Are Musical Emotions Chimerical? Lessons From the Paradoxical Potency of Music Therapy

Abstract

The dominant psychological model of emotion posits that a cognitive process (the appraisal) precedes, and results in, the corresponding emotion, including any induced state of physiological arousal: the cognitive com-ponent of emotion mediates the effect of the external cause on the internal arousal component. If emotions in music were naturalistic, the same mechanism should apply. However, a study in which a group of people with autism were compared with matched controls showed a normal level of physiological responsiveness to music in the autism group, coupled with a reduced capacity to verbalize their responses to it. It is hard to account for these results in terms of the standard mechanism for emotion induction; I suggest that musical emotions are in fact chimerical, consisting of components of separate naturalistic emotions combined in non-natural ways. This fact can not only explain the ability of music to generate a response in individuals with impaired emotion-al understanding, but can also suggest ways to exploit this effect in order to teach such individuals about natu-ralistic emotions by pairing musically induced states of autonomic arousal with the kind of naturalistic context provided in, for example, opera.