The melody to inspiration: The effects of awe-eliciting music on approach motivation and positive well-being

ABSTRACT

Rooted in the rich soil of positive psychology, scholarship on the uses and effects of self-transcendent media content that elicits other-oriented emotions has flourished in the past few years, covering a full range of media content such as movies, online videos, social media posts, and news stories. The current research aimed to gain a better understanding of the positive consequences of consuming self-transcendent media with a particular focus on music – a medium that is frequently identified as inspiring. Specifically, two studies were conducted to examine the degree to which self-transcendent music (manifested as awe-eliciting music) can boost listeners’ activated positive affect and prosociality relative both to the natural baseline condition (Study 1) and to amusing/hedonic condition (Study 2). Results show that while awe-eliciting music did not directly contribute to increases of well-being variables compared to amusing music, inspiration was a crucial mediator through which awe-eliciting music exerted influences on participants’ perceptions of meaning in life and universality. Results are reflected in the broader context of positive media psychology, and implications for music’s potential to inspire are discussed in detail.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Amy Nathanson and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful feedback throughout the review process. It is through constructive comments and meticulous discretion like theirs, we were able to bring this research to our fellow media psychologists. For that, we are truly grateful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The terms such as “meaning in life” and “self-actualization” as used here loosely represent a range of motivations (see Table 2); they should not be confused with the psychological constructs that share those labels.

2. Music used in the pretest included Battle Borne (Two Steps from Hell), Electric Romeo (Immediate music), Passing the Torch (Hans Zimmer), Victory (Two Steps from Hell), The Dragon Warrior (Hans Zimmer), and A Little Night Songs (Mozart). Note that A Little Night Song was used as a baseline group, as it was considered to be positive music in the previous research (Ziv et al., 2011).

3. Due to a questionnaire construction error, only nine items from the activated positive affect scale were assessed (excluding the item: interested). However, previous analysis (Thrash et al., 2010) suggested that the average scores of nine items produced little to no effects on subsequent data analysis in comparison to the scores of 10 items.

4. Initial analysis with MANCOVA indicated that none of the covariates were significant. Hence, we proceeded to report the MANOVA result for simplicity concern.

5. Although positive affect (PA) has been conceived as a well-being variable in this study and elsewhere (Thrash & Elliot, 2003; Thrash et al., 2010), we decided not to model PA along with other well-being criteria for two main considerations: First, this study measured activated PA as an affective response to media stimuli (see also Thrash & Elliot, 2004; Thrash et al., 2010, Study 1), as opposed to a holistic measure of individuals’ affective propensity (Thrash & Elliot, 2003; Thrash et al., 2010, Study 2–Study 4); hence, it should not be examined equivalently with other well-being variables. Second, activated PA has been accepted as inspiration’s strongest correlate (Thrash & Elliot, 2004); therefore, we dropped the activated PA from the path model to avoid multicollinearity. Nevertheless, to avoid being overly cautious, the path model with activated PA as an additional outcome variable was tested, which yielded poor fit.