Changes in the Perception and the Psychological Structure of Musical Emotions with Advancing Age

Abstract

Background/Study Context: To date, little is known about how advancing age may impact perception of emotions in music. This study was designed to test whether there are age-related changes in emotional judgments and psychological structure for musical emotions.

Methods: Twenty-five older (64–81 years) and 25 younger (18–30 years) listeners performed emotional judgments and free categorization tasks on happy, peaceful, sad, and threatening musical excerpts. Correlations, analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), and multidimensional scaling analyses were conducted to examine the effect of age on emotional judgments and categorization performances.

Results: Compared with younger adults, older adults did not discriminate the arousal difference between peaceful and threatening excerpts and showed higher association between arousal and valence judgments. The multidimensional scaling analysis indicated that the emotional space showed by older listeners did not fit younger listeners’ bidimensional valence-arousal structure. There was also a better categorization for happy excerpts among the older group.

Conclusion: Altogether, these data are consistent with the view that advancing age may result in the reduction of emotional complexity and a distortion of the emotional processing in a positive direction.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Alexa Pijoff for her help in testing the participants.

Notes

¹When testing young people, arousal and valence are generally perceived as two orthogonal dimensions of emotions (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1998; Russell, 1980).

²Given that the familiarity with classical music varied as function of age group, we controlled the potential influence of this factor by conducting additional separated analyses of variance on emotional judgments (i.e., valence, hedonic value, arousal, and liking), with age group and classical music listening as a between-subjects factors and emotion category as a within-subjects factor. Neither significant main effects nor interactions were observed for emotional judgments excepted for liking judgment. For this rating, a significant age group by emotion category by classical music listening interaction has been observed, F(3, 138) = 3.59, p = .02, , indicating that among classical music listeners, young adults gave higher liking judgments (M = 6.14, SE = 0.39) to musical stimuli than older adults (M = 5.01, SE = 0.21).

³The happy excerpts were written in a major mode at an average tempo of 137 metronome markings (MM; range: 92–196), with the melodic line lying in the medium high pitch range (the pedal was not used). The peaceful excerpts were composed in a major mode, had an intermediate tempo (mean: 74 MM, range: 54–100), and were played with pedal and arpeggio accompaniment. The sad excerpts were written in a minor mode at an average slow tempo of 46 MM (range: 40–60), with the pedal. The threatening excerpts were composed with minor chords on the third and sixth degrees, hence implying the use of many out-of-key notes. Although most threatening excerpts were regular and consonant, a few had irregular rhythms and were dissonant. Their tempo varied from 44 to 172 MM. Examples can be heard at www.brams.umontreal.ca/peretz.

Note. *Significant at p < .05, **significant at p < .001.