Which emotions are communicated by music cross-culturally?

Abstract

This thesis investigated which emotions are communicated by music cross-culturally. The research was conducted by means of a comprehensive literature review of empirical studies in music psychology. Ten studies published between 1996 and 2013 fulfilled the inclusion criteria. A number of findings emerged from the analysis of the reviewed literature. The review revealed that the definition of culture is explicitly or by default based on nationality. Further analysis led to the conclusion that using nationality is a simple way to categorise the people of a culture but is necessarily reductionist because it can exclude other culture-specific values. A re-analysis of the cultures based on nationality using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory suggested new interpretations of the published data. For example, the re-analysis could explain cross-cultural difference when the decoding cultures investigated scored differently along the dimension “uncertainty avoidance” (intolerance towards uncertainty and ambiguity). On the other hand, it could explain no cross-cultural difference when the decoding cultures scored similarly along the same dimension of uncertainty avoidance. Anger variance between encoded and decoded emotion was regularly noted in the review. These data were examined using current theories in music psychology, but each theory failed to explain much of the variance observed. For example, none were able to explain the finding that anger expressed in Japanese music was poorly decoded by Indian, Japanese and Swedish listeners. Thus, by expanding the lens model of emotion communication as a framework, the stereotype theory of emotion in music (STEM) was proposed. According to STEM, listeners filter the emotion they perceive according to stereotypes of the encoding culture. For example, Japanese culture is stereotyped as an anger reticent culture, explaining the low anger ratings for their “anger-encoded” music. The thesis concluded that happiness and sadness are universally communicated; however, anger perception is culturally influenced through a stereotyping process. STEM predicts that anger will be perceived if the decoding culture has no stereotype attached to the encoding culture through psychophysical cues such as rhythm and timbre. STEM presents a new way forward in understanding the cognitive processing of emotion in music.