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108 F. R. Balteş, M. Miclea, A. C. Miu INTRODUCTION Music fascinates us in so many ways. The power of music may lie within its ability to induce or modulate precious emotional states. Indeed, using various methods such as written reports, interviews or experience sampling, psychologists have shown that music can evoke a wide range of strong, self-relevant emotions (Gabrielsson & Lindström, 1993). Some of these emotions (e.g., wonder or feeling moved and admiring, transcendence or feeling overwhelmed and inspired) are more often induced by music compared to words or images (Zentner, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2008). Music can also be an agent of change or a promoter of the intensification or release of the existing emotions (Sloboda, 1992). For instance, music can intensify positive affect, vigilance and focus in the present, or facilitate emotion regulation functions (DeNora, 1999; Juslin, Liljestrom, Vastfjall, Barradas, & Silva, 2008; Sloboda, O'Neil, & Ivaldi, 2001). In line with similar efforts focused on the standardization of emotional words or pictures, Vieillard et al. (2008) have created the first archive of musical stimuli with affective norms. Such normatively-rated affective stimuli allow better experimental control in the selection of emotional stimuli, and facilitate the comparison of results across different studies conducted in the same or different laboratory (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2005). The archive of Vieillard et al. (2008) includes short (mean 12.4 s), computer-generated musical stimuli. Such short stimuli have already been useful in describing the minimal time that is necessary for the successful classification of music according to emotional content. For instance, listeners without musical training were able to distinguish between cheerful and sad music in less than half a second from the beginning of the audition (Peretz, Gagnon, & Bouchard, 1998). However, the use of short stimuli in the study of music-induced emotions may be limited by several factors. The processing of emotional valence may be difficult in the case of short musical stimuli with low dynamics (Bigand, Vieillard, Madurell, Marozeau, & Dacquet, 2005). In addition, familiarity and the level of musical training influence the recognition of tunes, and these effects may be less obvious when short stimuli are used (Dalla Bella, Peretz, & Aronoff, 2003). Moreover, although studies using short musical stimuli emphasized that the recognition of basic emotions happens rapidly, several seconds may not be enough time for the full-blown psychophysiological responses associated with musicinduced emotions to develop. For instance, listening to a musically-complex and dramatically-coherent excerpt from Tosca induced positive emotion and autonomic arousal, seen in faster heart rate, but slower respiration rate and reduced skin conductance in comparison to baseline (Baltes, Avram, Miclea, & Miu, 2011). It has been argued that the complex arrangement of musical elements that is characteristic of everyday life music inspires a global affective response (Altenmuller, Schurmann, Lim, & Parlitz, 2002), and the use of entire musical pieces has a greater external validity when one investigates the emotional responses Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal 16 (2012) 107-119
F. R. Balteş, M. Miclea, A. C. Miu 109 to music (Baltes et al., 2011; Levitin, 2006; Rickard, 2004). Therefore, the aim of the present study was to explore the affective space of an entire musical composition. We chose to use Vivaldi’s Four Seasons because we suspected that the extensive popularity of this composition may be related to its emotional content. The Four Seasons has been previously used in cognitive research that investigated the effects of music on memory or categorization tasks in older adults (Mammarella, Fairfield, & Cornoldi, 2007; Thompson, Moulin, Hayre, & Jones, 2005). Clearly, in light of the rapidly developing literature on music and cognition, mapping the affective space of everyday music will become increasingly necessary. The affective space of select musical stimuli has started to be mapped on the two dimensions of emotional arousal and valence (Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez, & Altenmuller, 2007; Vieillard et al., 2008). In Russell’s circumplex model, the conceptual distance between different emotions and the structure of affective experience are represented by a circle that has pleasure and displeasure (i.e., valence) on the extremes of the left-right axis, and activation and sleepiness (i.e., arousal) on the extremes of the upper-lower axis (Russell, 1980). Using the multidimensional scale method, which allows for emotions to be investigated without the use of linguistic labels, another study confirmed that emotional activation and valence are representative dimensions of music-induced emotions (Bigand et al., 2005). For instance, excerpts from Bach and Mahler were both perceived as pleasant, but they were distinguished by different degrees of emotional arousal (Flores-Gutierrez et al., 2007). Therefore, the present study used self-report measures of music-induced emotional arousal and valence. Another important aim of this study was to investigate whether there are differences in music-induced emotions between musicians and non-musicians. The traditional view is that in comparison to non-musicians, musicians have subtler and more complex knowledge about the musical tonalities typical to their culture, and they use it in order to improve their musical perception and memory (Dowling, 1978; Krumhansl & Shepard, 1979). This perspective has been supported by studies from cognitive neuroscience, which identified various neuroanatomical and neurophysiological differences between musicians and non-musicians. For instance, musicians displayed increased grey matter density in Heschl’s gyrus (i.e., primary auditory cortex) and early auditory N19-P30 evoked potentials; these differences correlated with the musicality score on the Advance Measures of Music Audiation test (Hutchinson, Lee, Gaab, & Schlaug, 2003; Schlaug, Jancke, Huang, Staiger, & Steinmetz, 1995). However, non-musicians are also able to learn the tonal principles of their cultural musical idiom, and they accurately use this knowledge in music processing tasks in order to differentiate tonal from atonal melodies, for instance (Bartlett & Dowling, 1980; Frances, 1988). The emerging view is that all music listeners, whether musicians or non-musicians, may share a certain form of musical knowledge, which gives meaning to the music that they listen to (Halpern, Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal 16 (2012) 107-119
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