Ambivalent Emotional Experiences of Everyday Visual and Musical Objects

Art brings rich, pleasurable experiences to our daily lives. However, many theories of art and aesthetics focus on specific strong experiences—in the contexts of museums, galleries, and concert halls and the aesthetic perception of canonized arts—disregarding the impact of daily experiences. Furthermore, pleasure is often treated as a simplistic concept of merely positive affective character, yet recent psychological research has revealed the experience of pleasure is far more complicated. This study explored the nature of pleasure evoked by everyday aesthetic objects. A mixture of statistical and qualitative methods was applied in the analysis of the data collected through a semi-structured online survey (N = 464). The result asserts the experience of emotional ambivalence occurred and was composed of a variety of nuanced emotions and related association, rather than just a combination of contradicting emotions. Such paradoxical pleasure is defined as a self-conscious hedonic exposure to negative emotions in art reception. The study also depicted four types of attitudinal ambivalence: loss, diversity, socio-ideology, and distance, reflecting contextual elements intertwined into experience, and the connection between ambivalence and intense emotional experienc

Music in mood regulation: Initial scale development

  Music is recognized as an effective means of regulating mood. However, there has not been a scale for assessing the use of different regulatory strategies related to musical activities, and the purpose of the current study was to construct such a scale. A survey study (N = 1515) was conducted with 10-20-year old adolescents. The measurement model of the scale for assessing the use of music for mood regulation was based on a previous theoretical model about the use of music for mood regulation in adolescence. A series of confirmatory factor analyses in the survey data supported the measurement model, and a 40-item scale for Music in Mood Regulation (MMR) was established. In addition, the relationships of the measure to relevant concepts were explored and differences in the use of music in mood regulation were studied.    

POM_778768_Suppl_mat_ – Supplemental material for Relaxed and connected: Insights into the emotional–motivational constituents of musical pleasure

<p>Supplemental material, POM_778768_Suppl_mat_ for Relaxed and connected: Insights into the emotional–motivational constituents of musical pleasure by Suvi H. Saarikallio, Johanna P. Maksimainen and William. M. Randall in Psychology of Music</p