Can sad music really make you sad? Indirect measures of affective states induced by music and autobiographical memories.

By Jonna Vuoskoski, Tuomas Eerola. 2012

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The present study addressed music’s disputed ability to induce genuine sadness in listeners by investigating whether listening to sad music can induce sadness-related effects on memory and judgment. Related aims were to explore how the different mechanisms of music-induced emotions are involved in sadness induced by familiar, self-selected music and unfamiliar, experimenter-selected music, and whether the susceptibility to music-induced sadness is associated with trait empathy. One hundred twenty participants were randomly assigned into four conditions with different tasks: listening to unfamiliar sad or neutral music, or to self-selected sad music, or recalling a sad autobiographical event and writing about it. The induced affective states were measured indirectly using a word recall task and a judgment task where participants rated the emotions expressed by pictures depicting facial expressions. The results indicate that listening to sad music can indeed induce changes in emotion-related memory and judgment. However, this effect depends, to some extent, on the music’s relevance to the listener, as well as on the personality attributes of the listener. Trait empathy contributed to the susceptibility to sadness induced by unfamiliar music, while autobiographical memories contributed to sadness induced by self-selected music.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Music, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e39a7e46a07363de29ea1b78454c7d21aeee886

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Citations in the corpus

From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: towards a unified theory of musical emotions. (2013, background): “…‘pleasurable sadness’, there is now evidence that music with a sad expression can arouse genuine sadness in listeners (Juslin et al., in press; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2012), and that some sadness-arousing music may be experienced as pleasurable nevertheless (Huron, 2011; Vuoskoski et al.,…”
Extramusical information contributes to emotions induced by music (2015, methodology): “…investigating trait empathy in the context of the present experiment was that previous studies have associated empathy with susceptibility to music-induced sadness (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2012) and with preference for sad music (Garrido & Schubert, 2011; Vuoskoski, Thompson, McIlwain, & Eerola, 2012).”
Music May Reduce Loneliness and Act as Social Surrogate for a Friend: Evidence from an Experimental Listening Study (2020, background): “Additionally, listeners with a more pronounced empathic disposition appreciate sad musical excerpts more than others with a less empathic nature (Eerola et al., 2016; Garrido & Schubert, 2011a; Vuoskoski, 2012; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2012).”
Adaptive and maladaptive attraction to negative emotions in music (2013, background): “Several studies have found that empathetic responses are involved in a liking for sad music (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2012; Vuoskoski, Thompson, McIIlwain, & Eerola, 2012).”