About
31
Publications
19,280
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
683
Citations
Introduction
I have an interdisciplinary background in psychology, neuroscience and aesthetics. My current research focuses on music’s capability to influence internally-oriented mental phenomena such as mind-wandering and visual mental imagery. Other research interests range over empathic responses to music, creativity, music and well-being. I use the tools of affective and cognitive psychology and neuroscience as well as qualitative methods.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (31)
While love is a common theme in pop music and studies indicate that music can significantly influence people’s emotions and behaviors, research on the impact of pop love songs on listeners—particularly regarding romantic love—remains limited. This study examined the short-term effect of listening to pop love songs on self-reported feelings of roman...
Prior literature suggests that both music and imagery have beneficial effects on motor skill performance in sport settings. However, evidence for their combined use is still scarce. We conducted a preregistered (PROSPERO protocol number CRD42024538656) systematic review following the PRISMA guidelines where we synthesized and critically appraised s...
Music listening can evoke a range of extra-musical thoughts, from colors and smells to autobiographical memories and fictional stories. We investigated music-evoked thoughts as an overarching category, to examine how the music’s genre and emotional expression, as well as familiarity with the style and liking of individual excerpts, predicted the oc...
Imagination plays a key role in evidence-based, cognitive therapies, and recent research highlights that music – a perceptual stimulus imbued with affective and social meaning – can influence some aspects of imagination, such as vividness and emotional tone. However, little is known about music's capability to facilitate specific imagery themes tha...
Music has the capability to trigger visual mental imagery (VMI), often leading to constructed imaginative worlds in the mind of the listener. Although VMI has been a topic of interest throughout centuries and across various disciplines including philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and visual arts, its relationship to musical contexts remains elusiv...
Drawing on perspectives from music psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, musicology, clinical psychology, and music education, Music and Mental Imagery provides a critical overview of cutting-edge research on the various types of mental imagery associated with music. The four main parts cover an introduction to the different types of ment...
During a live concert, the mind can wander to unrelated thoughts such as personal concerns or past memories or to vivid images that are inspired by the music. This is an omnipresent phenomenon commonly referred to as mind-wandering. Psychological research on mind-wandering has explored its main characteristics, such as frequency, phenomenology, and...
This chapter provides an overview of neuroscientific and behavioural research on music-evoked emotions with an eye towards evaluating their unique role in aesthetic experiences. In the first part of the chapter, we illustrate the neural underpinning of music-evoked affective experiences such as enjoyment or pleasure, as well as discrete and aesthet...
Research has shown that mind-wandering, negative mood, and poor wellbeing are closely related, stressing the importance of exploring contexts or tools that can stimulate positive thoughts and images. While music represents a promising option, work on this topic is still scarce with only a few studies published, mainly featuring laboratory or online...
Directed, intentional imagination is pivotal for self-regulation in the form of escapism and therapies for a wide variety of mental health conditions, such anxiety and stress disorders, as well as phobias. Clinical application in particular benefits from increasing our understanding of imagination, as well as non-invasive means of influencing it. T...
Individuals with a predisposition to empathize engage with sad music in a compelling way, experiencing overall more pleasurable emotions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these music-related experiences in empathic individuals are unknown. The present study tested whether dispositional empathy modulates neural responses to sad compared wit...
Visual mental imagery has been characterized as an important aspect of our mental life, which consists of “seeing” in the absence of a sensory stimulus. However, the mechanisms underlying how visual mental images unfold during music listening have remained largely neglected. Here, we review the existing literature on the relation between music-evok...
Music is amongst one of the most ancient human activities, dating back to the prehistoric era. Music has always played a pivotal role in thriving cultures and both playing and listening to music are universal human behaviours, which can be traced in all known societies. No human culture has yet been identified that does not practise some recognisab...
Visual mental imagery has been characterized as an important aspect of our mental life, which consists of "seeing" in the absence of a sensory stimulus. However, the mechanisms underlying how visual mental images unfold during music listening have remained largely neglected. Here, we review the existing literature on the relation between music-evok...
People are better able to empathize with others when they are given information concerning the context driving that person's experiences. This suggests that people draw on prior memories when empathizing, but the mechanisms underlying this connection remain largely unexplored. The present study investigates how variations in episodic information sh...
Music is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human cultures, mostly due to its power to evoke and regulate emotions. However, effects of music evoking different emotional experiences such as sadness and happiness on cognition, and in particular on self-generated thought, are unknown. Here we use probe-caught thought sampling and functional magnetic resonanc...
Pelowski et al. present a holistic framework within which the multiple processes underlying art viewing can be systematically organized [1]. The proposed model integrates a broad range of dynamic mechanisms, which can effectively account for empirical as well as humanistic perspectives on art perception. Particularly challenging is the final sectio...
PREVIOUS MUSIC AND EMOTION RESEARCH SUGGESTS that individual differences in empathy, alexithymia, personality traits, and musical expertise might play a role in music-perceived emotions. In this study, we investigated the relationship between these individual characteristics and the ability of participants to recognize five basic emotions (happines...
This study explores listeners' experience of music-evoked sadness. Sadness is typically assumed to be undesirable and is therefore usually avoided in everyday life. Yet the question remains: Why do people seek and appreciate sadness in music? We present findings from an online survey with both Western and Eastern participants (N = 772). The survey...
