Travelers Business - Music Evokes Emotion and Influences How We Perceive the World

. . Music brings up fundamental questions such as. Music even calls into question the long-standing notion that there is one objective reality which can be accurately perceived. Every 'normal' human being responds to music's mysterious ability to tap into the boundless ocean that is human emotion. Inaugurations and more, birthdays, funerals, music is present at every important social gathering - weddings. Music has an undeniable power to evoke emotion.

Why does music evoke emotion?

How does music affect emotion?

Food and meaningful work, is music a basic human need like shelter?

Answers to these questions would help to clarify the unique role of music in our lives. Such questions cut to the very core of human nature.

Music Impacts Our Emotions

The mood of a piece of music tends to induce similar emotions in the listener, as you may have guessed. Sad) music, . It was exactly the opposite for negative (i.e. Music that was rated positively increased participants' positive moods, not surprisingly. Yet the videos did not, the study found that songs had a major impact on the emotional state of the listener. Experts rated a number of songs and videos as either positive or negative. And the Wessman-Ricks Elation and Depression Scale (1), the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List, schefft and Radenhausen determined the effects of music versus videos on several assessments of mood - the Optimism/Pessimism Questionnaire, dember, lewis, for example. It has been shown in research that different types of music evoke different emotional reactions (in most people).

This is not surprising, in and of itself. It was found that participants attended to and recalled words that matched the mood of the music. And Ferraro (2) backed up these findings and found that certain music narrowed participants' attention, seibert, chastain.

Music Influences How We See Inanimate Objects

Respectively; the same findings were reported when positive paintings were paired with happy or sad music, yet those same paintings were perceived as positive when paired with happy music. Paintings rated as sad by experts were perceived as sad by participants when paired with sad music, in other words. But not vice versa, participants categorized the paintings by the type of music to which the listened. Participants rated the emotions evoked by the paintings as well as the songs. Each piece of music was either depressing or positive in the emotion it evoked per the experts. Paintings were paired together with music, in the study. The music influenced participant emotion and emotion influenced perception. More surprising are the results reported by Stratton and Zalanowski (3) where the mood of the music influenced how participants perceived paintings.

And mind), taste, touch, smell, . Emotions most likely influence every one of our senses (i.e. But our eyes as well, the emotions invoked by music influence not only our ears. The way in which we perceive a seemingly static object is not as clear-cut as first thought, amazingly.

Music Affects How We Perceive Others

Music seems to prime our minds to perceive people in a similar emotional light. They do. Do they also influence how we view other people, if emotions and music can influence our senses and how we perceive objects around us?

Music has a significant effect on how we perceive the world. They believe a neutral face is more or less happy, elevating music, upbeat, when participants listen to faster tempo, on the other hand. Melancholy song can influence participants to believe that a person looks sad even when they are expressing no emotion at all, a slow tempo, for instance. Yet listening to music can lead one to believe that an individual's face looks more happy or sad than it really is. Studies have demonstrated that normal people are quite good at correctly identifying the emotion on a person's face (without music). Bloem and Groothuis looked at the extent to which music influences how participants read the facial expression of emotions of others (4), bouhuys, in a fascinating study.

It seems clear that music does alter how we perceive the world around us, mood and behaviors, although it is not clear why music has such an influence on our emotions.

It brings into question the notion that there is one objective reality that can ultimately be accurately perceived. And how we interact with others, what we perceive, temporary emotions caused by music change what we pay attention to.

My entire list of over 600 positive songs may be found at http://www.guidetoself.com/publications.htm happy playlist, upbeat, if you are looking for suggestions of songs to create your own uplifting,

Thanks for your help! Or email suggestions to Info AT GuideToSelf.com. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the Comments box below.

Have a fantastic day!

Inc, positive Psychologist
Guide To Self. Ph.D, john Schinnerer.

References

29-41, 14, . Social, . Person, . Learn, . : Devel. Psychol. Curr. (1995) Can experimentally induced mood affect optimism and pessimism scores? A. R, and Radenhausen. K. B, scheff, . N. W, dember, . L.M, (1) Lewis.

137-157, 122, . General Psychol. J. And neutral words, negative, (1995) Mood and lexical access of positive. R. F, and Ferraro, . P.S, seibert, . G, (2) Chastain.

30-41, 26, . Music Ther. J. (1989) The effects of music and paintings on mood. A.H, and Zalanowski. V.N, (3) Stratton.

33:4 215-26 J Affect Disord. (1995) Induction of depressed and elated mood by music influences the perception of facial emotional expressions in healthy subjects. Groothuis T.G, . Bloem G.M, . (4) Bouhuys A.L.