The appeal of music lies in its ability to express emotions, and it is natural for us to organize music in terms of emotional associations. But the ambiguities of emotions make the determination of a single, unequivocal response label for the mood of a piece of music unrealistic. We address this lack of specificity by modeling human response labels to music in the arousal-valence (A-V) represen...

Based on psychological and neurobiological theories of core affective experience, we identify a set of direct and indirect paths through which affective feelings at work affect three dimensions of behavioral outcomes: direction, intensity, and persistence. First, affective experience may influence these behavioral outcomes indirectly by affecting goal level and goal commitment, as well as three...

Research has largely neglected the effects of gaze direction cues on the perception of facial expressions of emotion. It was hypothesized that when gaze direction matches the underlying behavioral intent (approach-avoidance) communicated by an emotional expression, the perception of that emotion would be enhanced (i.e., shared signal hypothesis). Specifically, the authors expected that (a) dire...

Our emotions don't have lives of their own, but mutually influence each other across time. Augmentation and blunting occur when experience of a current emotion increases or decreases the experience of another, subsequent emotion, and play a role in many everyday phenomena. In this study, we investigated patterns of augmentation and blunting between the experience of anger, sadness, relaxation, ...

This study examined the role of emotional awareness in couples' relationships and the effects of a tendency to respond to difficult couples' situations with "soft" emotions (including sadness and fear) versus "hard" emotions (including anger and resentment). Participants were 56 heterosexual couples who completed a measure of relationship satisfaction and two measures of emotional awareness, in...

Current evidence suggests that older adults are less accurate than young adults in their ability to identify facial expressions of emotion. In the present study, young and older adults' ability to correctly recognize facial affect representative of 6 different emotions (happiness, surprise, disgust, fear, anger, and sadness) was examined in 3 conditions varying in difficulty. Task difficulty wa...

Recent research has shown that pride, like the "basic" emotions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, has a distinct, nonverbal expression that can be recognized by adults (J. L. Tracy & R. W. Robins, 2004b). In 2 experiments, the authors examined whether young children can identify the pride expression and distinguish it from expressions of happiness and surprise. Results ...

Using a daily process design, the present study examined relationships between momentary appraisals and emotional experience based on Smith and Lazarus' (1993) theory of emotions (1993). Nine times a day for 2 weeks, participants (N = 33, 23 women) recorded their momentary experience of 2 positive emotions (joy, love) and 4 negative emotions (anger, guilt, fear, sadness) and the core relational...

K E Y W O R D S : cognition and emotion, cognitive ability, intellectual ability, Mozart effect, music and cognition, music listening The impact of music on listeners’ emotional state is well documented (e.g. Gabrielsson, 2001; Husain et al., 2002; Krumhansl, 1997; Peretz, 2001; Schmidt and Trainor, 2001; Sloboda and Juslin, 2001; Thayer and Levenson, 1983; Thompson et al., 2001), as is the eff...