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165 news posts in Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

05 Jan 2017

Measuring the emotional power of music

In exploring the psychological bases of human musicality, research expands simplistic categories of emotions, producing advanced tools which can sort feelings evoked by music and assess the emotional benefits of musical abilities. Here we interview Professor Marcel Zentner, Professor of Psychology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and Co-Chief specialty editor of section Personality and Social Psychology, in Frontiers in Psychology. His main research interests are in personality development, psychological assessment, emotion and music. By Eva Brown, Frontiers Science Writer We can all relate to music, which individually sparks some form of emotion within us, but what kind of emotion is it? Research shows that music induces numerous types of emotion, more in fact, than the bland categories usually referred to, such as happiness or sadness. “It is obvious that these categories do not capture the richness of feeling in response to music”, says Zentner. “It is no secret that music elicits ‘happiness’ or ‘positive affect’, so the merit lies not in stating the obvious, but in specifying musical happiness in all of its multiple forms.” The psychology of emotion focuses on broad categories, sadness, happiness, anger, fear, surprise, but are these categories too simplistic in analyzing our emotions? “They are useful for […]