Why is sad music pleasurable? A possible role for prolactin

By David Huron. 2011

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Music, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a87e49ef6534a7e55386bb8f80dd3c094a0ae217

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Swathi Swaminathan
2. E. G. Schellenberg
3. A. V. D. van den Tol
4. J. Edwards
5. Emery Schubert
6. Sandra Garrido
7. Tuomas Eerola
8. Maya Tamir

In Music

1. E. G. Schellenberg
2. A. V. D. van den Tol
3. J. Edwards
4. Swathi Swaminathan
5. Sandra Garrido
6. Emery Schubert
7. Maya Tamir
8. Patrik Juslin

In Social Psychology

1. Swathi Swaminathan
2. A. V. D. van den Tol
3. J. Edwards
4. E. G. Schellenberg
5. Sandra Garrido
6. Emery Schubert
7. Maya Tamir
8. Patrik Juslin

Citations in the corpus

• Listening to sad music in adverse situations: How music selection strategies relate to self-regulatory goals, listening effects, and mood enhancement (2015, background): “Many different psychological processes have been suggested to play a role in positive affective experiences that can be experienced as a result of listening to sad music (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Huron, 2011; Kallinen & Ravaja, 2006; Matsumoto, 2002; Saarikallio, 2008; Vuoskoski, Thompson, McIIlwain, ”
• From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: towards a unified theory of musical emotions. (2013, background): “A different account, offered by Huron (2011), is that the aroused sadness will trigger adaptive physiological responses (e.g., the release of prolactin) that will counter-act the painful nature of the sad emotion.”
• Music as an emotion regulation strategy: An examination of genres of music and their roles in emotion regulation (2019, background): “Other research suggests that individuals may experience sad music with more pleasure when prolactin levels are high than when they are low (Huron, 2011).”
• Current Emotion Research in Music Psychology (2015, background): “Huron (2011) argues that sad sounding music induces genuine sadness accompanied by elevated levels of prolactin, a hormone that is associated with comfort and consolation, and released during episodes of sadness.”
• Why Do People Regulate Their Emotions? A Taxonomy of Motives in Emotion Regulation (2016, result): “Similar arguments have been made with respect to reactions to sad music (e.g., Huron, 2011; Schubert, 1996) or films (e.g., de Wied, Zillman, & Ordman, 1994).”
• Adaptive and maladaptive attraction to negative emotions in music (2013, background): “One item was especially designed to investigate the possible involvement of grief to the use of sad music (Huron, 2011).”