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The influence of emotion, locus of emotion and familiarity upon preference in music

University of New South Wales, Australia, E.Schubert{at}unsw.edu.au

This study reports an empirical investigation of the influence of felt (internal locus — IL) emotion versus expressed (external locus — EL) emotion upon preference in music. Sixty-fve participants rated IL and EL of emotions for fve pieces of romantic western art music. For each locus task `emotional strength', `valence', `arousal' and `dominance' were rated and converted into magnitude scores. Ratings of familiarity and preference were also collected. Gap across emotion loci (GAEL) was calculated overall — which combined GAEL scores in polar-coordinate emotion-space, and for each dimension. Familiarity, felt emotional strength and overall GAEL explained 46.9 percent of the variance in preference. Both IL and EL negative valence were correlated with preference suggesting enjoyment of negative emotion in music through dissociation. The study suggests that the way music makes the listener feel is more important in determining enjoyment than noticing the emotion the music is trying to convey. Also, matching of IL and EL emotions (i.e. minimizing GAEL) is more preferred than when IL emotions are lower in magnitude than EL. Hence two principles of enjoyment are identifed in this study: (1) dissociation and (2) GAEL.

Key Words: familiarity • felt emotion • music • preference

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