In a YouTube video (link is external)
that went viral last year, a toddler attending his sister’s piano
recital is moved to tears when he hears Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”
Among the thousands of comments people have posted about the video, many
are from musicians who marvel at the young boy’s sensitivity to music
and speculate on his prospects for a musical career
(many have even gone so far as to offer to buy him an instrument).
Whatever the boy’s poignant reaction to Beethoven’s famously haunting
melody may or may not indicate about his musical abilities, a recent study (link is external) in Finland suggests that it might reveal a great deal about his personality.
Researchers at the University Jyväskylä investigated the types of
emotions induced in people by listening to unfamiliar sad instrumental
music, and sought to determine whether these responses were consistently
associated with individual personality variables. One hundred and two
participants listened to a piece of instrumental music which had been
previously determined to induce sadness in listeners, and with which
they were unfamiliar (“Discovery of the Camp” from the Band of Brothers
movie soundtrack). The unfamiliarity of the piece, as well as the
absence of lyrics, was calculated to minimize any personal associations
it might evoke.
Prior to listening to the piece, participants rated their current
mood by completing the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS).
They once again rated their mood after listening to the piece, as well
as describing the emotions that they perceived and felt (what the music
sounded like to them, and how it made them feel) while the music was
playing. Indirect measures, including a pictorial facial expression
judgment task, and two psychophysiological indices—heart rate
variability and electrodermal activity—complemented the self-reported
measures.
Based on the resulting data, the participants’ emotional responses to
the music were distinguished in terms of three underlying factors: relaxing sadness, nervous sadness, and moving sadness. Relaxing sadness was characterized by “felt and perceived peacefulness and positive valence.” Nervous sadness involved “felt anxiety, perceived scariness, and negative valence.” The third factor, moving sadness,
was the one most closely aligned to the kind of powerful emotional
experience that sad music is capable of evoking—the kind of reaction
exhibited by the toddler in his first exposure to the “Moonlight
Sonata.” When the three factors were examined in terms of self-reported
emotion and indirect physiological indices, only moving sadness was characterized by both an intense sympathetic arousal and a positive valence. In other words, moving sadness
in response to a piece of sad music is “a complex and intense emotional
experience involving both aesthetic, enjoyable emotions (such as liking
and being moved) and feelings of sadness.”
Moving sadness became the focal point of the study as the
researchers looked for correlations between emotional responses to the
music and individual personality variables. Participants were
administered a number of instruments designed to measure personality
traits (e.g. the Interpersonal Reactivity Index), and the results were
compared with the results of the music listening experiment to see if
any traits predicted individual emotional responses to the sad music
excerpt. While relaxing sadness and nervous sadness
were not significantly predicted by any of the individual difference
variables, the distinctive combination of sadness and enjoyment
characteristic of moving sadness was effectively predicted by trait empathy and sensitivity to social contagion.
Both empathy and social contagion involve taking on the perspective
of other people. The empathy sub-scale most closely associated with moving sadness
was fantasy, which suggests that the ability to identify with the
perspectives of fictional characters, and to “lose oneself” in their
stories, plays a key role in the ability to be deeply moved by sad
music, as does sensitivity to social contagion, or the tendency to
“catch” the emotions of other people. While it is perhaps not surprising
that these two characteristics predict the tendency to be moved by sad
music—to experience the emotions implicitly communicated by a “sad”
instrumental composition—the fact that such an experience of sadness can
be described as enjoyable calls for a bit more of an explanation.
One possible such explanation is offered by the fact that, in addition to being predicted by fantasy, moving sadness
was also positively correlated with the empathy sub-scale "empathetic
concern.” Contrary to the related empathy sub-scale of “personal
distress,” which is “an aversive, self-focused response involving
feelings of discomfort and anxiety,” empathetic concern “is associated
with other-focused, pro-social behavior.” For “sadness enjoyers,” as the
researchers labeled participants who experienced the highest levels of moving sadness,
the intense feelings of sadness evoked by the music sample
were directed outward rather than inward. As a result, their experience
of these feelings was aesthetic, and therefore pleasurable, and not
personally distressing and unpleasant.
The results of this study suggest that the way we respond to an
unfamiliar piece of sad music can reveal quite a bit about our
personalities. If we’re browsing Spotify and happen upon some melancholy
composition we’ve never heard before—such as “Discovery of the Camp”
from the Band of Brothers soundtrack—and simply don’t “feel”
the music, or we do feel it but find the feeling unpleasant, it could
mean that empathy is not one of our defining traits. If, however, we
hear such a piece and find our lips quivering and our eyes filling with
tears, but—like the toddler hearing “Moonlight Sonata” for the first
time—remain fixated on the music until the final haunting note, our
reaction may indicate our capacity for reaching outside of ourselves and
viewing the world from the perspective of other people, both real and
fictional. Whichever way we respond to a sad song we’ve never heard
before—with stony indifference or with a flood of unexpected tears—it
likely says a great deal more about us than whether or not we have an
“ear” for music.
No comments:
Post a Comment