How Music Affects Your Emotions

Education & Career Trends: May 6, 2023
Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS

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• Excerpts are taken from an article published on psychologytoday.com.

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People express different emotions when they listen to music, for example by smiling, laughing, or crying. Listening to music is quite common in our daily lives, and the way music makes listeners feel is a key factor in determining their enjoyment of the music.

Music is capable of rousing both emotions and physiological responses. Music even works more rapidly and intensely upon the mind than any art, because it requires so little conscious reflection.

Here are six principles that may explain listeners’ emotional reactions to music:

1. Positive feelings

• Music mostly makes us feel good.
• Positive feelings tend to broaden our mindset in ways that are beneficial to health and creative thinking. This explains the potential mental health benefits of music.

2. The startle effect

• Our brainstem reflexes are hardwired for quick and automatic responses to sudden, loud, noise, or dissonant music.
• And those responses are associated with surprise, laughter, and even fear.
• For example, you may become startled and surprised by the loud noise during a live concert or a movie. And the sound makes you jump and you will easily remember the startle responses.

3. Being in sync

• Our internal rhythms, such as our heart rate, speed up or slow down to become one with the music.
• We float and move with the music.
• For instance, dancing is moving overtly or covertly in coordination with the music.
• Being in sync with music is a source of pleasure.
• This may explain our strong pleasurable urge to move our body in synchrony with the beat.
• The concept is also used to increase excitement and tension in viewers through the music in movies.

4. Emotional contagion

• We tend to “catch” the emotions of others when perceiving their emotional expressions.
• And this process assists us in understanding the feelings of others.
• The most obvious way in which musical events can produce contagion effects is through the non-verbal expressions (face, body) shown by performers.
• This suggests that a musician cannot move others unless he or she too is moved.
• A possible explanation of emotional contagion is so-called mirror neurons.
• Mirror neurons connect us to each other through a brain mechanism designed to facilitate imitation and mimicry.

5. Emotional events

• Our responses to music are conditioned by the context we inhabit.
• Conditioning is a powerful source of emotion in music.
• A great deal of our musical preferences reflects our individual learning history.
• When a memory is evoked, so are our associated emotions with the memory.
• Many listeners use music to remind themselves of valued past events.

6. Musical surprise

• The brain is essentially a prediction machine that is continuously trying to predict incoming information based on past experiences.
• The discrepancy between the predictions made by the brain and the actual sensory input is a source of surprise.
• Surprise requires an unexpected outcome.
• This framework is key to our emotional response to music. Listeners experience strong emotions when something really unexpected happens.
• For example, a listener may expect a dissonant chord to resolve into a consonant one. But, this may be delayed by a creative composer to enhance emotional excitement.

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Have you checked out yesterday’s blog yet?

7 Ways To Get Your Thoughts Back On Track

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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)

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