HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Cognit.
Sec. Reason and Decision-Making
This article is part of the Research TopicMusic and Pro-socialityView all 9 articles
How Experiencing Eudaimonic Emotions Through Music Shapes Prosocial and Altruistic Behavior: Introducing A Unified Model of Music-Listening-Induced Eudaimonia (UMMIE)
Provisionally accepted
- 1Chapman University School of Communication, Orange, United States
- 2Hebrew Univeristy of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
- 3University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
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This paper introduces the UMMIE (Unified Model of Music-Listening Induced Eudaimonia), which offers an integrated novel theoretical framework to explain how music listening promotes prosocial and altruistic outcomes. Drawing on communication and psychology research, UMMIE maintains that elicitation of eudaimonic emotions can be appraised inwards, towards oneself, and thus contribute to the individual’s personal growth, wellbeing, and development, or outwards, by connecting to something bigger than oneself, to humanity in general, which could possibly then lead to enhanced prosocial and altruistic attitudes and behaviors. The model specifies musical, situational, and individual variables that serve as moderators and increase the likelihood of experiencing inwards or outwards effects of music listening. In this way, the current article organizes and synthesizes existing literature and offers a novel blueprint for future research.
Keywords: Music listening, Prosocial Behavior, Eudaimonic emotions, being moved, transcendence, awe, Power ballad, Altruism
Received: 15 Sep 2025; Accepted: 07 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tukachinsky, Spitz, Rabinowitch and Granot. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Roni Granot, roni.granot@mail.huji.ac.il
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