Emotional Effects Stimulated by Sad and Fearful Music: A Comparative Study Based on ERP and Behavioural Experiment

Abstract

In recent two decades, human brain’s response to the emotions of music has become a focus in both neuroscience and applied musicology. Rapid development in brain scanning such as ERP technique provides facilities to explore this fascinating field. How people respond to music emotionally has become a new area of study. This study is one of such explorations and aims to probe into the physical and mental effects of music with negative emotions on humans. Event-related potential (ERP) and behavioural experiment were conducted with 81 participants (20 to 28 years old) with ANOVA / t-test as the analytical tool to compare the effects of two kinds of negative emotional music, i.e., sad music and fearful music. The results showed that the participants had different neural mechanisms, willingness to listen, feelings and music preferences regarding the two types of music with negative emotions. Although fear and sadness are both negative music emotions, the emotional effects on the participants were significantly different based on brain processing. The participants did not reject sad music, but less than 5% of the participants were able to accept fearful music. There were also significant differences in the speed and intensity of the electroencephalography (EEG) responses as well as emotional stability when the participants processed these two music emotions. In sum, this study suggests that close attention people should be paid to the perception of negative emotional music to design music activities that contribute to a positive aesthetic perception.