Castro, S. L. & Lima, C.
Faculty of Psychology and Education at the University of Porto, Portugal
Listening to music is like going through a landscape that offers multiple views. How are the views on emotions shaped by two experiential factors, musical expertise proper and age? Forty musicians and forty musically naive persons, in each group half young adults (18-30 years) and half middle-aged adults (40-60 years), listened to music excerpts validated to express happiness, sadness, peacefulness and fear. They rated how much each excerpt expressed these four emotions on 10-point intensity scales. Intended emotions were consistently perceived as more intense than the non-intended ones, but the pattern of judgements differed according to age and musical expertise. Middle age was associated with decreased responsiveness to sadness and fear, whereas responsiveness to happiness and peacefulness remained invariant since young adulthood. Years of musical training correlated with enhanced sensitivity to the intended emotions. Middle-aged musicians, but not younger ones, were more accurate than musically naive listeners. These effects were independent of domain-general cognitive abilities and personality traits. Mechanisms supporting emotion recognition in music are robust, but also variable: they are shaped by age and musical expertise.