Abstract
Emotions play a crucial role in music listening, and could also have far-reaching implications for listeners’ subjective well-being and health. Yet, it remains a challenge to explain why and how musical emotions occur. In this presentation, I will show how psychological mechanisms from our ancient past engage with meaning in music at multiple levels of the brain in order to induce a variety of affective episodes - from startle reflexes to profound aesthetic emotions. I will also provide examples of how the mechanisms can be explored by means of self-reports, psychophysiological indices, and measures of acoustic and musical features. I will argue that a deeper understanding of the emotion-induction process will, ultimately, have to encompass an idiographic approach; that is, modeling of listeners at the individual level. Understanding how individual variability arises within the confines of general emotional mechanisms could benefit future applications of musical emotions - for instance by enabling health practitioners to actively manipulate mechanisms according to the unique needs of individual clients.
Bio
Patrik Juslin is head of the Music Psychology Group, Uppsala University, and is responsible for the department’s research, teaching, and open seminars in music psychology. His research focuses on areas such as music and emotions, aesthetics, emotions in speech, music education, music and health, and emotion perception in schizophrenia and dementia. Juslin has published over a hundred papers, including articles in high prestige journals like Psychological Bulletin, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and The American Journal of Psychiatry. In 2020, the Royal Academy of Music awarded him a prize "for his world-leading research in music psychology" which includes his recent book, Musical Emotions Explained (2019). Alongside his work as a researcher, Juslin has been an avid guitar player for 40 years.