of childhood maltreatment. Understanding these mechanisms can help refine treatment strategies and provide better support for this subgroup of individuals.

“It remains to be examined whether the identified emotion decoding problems in MDD patients with childhood maltreatment exacerbate their depressive symptoms,” Nilsson said. “This would be a relevant subject for investigation in a longitudinal study that follows these patients over time.”

Face-to-Face Interaction in Preventing Depression

Previous research suggests that there are unsurpassed mental health benefits of regular face-to-face social interactions, particularly among older adults.

Study participants who regularly met in person with family and friends were less likely to report symptoms of depression, compared with participants who emailed or spoke on the phone. The gains people derived from face-to-face socializing endured even years later.

The findings were published online today in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The post Childhood Maltreatment, Depression, and Emotion Recognition first appeared on Humintell.