Sandrine Vieillard

Multidimensional scaling of emotional responses to music: The effect of musical expertise and of the duration of the excerpts

Musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to 27 musical excerpts and to group those that conveyed a similar emotional meaning (Experiment 1). The groupings were transformed into a matrix of emotional dissimilarity that was analysed through multidimensional scaling methods (MDS). A 3-dimensional space was found to provide a good fit of the data, with arousal and emotional valence as the primary dimensions. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed the consistency of this 3-dimensional space using excerpts of only 1 second duration. The overall findings indicate that emotional responses to music are very stable within and between participants, and are weakly influenced by musical expertise and excerpt duration. These findings are discussed in light of a cognitive account of musical emotion.

Happy, sad, scary and peaceful musical excerpts for research on emotions

Three experiments were conducted in order to validate 56 musical excerpts that conveyed four intended emotions (happiness, sadness, threat and peacefulness). In Experiment 1, the musical clips were rated in terms of how clearly the intended emotion was portrayed, and for valence and arousal. In Experiment 2, a gating paradigm was used to evaluate the course for emotion recognition. In Experiment 3, a dissimilarity judgement task and multidimensional scaling analysis were used to probe emotional content with no emotional labels. The results showed that emotions are easily recognised and discriminated on the basis of valence and arousal and with relative immediacy. Happy and sad excerpts were identified after the presentation of fewer than three musical events. With no labelling, emotion discrimination remained highly accurate and could be mapped on energetic and tense dimensions. The present study provides suitable musical material for research on emotions.Keywords.

Liking for happy- and sad-sounding music: Effects of exposure

We examined liking for happy- and sad-sounding music as a function of exposure, which varied both in quantity (number of exposures) and in quality (focused or incidental listening). Liking ratings were higher for happy than for sad music after focused listening, but similar after incidental listening. In the incidental condition, liking ratings increased linearly as a function of exposure. In the focused condition, liking ratings were an inverted U-shaped function of exposure, with initial increases in liking (after 2 exposures) followed by decreases (after 8 or 32 exposures). The results documented that: (1) sad music is liked as much as happy music in some instances; (2) frequency of exposure causes both familiarity (positive) and over-familiarity (negative) effects; and (3) effects of exposure on liking differ for focused and incidental listening.

Expressiveness in musical emotions

This study was designed to investigate how emotion category, characterized by distinct musical structures (happiness, sadness, threat) and expressiveness (mechanical, expressive) may influence overt and covert behavioral judgments and physiological responses in musically trained and untrained listeners. Mechanical and expressive versions of happy, sad and scary excerpts were presented while physiological measures were recorded. Participants rated the intensity of the emotion they felt. In addition, they monitored excerpts for the presence of brief breaths. Results showed that the emotion categories were rated higher in the expressive than in the mechanical versions and that this effect was larger in musicians. Moreover, expressive excerpts were found to increase skin conductance level more than the mechanical ones, independently of their arousal value, and to slow down response times in the breath detection task relative to the mechanical versions, suggesting enhanced capture of attention by expressiveness. Altogether, the results support the key role of the performer’s expression in the listener’s emotional response to music.

Age-related differences in affective responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music: a cross-sectional study

There is mounting evidence that aging is associated with the maintenance of positive affect and the decrease of negative affect to ensure emotion regulation goals. Previous empirical studies have primarily focused on a visual or autobiographical form of emotion communication. To date, little investigation has been done on musical emotions. The few studies that have addressed aging and emotions in music were mainly interested in emotion recognition, thus leaving unexplored the question of how aging may influence emotional responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music. In the present study, eighteen older (60–84 years) and eighteen younger (19–24 years) listeners were asked to evaluate the strength of their experienced emotion on happy, peaceful, sad, and scary musical excerpts (Vieillard et al., 2008) while facial muscle activity was recorded. Participants then performed an incidental recognition task followed by a task in which they judged to what extent they experienced happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and fear when listening to music. Compared to younger adults, older adults (a) reported a stronger emotional reactivity for happiness than other emotion categories, (b) showed an increased zygomatic activity for scary stimuli, (c) were more likely to falsely recognize happy music, and (d) showed a decrease in their responsiveness to sad and scary music. These results are in line with previous findings and extend them to emotion experience and memory recognition, corroborating the view of age-related changes in emotional responses to music in a positive direction away from negativity.

Distinct effects of positive and negative music on older adults' auditory target identification performances

Older adults, compared to younger adults, are more likely to attend to pleasant situations and avoid unpleasant ones. Yet, it is unclear whether such a phenomenon may be generalized to musical emotions. In this study, we investigated whether there is an age-related difference in how musical emotions are experienced and how positive and negative music influences attention performances in a target identification task. Thirty-one young and twenty-eight older adults were presented with 40 musical excerpts conveying happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and threat. While listening to music, participants were asked to rate their feelings and monitor each excerpt for the occurrence of an auditory target. Compared to younger adults, older adults reported experiencing weaker emotional activation when listening to threatening music and showed higher level of liking for happy music. Correct reaction times (RTs) for target identification were longer for threatening than for happy music in older adults but not in younger adults. This suggests that older adults benefit from a positive musical context and can regulate emotion elicited by negative music by decreasing attention towards it (and therefore towards the auditory target).

Changes in the Perception and the Psychological Structure of Musical Emotions with Advancing Age

Background/Study Context: To date, little is known about how advancing age may impact perception of emotions in music. This study was designed to test whether there are age-related changes in emotional judgments and psychological structure for musical emotions. Methods: Twenty-five older (64–81 years) and 25 younger (18–30 years) listeners performed emotional judgments and free categorization tasks on happy, peaceful, sad, and threatening musical excerpts. Correlations, analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), and multidimensional scaling analyses were conducted to examine the effect of age on emotional judgments and categorization performances. Results: Compared with younger adults, older adults did not discriminate the arousal difference between peaceful and threatening excerpts and showed higher association between arousal and valence judgments. The multidimensional scaling analysis indicated that the emotional space showed by older listeners did not fit younger listeners’ bidimensional valence-arousal structure. There was also a better categorization for happy excerpts among the older group. Conclusion: Altogether, these data are consistent with the view that advancing age may result in the reduction of emotional complexity and a distortion of the emotional processing in a positive direction.

Expressive suppression and enhancement during music-elicited emotions in younger and older adults

When presented with emotional visual scenes, older adults have been found to be equally capable to regulate emotion expression as younger adults, corroborating the view that emotion regulation skills are maintained or even improved in later adulthood. However, the possibility that gaze direction might help achieve an emotion control goal has not been taken into account, raising the question whether the effortful processing of expressive regulation is really spared from the general age-related decline. Since it does not allow perceptual attention to be redirected away from the emotional source, music provides a useful way to address this question. In the present study, affective, behavioral, and physiological consequences of free expression of emotion, expressive suppression and expressive enhancement were measured in 31 younger and 30 older adults while they listened to positive and negative musical excerpts. The main results indicated that compared to younger adults, older adults reported experiencing less emotional intensity in response to negative music during the free expression of emotion condition. No age difference was found in the ability to amplify or reduce emotional expressions. However, an age-related decline in the ability to reduce the intensity of emotional state and an age-related increase in physiological reactivity were found when participants were instructed to suppress negative expression. Taken together, the current data support previous findings suggesting an age-related change in response to music. They also corroborate the observation that older adults are as efficient as younger adults at controlling behavioral expression. But most importantly, they suggest that when faced with auditory sources of negative emotion, older age does not always confer a better ability to regulate emotions.

Using humour as an extrinsic source of emotion regulation in young and older adults

It has been suggested that intrinsic abilities for regulating emotions remain stable or improve with ageing, but, to date, no studies have examined age-related differences in extrinsic emotion regulation. Since humour has been found to be an effective form of emotion regulation, we used a paradigm similar to that of Strick and colleagues (2009) with two objectives: to compare extrinsic humorous emotion regulation in young and older adults and to test whether the potential beneficial effect of humour on negative emotion is better explained by the cognitive distraction hypothesis or by the positive affect elicitation hypothesis. To this end, neutral, moderately, and strongly negative pictures followed by humorous, simply positive, or weird cartoons, controlled for both their funniness and cognitive demands, were presented to 26 young and 25 older adults with the instruction to report their negative feelings. When induced to feel moderately negative emotions, both young and older adults reported a lower negative feeling after viewing the humorous cartoons than after the other ones. This indicates that the extrinsic humorous emotion regulation skill remains stable with ageing and suggests that the beneficial effect of humour on emotional feeling cannot be seen as a purely cognitive distraction.

Cerebral bases of emotion regulation toward odours: A first approach.

HighlightsRegulation of odour‐induced emotions results in higher activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula.Regulation of odour‐induced emotions results in mild lower activation of the amygdala.Orbitofrontal cortex is less activated during regulation compared to maintain emotions.Regulation of positive odour‐induced emotions results in activation of the supplementary motor area.Regulation of negative odour‐induced emotions results in activation of the posterior cingulate gyrus. ABSTRACT Emotion regulation is defined as an important mechanism for human adaptation. fMRI studies have recently highlighted its neural bases but most research uses visual stimulation to induce emotion, none of them using odorant stimulations. Nevertheless, olfaction is intimately linked to emotional processes, sharing some same neural bases and thus constitutes a valuable emotion‐inducer in experimental conditions. The present study aims to determine the cerebral areas which might be involved in down‐regulation, using pleasant and unpleasant odours as emotion‐inducers. Eighteen subjects were scanned during 2 sequences of 12 stimulations, each with either a pleasant or an unpleasant odour. For one sequence, subjects were instructed to naturally experience their emotion induced by odour inhalation and for the other one, to decrease the intensity of their emotion. Consistent with previous work using emotion‐inducers, emotion regulation resulted in higher activations of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula, but in lower activation of the amygdala. However, some areas (the posterior cerebellum and the orbitofrontal cortex) are less activated during regulation compared to maintain and thus appear to be specific to odorant stimulations. Finally the hedonic valence of the odour determines activations in different brain areas such as the supplementary motor area and the posterior cingulum. Thus, this study suggests abilities to regulate emotion in response to odours, involving brain areas usually described in the literature for other emotional stimuli, but also specific areas depending partly of the hedonic valence of the odour.