A Special Class of Experience: Positive Affect Evoked by Music and the Arts
Abstract
:1. Introduction
the most elementary consciously accessible affective feelings (and their neurophysiological counterparts) that need not be directed at anything. Examples include a sense of pleasure or displeasure, tension or relaxation, and depression or elation. Core affect ebbs and flows over the course of time. Although core affect is not necessarily consciously directed at anything—it can be free-floating (p. 806).
2. Aesthetic Emotion Words
3. Subtle, Coarse, Pseudo, and Real
These secondary emotions themselves are assuredly for the most part constituted of other incoming sensations aroused by the diffusive wave of reflex effects which the beautiful object sets up. A glow, a pang in the breast, a shudder, a fulness of the breathing, a flutter of the heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a stirring in the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides, may be felt the moment the beauty excites us. ([40] (p. 470), italics as in the source)
How far can unpleasantness go before it is incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment? Can a person enjoy music and have an unpleasant emotion at the same time? Are there mixed feelings? Such troublesome questions as these must be answered if it is assumed that a person’s pleasure in a work of art can be accompanied by displeasure, but they need never be raised if it is discovered that the so-called emotions are really not emotions at all, but are characters of the music which bear a striking formal resemblance to emotion [44] (pp. 199–200).
4. Refined Emotions
[R]efinement represents a mode of perhaps all emotions that language or emotion taxonomy could distinguish. There exist refined anger, love, and sexual ecstasy, as well as coarse, straightforward anger, love, and sexual ecstasy. (p. 227)
5. Flow, Absorption, and Concepts in Positive Psychology
(a) elation, gladness, and joy …; (b) awe …, wonder …, inspiration …; (c) mindfulness …, insight …, and self-transcendence …; (d) hope …, optimism …, and positive thinking …; (e) imagination …, anticipation …, and positive daydreaming …; (f) absorption …, flow …, and peak experience …; and (g) flourishing …, capitalizing …, and savoring …. (pp. 61–62)
6. Discussion and Conclusions
experiences in which the individual transcends ordinary reality and perceives Being or ultimate reality. Peak experiences are typically of short duration and accompanied by positive affect. Peak experiences teach the individual that the universe is ultimately good or neutral, not evil; that the ultimate good is composed of Being-values such as truth, goodness, wholeness, beauty, dichotomy-transcendence, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, necessity, completion, justice, order, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, and self-sufficiency; and that opposites really do not exist. As a result of having had a peak experience the individual is usually changed so that he or she is more psychologically healthy. (p. 93)
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Grouping | Explanation of Grouping | Subscale Labels 1 | Role in Present Study |
---|---|---|---|
Prototypical aesthetic emotions | “capture aesthetic appreciation irrespective of the pleasingness” | (1) feeling of beauty/liking, (2) fascination, (3) being moved, (4) awe (and, more weakly, (5) enchantment/wonder and (6) nostalgia/longing). | This links well to the proposed conceptualization of positive affect class. |
Pleasing emotions † | “all emotions with positive affective valence” | (7) joy, (8) humour, (9) vitality, (10) energy, and (11) relaxation | This links fairly well to the proposed conceptualization of positive affect class, but may also be well suited to the emotion class (e.g., relaxation). |
Epistemic emotions * | “the search for and finding of meaning during aesthetic experiences” | (12) surprise, (13) interest, (14) intellectual challenge, and (15) insight | These subscales can be characterised as a positive affect class or as a separate experiential class. |
Negative emotions | “emotions often are felt during aesthetic experiences that not only are unpleasant but also contribute to a negative evaluation regarding aesthetic merit” | (16) feeling of ugliness, (17) boredom, (18) confusion, (19) anger, (20) uneasiness, and (21) sadness. | Omitted because it could include an other-than-positive experience. |
- 1 Subscale labels and explanations are taken from [35].
- * Adopted as part of the affect class experience in the present paper;
- † adopted as part of the emotion class of experience as part of the present paper; other groupings not adopted.
Affect Term 1 | Subclass 2 | Source 3 |
---|---|---|
Absorption | Deep | f |
Acceptance wriggles | Physical | [48] |
Anticipation | Shallow | e |
Attraction PAE | Shallow | [35] |
Awe PAE | Deep | b, [27,35] |
Capitalizing | g | |
Captivation PAE | Deep | [35] |
Chills | Physical | [27] |
Contemplation | Deep | [48] |
Crying − | Physical | [41] |
Curiosity | z | |
Delight | Shallow | [44] |
Ecstasy | Deep | [44] |
Elation | Deep | a, [44] |
Enchantment PAE | Deep | [35] |
Enjoyment | Shallow | [27,44] |
Enriching | Deep | z |
Exhilaration | Deep | [63] |
Exultation | Deep | [44] |
Fascination | Deep | z |
Fandom | Shallow | z |
Feeling of beauty PAE | Deep | [35] |
Flourishing | Deep | g |
Flow | Deep | f |
Flutter/Racing of the heart | Physical | [40,41] |
Frisson | Physical | [27] |
Fulfilling | Deep | z |
Fulness of the breathing | Physical | [40] |
Gladness * | Shallow | a |
Glow | Deep | [40,48] |
Goose pimples | Physical | [41] |
Hope | Deep | d |
Imagination | Shallow | e |
Ineffable | Deep | z |
Insight | Deep | c, [35] |
Inspiration | Deep | b |
Interest | Shallow | [35] |
Joy * | Deep | a |
Kama muta ** | Deep | [63,64,65,66] |
Liking PAE | Shallow | [27,35] |
Longing −,PAE | Deep | [35] |
Love * | Deep | [6] |
Lump in throat − | Physical | [41] |
Mindfulness | Deep | c |
Moistening of the eyes − | Physical | [40] |
Moving/(being) moved −,PAE,** | Deep | [27,35] |
Nostalgia PAE | Deep | [35,67] |
Optimism * | Shallow | d |
Pang in the breast − | Physical | [40] |
Peak experience | Deep | f |
Pit of stomach sensation | Physical | [41] |
Pleasantness | Shallow | [27,44] |
Pleasure | Shallow | [44] |
Positive daydreaming | Shallow | e |
Positive thinking | Shallow | d |
Power | Deep | [67] |
Preference | Shallow | z |
Racing heart | Physical | [41] |
Rapture | Deep | [44] |
Satisfaction | Shallow | z |
Savoring | Deep | g, [48] |
Self-transcendence | Deep | c |
Serenity * | Deep | z |
Shiver down the back/spine | Physical | [40,41] |
Shudder − | Physical | [40] |
Stirring in the hypogastrium † | Physical | [40] |
Surprise | Shallow | [35] |
Tears − | Physical | [41] |
Thrills | Deep | [27] |
Transcendence | Deep | [27] |
Transport | Deep | [44] |
Wonder PAE | Deep | b, [35] |
- 1 Some proposed affect class experience terms are accompanied by notes:
- † Hypogastrium (in the ‘Stirring in the hypogastrium’ entry) is the anatomical structure that best fits the ordinary language description ‘Pit of the stomach’ (see that entry).
- * Examples of terms that may be more commonly used to describe both emotion class and affect class experience.
- − despite being positive affect terms, these marked items have at least some potential negative connotations. It is the context (of contemplating or engaging with music/art) that enables these affects to be experienced as strongly positive.
- ** ‘Kama muta’ is an affect class related to being moved (by love) (see entry ‘Moving…’). It has also been linked to the physical experience subclass because the experience can include ‘tears, chills, warmth in the chest, feeling choked up’ (the latter represented by ’Lump in the throat’ in the table) [63]. Because the term is borrowed from the ancient Sanskrit language [68] and has been relatively recently proposed for adoption into English, it is currently not in common usage.
- PAE Classified as a ‘prototypical aesthetic emotion’ by [25].
- 2 Proposed subclasses of affect class experience: hedonic tone (deep or shallow), and whether experience is described directly in terms of a physical correlate (physical).
- 3 ‘Source’ lists sample sources in which the term was located as an amendable member of the positive affect class of experience. A single letter denotation from a to g indicates one of the seven triads of the 21 positive psychology terms taken from Bryant, King, and Smart [62]. The single letter z is a term proposed in the present paper. Other sources cited in the table are (for more details, see References):
- [6]—Schubert (2013);
- [27]—Schubert, North, and Hargreaves (2016);
- [35]—Schindler et al. (2017);
- [44]—Pratt (1931);
- [48]—Frijda and Sundararajan (2007);
- [63]—Zickfeld et al. (2019);
- [64]—Fiske, Schubert, and Seibt (2017);
- [65]—Steinnes et al. (2019);
- [66]—Fiske, Seibt, and Schubert T. (2019);
- [67]—Schubert, Hargreaves, and North (2019).
C | (Positive) Affect Class | Emotion Class | S |
---|---|---|---|
Structure | Refined, subtle emotions (James) OR a wide range of emotions can be both coarse and refined (Frijda and Sundararajan [48]). Different terms may have considerable overlap in meaning with other affect experiences and may be difficult to clearly distinguish from one another. | Coarse emotions. Generally easy to distinguish from one another. | [40] OR [48] |
Sample 1 | Awe, moved, wonder, thrills, absorbed, and energised. | Sad, angry, scared, calm, happy, and excited. | [25] |
Feels like | Savouring of, and yet detachment from, the coarse emotion. | The coarse emotion itself, e.g., feeling sad or feeling happy. | [48] |
Directedness | Diffuse; difficult to poinpoint the sensation to a particular, unique type, or to a particular object/event, apart from the object/event being engaged with (e.g., frisson, thrills, and chills are overlapping concepts and subtley distinguishable from one another [74,75,76]). The experience may be undescribable in words (ineffable). | Specific, identifiable, self-contained experience (e.g., I feel happy, I feel sad, etc.); focussed on the self or the object causing the emotion (i.e., not as diffuse). | [6,24,25,26] |
Lexicon | The terminology is poorly established and needs to consider the ineffable. With the possible exception of some ‘aesthetic emotions’ (awe, being moved, wonder, and thrills), there is no prototypical terminology; core affect. | Terminology well established. Prototypical: discrete, definable. | [25] |
Structure: | An intensity or strength of feeling eminating (usually) from the emotion. Metaphors with temperature (heat), charge, or force/energy of the coarse emotion; embellishment of simultaneous emotion class experience; wholly or in part positive. | Consists of physiological, signalling, feelingful, and motivational components; valence, arousal; can be positive or negative. | [6,21,22,24,48,77,78,79] |
Function | Powerful, motivating force, without necessarily knowing why (apart from the act of engagement with the object/event); arises through pure contemplation/engagement with a thought, object, or event and is in and of itself a positive; supports exploration of emotions in a safe environment and possibly generates wellbeing. | Various: attraction, neutral, repulsion (including withdrawal, attack); knowing why (e.g., the cause/trigger of the feeling); adapting to the environment; moral, self-reflective, or social change/improvement. | [16,25,36,52,61,80,81,82,83,84] |
- C = conceptual aspect.
- S = sources upon which interpretations of the conceptualization are based.
- 1 See Table 2 for the more extensive, proposed list of affect terms.
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Schubert, E. A Special Class of Experience: Positive Affect Evoked by Music and the Arts. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 4735. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19084735
Schubert E. A Special Class of Experience: Positive Affect Evoked by Music and the Arts. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2022; 19(8):4735. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19084735
Chicago/Turabian StyleSchubert, Emery. 2022. "A Special Class of Experience: Positive Affect Evoked by Music and the Arts" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 8: 4735. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19084735