Music evokes vicarious emotions in listeners

Abstract

Why do we listen to sad music? We seek to answer this question using a psychological approach. It is possible to distinguish perceived emotions from those that are experienced. Therefore, we hypothesized that, although sad music is perceived as sad, listeners actually feel (experience) pleasant emotions concurrent with sadness. This hypothesis was supported, which led us to question whether sadness in the context of art is truly an unpleasant emotion. While experiencing sadness may be unpleasant, it may also be somewhat pleasant when experienced in the context of art, for example, when listening to sad music. We consider musically evoked emotion vicarious, as we are not threatened when we experience it, in the way that we can be during the course of experiencing emotion in daily life. When we listen to sad music, we experience vicarious sadness. In this review, we propose two sides to sadness by suggesting vicarious emotion.

Full text

FOCUSED REVIEW
published: 30 May 2014
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00431
Music evokes vicarious emotions in
listeners
Ai Kawakami1,2*, Kiyoshi Furukawa1,2,3 and Kazuo Okanoya1,2,4
1JST, ERATO, OKANOYA Emotional Information Project, Tokyo, Japan
2Emotional Information Joint Research Laboratory, RIKEN BSI, Saitama, Japan
3Department of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, Japan
4Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Edited by:
Luiz Pessoa, University of Maryland,
USA
Revi ewed by:
Hideki Ohira, Nagoya University,
Japan
Takashi Taniguchi, Osaka Gakuin
University, Japan
*Correspondence:
Ai Kawakami is a research scientist who
studies music and emotion. Last year, she
completed her PhD from the Tokyo
University of the Arts with the highest
honors. She has an interest in why we
listen to sad music from the viewpoints of
not only music psychology but also
neuroscience and cognitive science, and
she does have actual experience in this
regard, having won the most difficult
piano competition in Japan.
amour.kawakami@gmail.com
Why do we listen to sad music? We seek to answer this question using a psychological
approach. It is possible to distinguish perceived emotions from those that are
experienced. Therefore, we hypothesized that, although sad music is perceived as sad,
listeners actually feel (experience) pleasant emotions concurrent with sadness. This
hypothesis was supported, which led us to question whether sadness in the context
of art is truly an unpleasant emotion. While experiencing sadness may be unpleasant, it
may also be somewhat pleasant when experienced in the context of art, for example,
when listening to sad music. We consider musically evoked emotion vicarious, as we are
not threatened when we experience it, in the way that we can be during the course of
experiencing emotion in daily life. When we listen to sad music, we experience vicarious
sadness. In this review, we propose two sides to sadness by suggesting vicarious
emotion.
Keywords: sad music, vicarious emotion, perceived/felt emotion, ambivalent emotion, emotional quality
INTRODUCTION
Some people listen to music to shift their mood, while others do so to alleviate feelings of depres-
sion, unhappiness, or emotional discomfort. We often regulate our mood by listening to our music
of choice. People tend to listen to cheerful music when they want to improve their mood because
specific qualities contained in that music amuse us and improve our emotional state. With this in
mind, why do we listen to sad music? It is reasonable to assume that sad music would evoke sadness
in listeners, as we tend to tap into the sadness it emits when we elect to listen to it.
However, this seems unusual. Within emotion psychology, sadness is generally regarded as an
unpleasant emotion. According to the typical dimensional model of emotion suggested by Russell
(1980), sadness is located in the position of displeasure and deactivating emotions (Russell, 2003).
In addition, from an approach-avoidance perspective, people should want to avoid sadness. No one
would be eager to experience sadness, being such an unpleasant emotion. This begs the question:
why do we choose to listen to sad music when it should offer us an unpleasant experience?
Aristotle addressed this question by suggesting the concept of catharsis. If, as he suggested, sad
music assuages depression, then it is not surprising that people would prefer sad music. Our recent
study (Kawakami et al., 2013b) added an alternative idea explaining human preference for sad
music. We suggested that people’s ability to feel pleasure when listening to music that is perceived
as sad might be related to a difference between the perception of emotion in the music and the
emotion it actually evokes.
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Kawakami et al. Vicarious emotions evoked by sad music
KEY CONCEPT 1 | Sad music
Although music consists of many elements, including tempo, key, and
melody, numerous previous studies have confirmed that existing musical
pieces in minor keys sound sad to listeners (Hevner, 1935; Nielzén and
Cesarec, 1982; Krumhansl, 1997; Peretz et al., 1998). Therefore, we focused
on music in a minor key and defined it as sad music in this study.
There are two types of emotions: perceived and felt.
Perceived emotions concern what people perceive objectively,
whereas felt emotions concern what people actually experience. It
is possible to determine the affective aspects of a target’s expres-
sion. We can usually recognize others’ emotions using expressed
cues including facial expression, tone of voice, and gestures. A
similar process occurs when we listen to music, in that we recog-
nize it as happy or sad using cues such as key, tempo, or volume.
Conversely, we experience various emotions other than our objec-
tively perceived emotion.Whenwelookatanangryperson,we
can usually perceive that the person is angry, but we do not always
experience anger ourselves; rather, we often experience fear in
response to others’ anger. Of course, when our experienced emo-
tion is identical to our perceived emotion, then felt emotion and
perceived emotion coincide.
KEY CONCEPT 2 | Perceived emotion
There are two kinds of emotions: perceived and felt (Gabrielsson, 2002).
Perceived emotion refers to emotion that we perceive or recognize from our
surroundings and environments. For example, when we listen to a piece of
music that is being played, we are able to perceive it as being happy or sad.
KEY CONCEPT 3 | Felt emotion
Felt emotion refers to an emotion we actually experience. Indeed, per-
ceived and felt emotions are identical in many cases. However, our earlier
study (2013a) suggests that musically trained people experience pleasant
emotions while listening to dissonance and music in minor keys despite per-
ceiving them as unpleasant. Thus, there is a need to distinguish felt from
perceived emotion.
Gabrielsson (2002) noted that it is essential to distinguish
between perceived emotion and felt emotion, suggesting four
patterns of relationships between these two kinds of emotions
in response to music: positive relationship, negative relation-
ship, no systematic relationship, and no relationship. A recent
article (Schubert, 2013) reviewed these four relationships, and
suggested that perceived and felt emotions are often coincident
in many cases. For example, sad music is generally thought to
make listeners feel sad, which would indicate a positive relation-
ship between perceived and felt emotions (Table 1). Can this be
expanded? Our earlier study (Kawakami et al., 2013a)presenteda
range of musical structures in which perceived emotion differed
from felt emotion. The structures were composed of 21 musical
stimuli, including key (major/minor), ascending (or descend-
ing) melody, and consonance (or dissonance). We found that,
Table 1 | Relationships between perceived and felt emotions.
Emotions
Perceived emotion Felt emotion
Positive relationship Sad Sad
Negative relationship Sad Pleasant
although dissonance and melody in a minor key were perceived
as unpleasant sounds, listeners actually felt fewer unpleasant and
more pleasant emotions when listening to these musical stim-
uli. Therefore, perceived emotion is not always congruent with
felt emotion when related to particular musical structures. When
felt emotion is opposed to perceived emotion, this is considered
as a “negative relationship” (Table 1 ). Generally, as minor-key
music is perceived as sad (Hevner, 1935), the above mentioned
case, in which the minor-key melody evoked more pleasant emo-
tions, exemplifies the common phenomenon of enjoyment of sad
music. In our study, we attempted to clarify the underlying mech-
anisms of “pleasurable sadness” using this framework for negative
relationships between perceived and felt emotions.
Further, Kawakami et al. (2013a) recently found that musically
trained or experienced individuals perceived dissonant, minor-
key music as unpleasant, but the stimuli did not evoke equally
unpleasant emotions. As musically trained people have had more
opportunity to listen to or play dissonant music than people who
are not musically experienced, the emotion evoked by dissonant
music was presumed to be influenced by musical experience. In
light of this, in our study (Kawakami et al., 2013b), we hypoth-
esized that musicians would experience more pleasant emotions
than non-musicians would when listening to sad music, although
both groups were expected to perceive an equal degree of sadness
in the sound of the music.
METHOD
PARTICIPANTS
Twenty-five women and 19 men participated in the study.
Participants were placed into one of two groups according to
their musical experience. Professional musicians and college stu-
dents who were majoring in music formed the “musician group”
(n=17), while individuals who were employed in fields unre-
lated to music or attended college and majored subjects other
than music formed the “non-musician group” (n=27). The
participants’ mean age was 25.3 years (SD =6.6).
MATERIALS
We used the following three musical pieces: (1) Glinka’s La
Separation (F major and F minor), played at quarter note =80;
(2) Blumenfeld’s Etude “Sur Mer” (G major and G minor), played
at half note =72; and (3) Granados’s Allegro de Concierto
(G major and G minor), played at quarter note =70. Preparing
both major- and minor-key versions for all musical pieces enabled
us to examine whether perceived and felt emotions differed
according to key. Kawakami et al. (2013b) present the scores.
We endeavored not to use prominent musical pieces as musi-
cal stimuli to avoid evoking particular memories that participants
may have associated with well-known music, thereby ensuring
that emotion evoked by the music would be derived from the
stimuli rather than a memory. We asked participants if they rec-
ognized the music, and no one reported having heard the musical
stimuli before.
SELF-REPORT MEASURES
Participants reported how they perceived the music (their per-
ception of the music) and how it made them feel (their own
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Kawakami et al. Vicarious emotions evoked by sad music
emotional state) using 62 emotion-related descriptive words and
phrases on a scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very much).
These descriptive words and phrases referred to various types
of emotion that had been used in earlier studies (Hevner, 1936;
Taniguchi, 1995; Zentner et al., 2008). For more details, refer to
Table 1 in Kawakami et al. (2013b).
PROCEDURE
The participants performed four tasks. The first asked partici-
pants to listen to the music (major or minor) and report either
their perceived or felt emotion. The second required that partici-
pants listen to the music played in a different key to that used in
the first piece and report their perceived or felt emotion according
to which of these they reported in the first task (i.e., the same type
of emotion, either perceived or felt, was reported in both tasks).
In the third and fourth tasks, participants repeated tasks 1 and 2
but gave an indication of the alternate type of emotion (perceived
or felt).
We used a traditional question to evaluate listeners’ feelings in
response to the music (felt emotion): “How did you feel when
listening to this musical stimulus?” We evaluated each listener’s
perceived emotion with the following question: “How would nor-
mal people feel when listening to this musical stimulus?” Though
this method may appear to be an inadequate measure of perceived
emotion, we presumed the following process: “This music sounds
sad to me and most likely to other people as well. I cannot know
how other people actually feel, but my best guess is that they will
feel the emotion that the music portrays.”
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
To determine the characteristics of relevant factors, we performed
an exploratory factor analysis to classify the 62 emotion-related
descriptive words and phrases included using 176 datasets: 2 (per-
ceived/felt emotion) ×2 (major/minor key) ×44 participants.
For each resultant factor, we conducted a Three-Way analysis of
variance (ANOVA) with the following design: musical emotion
(perceived vs. felt) ×key (major vs. minor) ×musical experience
(musicians vs. non-musicians). This allowed us to compare these
variables for each factor.
RESULTS
The 62 emotion-related descriptive words and phrases were
investigated via factor analysis, and four factors were extracted:
“tragic emotion,” “heightened emotion,” “romantic emotion,”
and “blithe emotion.” We then conducted a Three-Way ANOVA
for each factor.
PERCEIVED AND FELT EMOTIONS IN RESPONSE TO SAD MUSIC
We tested our hypothesis that felt emotion would not necessarily
correspond with perceived emotion, particularly in response to
music played in a minor key. Our results showed that, although
the sad music was perceived as more tragic, participants did
not experience the corresponding tragic emotions (e.g., gloomy,
meditative, and miserable). Mean factor scores were 2.50 for per-
ceived tragic emotion and 2.08 for felt tragic emotion. Indeed,
participants felt more romantic (e.g., fascinated, dear, and in
love) and blithe emotions (e.g., merry, animated, and feel like
dancing) than they perceived such emotions when listening to
the same sad music. Figure 1 represents mean factor scores for
perceived and felt emotion ratings; mean factor scores were 1.04
for perceived romantic emotion, 1.31 for felt romantic emo-
tion, 0.24 for perceived blithe emotion, and 0.40 for felt blithe
emotion.
THE EFFECTS OF MUSICAL TRAINING
Participants’ emotional responses were not associated with musi-
cal training. Music that was perceived as tragic evoked fewer
sad and more romantic emotions in both musicians and non-
musicians. Therefore, our hypothesis—when participants lis-
tened to sad (i.e., minor-key) music, those with more musical
experience (relative to those with less experience) would feel
more pleasant emotions than they would perceive—was not sup-
ported. According to an earlier study (Kawakami et al., 2013a),
musically experienced participants judged perceived emotion
as more unpleasant than felt emotion when exposed to very
short minor-key musical stimuli (played for approximately 5 s).
However, they also felt fewer unpleasant emotions and more
pleasant feelings when listening to music in a minor key. The lack
of significant differences between musicians and non-musicians
in terms of emotional reactions to sad music in the current study
could be a function of the musical stimuli that we used. Although
Kawakami et al. (2013a) used a musical structure that lacked eco-
logical validity (each stimulus was presented for approximately
5 s), we used existing musical pieces (presented for approximately
30 s) that included a number of musical structures (Ta b l e 2),
which allowed participants to capture more esthetic information
*
*
*
*
*p< 0.05
Tragic Emotion Heightened
Emotion
Romantic
Emotion
Blithe Emotion
FIGURE 1 | Mean factor scores for perceived and felt emotions.
Table 2 | Effect of musical training on the difference between
perceived and felt emotions.
Kawakami et al. (2013a) Kawakami et al. (2013b)
Musical stimuli Single musical structure
(5.06 s for each)
Excerpt of existing music
(33.8 s for each)
Difference
between perceived
and felt emotions
Only suitable for people
with high levels of musi-
cal training
Suitable for both musi-
cians and non-musicians
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Kawakami et al. Vicarious emotions evoked by sad music
from the music. Consequently, regardless of their musical expe-
rience, participants may have reacted to the esthetic aspects of
the sad music, which would render musical experience ineffec-
tual. This explanation seems plausible considering that people,
including those with musical experience, habitually enjoy sad
music.
Listening to sad music evokes ambivalent emotions: both
positive and negative relationships.
With regard to felt emotion, sad music evoked both tragic and
romantic emotions in participants. Romantic emotion included
emotions such as feeling fascinated, dear, and in love, and it
would be appropriate to regard these emotions as pleasant rather
than unpleasant. Therefore, when listening to sad music, it would
appear that people experience ambivalent emotion. Aristotle’s
explanation for a preference for sad music was based on the belief
that sad music evoked sad emotion. In contrast, the results of our
study suggest that sad music evokes other emotions in addition
to tragic (i.e., sad) emotion and preference for sad music is based
on positive emotions. It is therefore possible to love sad music
because of the positive emotional components it evokes, which
may relieve supporters of sad music.
Having established that we experience ambivalent emotions
when listening to sad music, why does this occur? The pos-
itive relationship suggested by Gabrielsson (2002) appears to
be the simplest explanation for the relationship between per-
ceived and felt emotions and how sad music evokes negative
emotion in listeners; however, the majority of previous studies
have not distinguished between perceived and felt emotion. More
precisely, results showing that people experience ambivalent emo-
tions in response to sad music demonstrate that perceived and
felt emotions in response to sad music are not coincident. The
phenomenon of enjoying sad music indicates that both negative
and positive relationships exist between perceived and felt emo-
tions. We discuss this phenomenon using three approaches in the
following section.
DISCUSSION
We offer three approaches to explain why both pleasant and
unpleasant emotions are evoked by sad music. The sweet anticipa-
tion and re-evaluation approaches presume that sadness evoked
by sad music is unpleasant and identical to common emotions,
as posited by Juslin (2013). Using these approaches, it would be
possible to explain why sad music evoked stronger felt roman-
tic emotion than perceived romantic emotion. We also introduce
the notion of “vicarious emotion.” This approach suggests that
sadness evoked by sad music is qualitatively different from sad-
ness experienced in daily life. It would be of help to explain why
sad music evoked weaker felt tragic emotion than perceived tragic
emotion. However, it should be noted that these three theories are
not mutually exclusive.
KEY CONCEPT 4 | Vicarious emotion
We defined vicarious emotion as that experienced while listening to music.
Although emotions we experience in daily life are often derived from actual
objects or situations, vicarious emotions are free from the essential unpleas-
antness of their genuine counterparts. As listening to music poses no direct
threat or danger to us, we can experience a range of vicarious emotions in
such a situation.
SWEET ANTICIPATION
While listening to music, we tend to anticipate what is coming
next. According to Meyer’s (1956) musical expectancy theory,
a violation, delay, or confirmation of a listener’s expectations
evokes emotion, which is derived from a prediction of the contin-
uation of the music (Huron, 2006). A listener’s expectation would
be confirmed if the predicted sound was heard, which would
evoke positive emotion (i.e., “sweet anticipation”).
Therefore, even if listeners experience sadness when listening
to sad music, this sweet anticipation allows them to feel positive
emotions simultaneously. Consequently, the pleasant experience
would have arisen as a consequence of sweet anticipation.
RE-EVALUATION IN THE CONTEXT OF ART
The role of the emotion-appraisal process is considered cru-
cial in the two-factor theory of emotion (Schachter and Singer,
1962) and cognitive-mediational theory (Lazarus, 1966, 1993).
According to Oatley and Johnson-Laird (2014),thisisthecase
with three representative cognitive theories of emotion: the
action-readiness theory of emotions (Frijda, 1986, 2007; Frijda
and Parrott, 2011); the core-affect theory of emotions (Russell,
2003); and the communicative theory of emotions (Oatley and
Johnson-Laird, 1987, 2011). It is also essential for people to
understand their own situations to experience emotion (Lazarus,
1966). When we listen to music, being in a listening situation
is obvious to us; therefore, how emotion is evoked would be
influenced by our cognitive appraisal of listening to music. For
example, a cognitive appraisal of listening to sad music as engage-
ment with art would promote positive emotion, regardless of
whether that music evoked feelings of unpleasant sadness, thereby
provoking the experience of ambivalent emotions in response
to sad music. It is possible that we initially experience negative
emotion, such as sadness, and subsequently experience positive
emotion because of the rewarding effects of enjoying art (Koelsch,
2012).
This approach may resemble those of Schubert (1996) and
Juslin (2013), in that both consider esthetic context or judg-
ment as causes of pleasant emotion. Schubert (1996) suggests that
esthetic context activates a node in the neural network that deac-
tivates the displeasure center of the brain. This is based on the
Berlyne’s (1971) notion that there are cues that inhibit the aver-
sion system in an artistic context. Juslin (2013) suggested that
conflicting emotion, such as sadness and pleasure, originates from
the “emotional contagion” and “esthetic judgment” mechanisms.
He explains that sadness elicited by music arises through emo-
tional contagion, and that the pleasure elicited by music occurs in
response to our perception of the beauty of the music. As these
two mechanisms occur concurrently, it is possible to experience
pleasurable sadness when we listen to sad music.
The ideas expressed by Schubert and Juslin are interesting, and
our results indicate that participants experienced both tragic and
romantic emotion when listening to sad music. However, notably,
participants experienced less tragic emotion than they perceived
when listening to sad music. If tragic emotion was evoked through
the emotional contagion mechanism, the degree of tragic emo-
tion experienced could be expected to be equal to or surpass the
listener’s perceived emotion in response to sad music. Because
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Kawakami et al. Vicarious emotions evoked by sad music
the emotional contagion emanates from others, the perceived
emotion in this study measured the emotional states of others.
In addition, so-called esthetic emotion would be compara-
ble to the romantic emotion in our experiment. Interestingly,
participants experienced more romantic emotion than they per-
ceived when listening to sad music. When participants listened to
happy music, this tendency was absent, and the degree of roman-
tic emotion perceived did not differ significantly from the degree
of romantic emotion actually experienced. Therefore, pleasant
emotion may originate not only from esthetic judgment but also
from a lack of real danger. As listening to music was not related
to an actual threat to their safety, participants would experi-
ence less tragic emotion and more romantic emotion than they
perceived.
VICARIOUS EMOTIONS IN RELATION TO ART
Is the sadness evoked by music really an unpleasant emotion? Is it
similar to the sad emotion experienced in daily life? In many cases,
emotions evoked by music are not regarded as different from
those experienced in daily life and listeners frequently report basic
emotions (e.g., happy, sad, or angry) in response to music. In our
study, participants also reported sadness, but we suspect that the
quality of that sadness differs from sadness in daily life in that we
are willing to experience it, whereas we are not generally willing to
experience sadness in daily life; this indicates that sadness evoked
by music is pleasant and the same emotion experienced in daily
life is not. Indeed, participants might only have chosen “sadness”
as a description of their emotion because the word was selected by
the experimenter for the questionnaire. Hence, it may be too soon
to conclude that sadness is only related to unpleasant emotion.
Of course, we agree that music evokes similar emotions to
those experienced in everyday life in cases in which personal
memories, such as those of a broken relationship or bereavement,
are associated with the music. In such cases, listeners would expe-
rience unpleasant sadness similar in quality to that experienced
in daily life. In this situation, the sadness evoked by the music is,
to be exact, derived from the memory associated with the music
rather than from the music itself, which would merely serve as a
trigger for the unpleasant sadness related to the memory.
In contrast, some researchers have denied that music can evoke
common “everyday emotions” (e.g., sadness, happiness, or anger;
Kivy, 1990; Koneˇ
cni, 2003; Scherer, 2003). Noy (1993) noted that
“the emotion evoked by music are not identical with the emotion
aroused by everyday interpersonal activity” (p. 126). As Eerola
and Vuoskoski (2011) noted, although sadness is generally con-
sidered an unpleasant emotion, in the context of music, it may not
be classified as unpleasant. That is, in the context of art, emotion-
evoking processes may differ from those of day-to-day emotions.
Therefore, as Scherer (2004) proposed when discussing the dis-
tinction between goal-oriented utilitarian emotion and esthetic
emotion, the sadness that we experience while listening to sad
music may differ from that experienced in daily life. As shown
in Figure 2, we imagine that, although sadness experienced in
daily life would be mapped in the displeasure area, sadness expe-
rienced via art would be mapped in the pleasure area. That is, the
two types of sadness may diverge, although sadness is typically
considered as a solely unpleasant emotion.
UNPLEASURE
AROUSAL
SLEEPY
PLEASURE
divergence
FIGURE 2 | The two kinds of sadness.
In sum, we consider emotion experienced in response to
music to be qualitatively different from emotion experienced in
daily life; some earlier studies (Scherer and Zentner, 2001, 2008;
Scherer, 2003; Zentner et al., 2008) also proposed that music
may evoke music-specific emotions. The difference between the
emotions evoked in daily life and music-induced emotions is
the degree of directness attached to emotion-evoking stimuli.
Emotion experienced in daily life is direct in nature because the
stimuli that evoke the emotion could be threatening. However,
music is a safe stimulus with no relationship to actual threat;
therefore, emotion experienced through music is not direct in
nature. The latter emotion is experienced via an essentially safe
activity such as listening to music. We call this type of emotion
“vicarious emotion.”
As emotions evoked by music have no real threat attached, we
suppose that a wide variety and intensity of emotions could be
considered vicarious emotions. However, it might be difficult to
apply the vicarious emotion hypothesis to particular emotions or
deep sadness associated with non-musical influences; for exam-
ple, where extremely intense sadness is related to a non-musical
factor, such as the death of a close relative. With regard to listening
to music, various types of sadness could be considered vicari-
ous emotions because we assume that musically evoked sadness
does not actually pose a threat, regardless of the intensity of that
sadness.
We added a direct-vicarious axis to the pleasant-unpleasant
axis, as shown in Figure 3. The horizontal axis (pleasant-
unpleasant) depicts the emotional evaluation of experienced
emotion, and the vertical axis (direct-vicarious) depicts the way
in which individuals relate to the stimuli that elicit the emo-
tion. Because of their direct relationship to the cause, emotions
experienced in daily life would be located in the first and sec-
ond quadrants in Figure 3. Conversely, emotions experienced
while listening to music would be located in the fourth quad-
rant because despite inducing emotion, music has no direct
relationship to the listener; therefore, listeners experience vicar-
ious emotions in response to music, which enables them to
experience pleasant emotion even when they perceive the music
as sad.
Focusing on vicarious emotion could improve our under-
standing of the nature of the experience of art and highlight an
aspect of our emotional system that is sensitive to more than just
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Kawakami et al. Vicarious emotions evoked by sad music
FIGURE 3 | Pleasant-unpleasant, direct-vicarious model.
foodorthreats.Whenwepineorweepatthebeautyofsadmusic,
we experience an astounding range of emotions. An endeavor to
understand what such emotional functions provide could become
a quest for the meaning and significance of art (Kawakami, 2013).
CONCLUSION
Measuring both perceived and felt emotions, we clarified the
phenomenon of enjoyment in listening to sad music. We hypothe-
sized that sad music would be perceived as sad, but the experience
of listening to sad music would evoke positive emotions in lis-
teners. The results supported our hypothesis, in that although
sad music was perceived as more tragic, listeners experienced
less tragic emotion. Listeners also experienced romantic emo-
tion; therefore, we could argue that sad music inspired ambivalent
emotions in the listeners. Moreover, we suggest that the reason
people experience ambivalent emotions when listening to sad
music may be that the music generates vicarious emotions in
listeners. That is, even if the music evokes a negative emotion,
listeners are not faced with any real threat; therefore, the sadness
that listeners feel has a pleasant, rather than an unpleasant, qual-
ity to it. This suggests that sadness is multifaceted, whereas it has
previously been regarded as a solely unpleasant emotion.
FUTURE ISSUES
Although we used minor-key musical pieces as sad music in our
study (Kawakami et al., 2013b), examination of other musical ele-
ments, including acoustic parameters (Gingras et al., 2013), is
required. Moreover, we are anxious to know more why minor-
key music sounds sad and evokes sadness in listeners; we believe
this to be an important issue.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the JST ERATO OKANOYA Emotional
Information Project and the Emotional Information Joint
Research Laboratory (RIKEN BSI). We also acknowledge the
Basic Agreement for the Promotion of Coordination and
Cooperation between Tokyo University of the Arts and RIKEN.
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Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was con-
ducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Received: 30 January 2014; accepted: 24 April 2014; published online: 30 May 2014.
Citation: Kawakami A, Furukawa K and Okanoya K (2014) Music evokes vicarious
emotions in listeners. Front. Psychol. 5:431. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00431
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