Among the vital issues in music psychology is to how music will impact emotional experience of a person. Believe it or not, music has this special ability of evoking powerful and strong emotional responses similar to thrills and chills in its listeners; almost the same thing when using this crossbow when having target practice.
Positive Emotions are Dominating Musical Experiences
Pleasurable music might help in releasing neurotransmitters that are oftentimes linked with rewards similar to dopamine. Listening to music is actually a simple way of altering moods or relieving stress. People are using music in their lives to be able to enhance, diminish and regulate negative emotional feelings they have like fatigue and stress.
The question here is, how is it possible that listening to music can produce pleasures and emotions among listeners?
Musical Pleasure
The enjoyment and happiness of music seem to involve the same pleasure part of the brain as well as with other kinds of pleasure like drugs, sex and food. According to research, it shows that aesthetic stimulus similar to music can hit the brain’s dopamine system naturally.
In a different study, participants have listened to their favorite songs after they take naltrexone. This is prescribed often by physicians to treat addition disorders. Researchers discovered that when subjects took the drug, they responded that the songs they used to listen no longer bring pleasure. On the other hand, not everyone have the same emotional reaction to music. This is because about 5 percent of population doesn’t experience chills. Such incapacity of deriving pleasure particularly from music is referred to us musical anhedonia.
Musical Anticipation
Music can be a pleasurable experience both when it violations and fulfills expectation. The more unpredictable the events are in music, the more awestruck the person will have in their musical experience. This is because of the reason that we are more appreciative of music that’s a bit more complex and less predictable.
Action Tendency
Oftentimes, music can create a strong action tendency to be able to move in coordination with the beat it has. Our internal rhythms similar to heartbeat either slow down or speed up to be one with the music we are listening to.