Our research on music and emotion examines how listeners perceive the emotions expressed by music, how music makes listeners actually feel, and how listeners come to like certain pieces of music and musical genres. Some musical cues, such as fast tempo and major key, are associated with happiness, whereas other cues, such as slow tempo and minor key, are associated with sadness. We showed that if you mix happy cues with sad cues (fast tempo and minor key, or slow tempo and major key), listeners perceive the music to sound happy and sad, and that they feel mixed emotions as well (Hunter, Schellenberg, & Schimmack, 2008, 2010; Ladinig & Schellenberg, 2012). Our research on the history of pop music revealed that it has become sadder sounding and more emotionally ambiguous over the past 50 years (Schellenberg & von Scheve, 2012).
We often begin to like a piece of music after hearing it a few times, but we also get tired of music we have heard too often. Our laboratory documented convincingly the increases and decreases in liking for music that is based on the number of times people have heard specific pieces (Schellenberg, Peretz, & Vieillard, 2008; Szpunar, Schellenberg, & Pliner, 2004). Listeners who score high on the personality dimension called openness-to-experience tend to get tired of music particularly quickly (Hunter & Schellenberg, 2011). When children are asked whether they like a piece of music, they tend to like faster-tempo music, but adults tend to like major-key music (Hunter, Schellenberg, & Stalinski, 2011). Younger children also rely primarily on tempo when making judgments about the emotions expressed by music, whereas adults focus more on whether a piece is in a major or minor key.
Although people in general tend to prefer happy- over sad-sounding music (Husain et al., 2002; Thompson et al., 2001), we also know that they often choose to listen to sad-sounding music. We have found that increased liking for sad-sounding music is evident among (1) listeners who score high on personality dimensions such as introversion and openness-to-experience (Ladinig & Schellenberg, 2012), (2) listeners who are fatigued (Schellenberg et al., 2008) or in a sad mood (Hunter, Schellenberg, & Griffith, 2011), and (3) listeners who have heard many happy-sounding pieces in a row (Schellenberg, Corrigall, Ladinig, & Huron, 2012). Being in a sad mood also increases the perceived sadness of a piece of music (Hunter et al., 2011).
Other research from the lab has shown that listeners tend to remember music they like better than music they dislike or feel neutral about (Stalinski & Schellenberg, 2012). Although music is intricately linked with perceiving and feeling emotions, children and adults with music training are not more emotionally intelligent than other individuals (Schellenberg, 2011a; Schellenberg & Mankarious, 2012).
See the Publications page to view (and see complete citations for) the journal articles referenced above.