Music induced emotions: Some current issues and crossmodal comparisons

The potential of music to communicate emotions is part of our everyday experience. Music psychologists have distinguished between emotion perception, which refers to the perception of emotions expressed by music without evoking affective responses in the listeners, and emotion induction, which refers to listeners‟ affective response to music. Here, we focus on emotion induction. The first part briefly discusses recent empirical evidence and theoretical reflections on i) the nature of musical emotions, ii) emotion models in relation to music, iii) the influence of factors like familiarity, culture, gender, personality, expertise and contextual features on listeners‟ emotional experience, and iv) the link between emotion and aesthetics. The second part concerns itself with musical emotions and the central nervous system and discusses recent findings of brain areas involved in emotional processing of music, issues related to cerebral asymmetry, and the link between emotion and cognition in these processes. In this context, the question of whether emotions evoked by music are similar or different compared to emotions evoked by other sensory modalities has been of substantial interest to music researchers. Therefore, we extensively address this issue and report on current cross-modal affective priming studies. Automatic affective responses to stimuli are essentially relevant for subsequent cognitive, emotional and behavioural reactions: emotions induced by music crucially influence the (emotional) processing of pictures, facial expressions, films, and words. We propose that cross-modal priming studies provide a promising alternative to conventional approaches in order to better understand the nature of musical emotions.