When words matter: a cross-cultural perspective on lyrics and their relationship to musical emotions

Several studies have investigated emotional reactions to instrumental music. However, studies on the effect of lyrics on emotions are limited. Previous studies suggest that the importance of lyrics may vary cross-culturally. The aim of this study was twofold: to investigate the effects of lyrics on aroused emotions and psychological mechanisms with music and to explore whether these differ cross-culturally. Fifty participants from Portugal and Sweden listened to six musical stimuli based on two songs, one representing each culture. These were presented in three versions each: the original, an instrumental, and the instrumental version with lyrics on the screen. The Portuguese and Swedish participants differed notably: the presence of lyrics did not affect listeners’ happiness in neither group as predicted, but did increase sadness, albeit only in the Portuguese group. Lyrics also increased nostalgia for the Portuguese listeners as predicted and surprise-astonishment for the Swedish listeners. Regarding the mechanisms, lyrics increased the activation of episodic memory in both groups, and the activation of evaluative conditioning, contagion, and visual imagery in the Portuguese group. The present study indicates that lyrics have an effect on musical emotions and mechanisms which vary between groups of different cultural backgrounds.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Emotions, mechanisms, and individual differences in music listening: A stratified random sampling approach

Emotions have been found to play a paramount role in both everyday music experiences and health applications of music, but the applicability of musical emotions depends on: 1) which emotions music can induce, 2) how it induces them, and 3) how indi- vidual differences may be explained. These questions were addressed in a listening test, where 44 participants (aged 19–66 years) reported both felt emotions and subjective impressions of emotion mechanisms (Mec Scale), while listening to 72 pieces of music from 12 genres, selected using a stratified random sampling pro- cedure. The results showed that: 1) positive emotions (e.g., happiness) were more prevalent than negative emotions (e.g., anger); 2) Rhythmic entrainment was the most and Brain stem reflex the least frequent of the mechanisms featured in the BRECVEMA theory; 3) felt emotions could be accurately predicted based on self- reported mechanisms in multiple regression analyses; 4) self-reported mechanisms predicted felt emotions better than did acoustic features; and 5) individual listeners showed partly different emotion-mechanism links across stimuli, which may help to explain individual differences in emotional responses. Implications for future research and applications of musical emotions are discussed