Investigating Relationships between Music, Emotions, Personality, and Music-induced Movement

Listening to music makes us to move in various ways. The characteristics of these movements can be affected by several aspects, such as individual factors, musical features, or the emotional content of the music. In a study in which we presented 60 individuals with 30 musical stimuli representing different genres of popular music and recorded their movement with an optical motion capture system, we found significant correlations 1) between musical characteristics and the exhibited movement, 2) between the perceived emotional content of the music and the movement, and 3) between personality traits of the dancers and the movement. However, such separate analyses are incapable of investigating possible relationships between the different aspects. We describe two multivariate analysis approaches – mediation and moderation – that enable the simultaneous analysis of relationships between more than two variables. The results of these analyses suggest mediation effects of the perceived emotional content of music on the relationships between different features of music and movement. It can therefore be assumed that musical emotions can (partly) account for the effect of music on movements. However, using personality as moderator between music and movement failed to show a moderation effect in most cases, suggesting that personality does not generally affect existing relationships between music and movement. Hence it can be assumed that musical characteristics and personality are independent factors in relation to music-induced movement.