Carolina Labbé

Musical Emotions Predicted by Feelings of Entrainment

Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2014

In our study, two groups of participants (n = 61 and n = 58) listened to nine pieces for solo vio... more In our study, two groups of participants (n = 61 and n = 58) listened to nine pieces for solo violin and rated how they felt along an affect dimension and along the nine Geneva Emotional Music Scale dimensions. After each piece, they completed a 12-item questionnaire corresponding to subjective entrainment reports. A factorial analysis of this Musical Entrainment Questionnaire revealed a two-factor solution, with Visceral Entrainment (VE) corresponding to sensations of internal bodily entrainment and Motor Entrainment (ME) reflecting participants’ inclination to move to the beat. These findings represent, to the best of our knowledge, the first empirical evidence for the existence of two components underlying entrainment capable of predicting specific emotional responses to music. Indeed, although both factors predicted Affect, Joyful activation, Transcendence, Wonder, Power, and Tenderness dimensions, only VE predicted Nostalgia and Sadness. Moreover, Peacefulness was mostly predic...

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Emotional Prosody Recognition Enhances and Progressively Complexifies From Childhood to Adolescence

Background: Emotional prosody is the result of the dynamic variation of acoustical non-verbal asp... more Background: Emotional prosody is the result of the dynamic variation of acoustical non-verbal aspects of language that allow people to convey and recognize emotions. Understanding how this recognition develops during childhood to adolescence is the goal of the present paper. We also aim to test the maturation of the ability to perceive mixed emotions in voice. Methods: We tested 133 children and adolescents, aged between 6 and 17 years old, exposed to 4 kinds of emotional (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness) and neutral linguistic meaningless stimuli. Participants were asked to judge the type and degree of perceived emotion on continuous scales. Results: By means of a general linear mixed model analysis, as predicted, a significant interaction between age and emotion was found. The ability to recognize emotions significantly increased with age for all emotional and neutral vocalizations. Girls recognized anger better than boys, who instead confused fear with neutral prosody more th...

Affective experiences to chords are modulated by mode, meter, tempo, and subjective entrainment

Psychology of Music

Mode and tempo are known to influence affective experiences during music listening. While mode (m... more Mode and tempo are known to influence affective experiences during music listening. While mode (major/minor) is associated with emotional valence (positive/negative), tempo (slow/fast) is associated with emotional arousal (calm/excited). Heart rate (HR) and respiration rate (RR) are also thought to adapt (entrain) to the tempo, leading to emotion elicitation via afferent feedback mechanisms. Here, we tested the influence of mode, tempo, and entrainment on affective experiences by recording HR, RR, and self-reported subjective entrainment and affect measures while participants ( N = 20) listened to major and minor chords embedded in slow and fast isochronous, metrical, and random sequences. Though there was no effect of tempo on HR or RR, both were faster during major and metrically random chord sequences, respectively. Slower HR positively predicted visceral entrainment (VE) ratings, the extent to which one feels one’s internal rhythms changing, and fast tempo positively predicted m...

Towards a Dynamic Approach to the Study of Emotions Expressed by Music

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2012

The emotions expressed through music have often been investigated by asking listeners to fill que... more The emotions expressed through music have often been investigated by asking listeners to fill questionnaires at the end of a given musical performance or an excerpt; only few studies have been dedicated to the understanding of the dynamics of emotions expressed by music in laboratory or in social contexts. Based on a specific model of emotions related to music, the Geneva Emotion Music Scale (GEMS), we tested to what extent such dynamic judgments are reliable and might be a promising avenue to better understand how listeners are able to attribute different kinds of emotions expressed through music and how the social contexts might influence such judgments. The results indicate a high reliability between listeners for different musical excerpts and for different contexts of listening including concerts, i.e. a social context, and laboratory experiments.

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Grandjean & Labbé (2017) The impact of Dalcroze Eurhythmics on the development of self-representations and social competencies

Pédagogie, art et science : l'apprentissage par et pour la musique selon la méthode Jaques-Dalcroze, 2017

The practice of a musical discipline and of Dalroze Eurythmics in particular allows for the devel... more The practice of a musical discipline and of Dalroze Eurythmics in particular allows for the development of several corollary skills in children. Through a practice integrating music, body, and action we studied the impact of these activities on the evolution of children’s perception and mental representations of their bodies, also known as body schema. We present and discuss the results of a study carried out at the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute where we tracked the evolution of children’s body schema over several months. We discuss the relationship between the development of the body schema and the capacity to perform certain musical activities as well as other functions in light of recent neuroscientific and psychological findings on the construction of self-representations.

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The effect of ensemble and solo performance on affective experiences induced by music

by Carolina Labbé and Didier Grandjean

Scherer and Zentner (2001) propose that affective experiences might be the product of a multiplic... more Scherer and Zentner (2001) propose that affective experiences might be the product of a multiplicative function between structural, performance, listener, and contextual related features. Yet research on the effects of structure, and particularly texture, has mostly focused on perceived emotions. We therefore sought to test the effects of structural features on subjective musical experiences in a listening study by manipulating the performance, solo versus ensemble, of five segments of a piece for string quartet, while also exploring the impact of listener features such as musical training, listening habits and stable dispositions such as empathy. We found that participants (N = 144, 78% female; M age = 22.74 years, SD = 5.13) felt like moving more (ME) and perceived their physiological rhythms change more (VE) during ensemble compared to solo conditions. Moreover, ME significantly predicted positive emotions, such as Wonder and Power, while VE significantly predicted both positive and negative emotions, such as Tension and Nostalgia. We also found direct main and interaction effects of both segment and performance factors on all four emotion models. We believe these results support Scherer and Zentner's model and show the importance of considering the interaction between compositional and instrumental texture when studying music-induced emotions.

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Rhythmic entrainment as a musical affect induction mechanism

by Carolina Labbé and Didier Grandjean

One especially important feature of metrical music is that it contains periodicities that listene... more One especially important feature of metrical music is that it contains periodicities that listeners' bodily rhythms can adapt to. Recent psychological frameworks have introduced the notion of rhythmic entrainment, among other mechanisms, as an emotion induction principle. In this review paper, we discuss rhythmic entrainment as an affect induction mechanism by differentiating four levels of entrainment in humans—perceptual, autonomic physiological, motor, and social—all of which could contribute to a subjective feeling component. We review the theoretical and empirical literature on rhythmic entrainment to music that supports the existence of these different levels of entrainment by describing the phenomena and characterizing the associated underlying brain processes. The goal of this review is to present the theoretical implications and empirical findings about rhythmic entrainment as an important principle at the basis of affect induction via music, since it rests upon the temporal dimension of music, which is a specificity of music as an affective stimulus.

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Getting the beat: Entrainment of brain activity by musical rhythm and pleasantness

by Wiebke Trost, Sascha Frühholz, Daniele Schön, Carolina Labbé, and Didier Grandjean

Rhythmic entrainment is an important component of emotion induction by music, but brain circuits ... more Rhythmic entrainment is an important component of emotion induction by music, but brain circuits recruited during spontaneous entrainment of attention by music and the influence of the subjective emotional feelings evoked by music remain still largely unresolved. In this study we used fMRI to test whether the metric structure of music entrains brain activity and how music pleasantness influences such entrainment. Participants listened to piano music while performing a speeded visuomotor detection task in which targets appeared time-locked to either strong or weak beats. Each musical piece was presented in both a consonant/pleasant and dissonant/unpleasant version. Consonant music facilitated target detection and targets presented synchronously with strong beats were detected faster. FMRI showed increased activation of bilateral caudate nucleus when responding on strong beats, whereas consonance enhanced activity in attentional networks. Meter and consonance selectively interacted in the caudate nucleus, with greater meter effects during dissonant than consonant music. These results reveal that the basal ganglia, involved both in emotion and rhythm processing, critically contribute to rhythmic entrainment of subcortical brain circuits by music.

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Musical Emotions Predicted by Feelings of Entrainment.

In our study, two groups of participants (n = 61 and n = 58) listened to nine pieces for solo vio... more In our study, two groups of participants (n = 61 and n = 58) listened to nine pieces for solo violin and rated how they felt along an affect dimension and along the nine Geneva Emotional Music Scale dimensions. After each piece, they completed a 12-item questionnaire corresponding to subjective entrainment reports. A factorial analysis of this Musical Entrainment Questionnaire revealed a two-factor solution, with Visceral Entrainment (VE) corresponding to sensations of internal bodily entrainment and Motor Entrainment (ME) reflecting participants’ inclination to move to the beat. These findings represent, to the best of our knowledge, the first empirical evidence for the existence of two components underlying entrainment capable of predicting specific emotional responses to music. Indeed, although both factors predicted Affect, Joyful activation, Transcendence, Wonder, Power, and Tenderness dimensions, only VE predicted Nostalgia and Sadness. Moreover, Peacefulness was mostly predicted by ME, whereas Tension was mostly predicted by VE.

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Torres-Eliard, K., Labbé, C., & Grandjean D. (2012). Towards a Dynamic Approach to the Study of Emotions Expressed by Music.

The emotions expressed through music have often been investigated by asking listeners to fill que... more The emotions expressed through music have often been investigated by asking listeners to fill questionnaires at the end of a given musical performance or an excerpt; only few studies have been dedicated to the understanding of the dynamics of emotions expressed by music in laboratory or in social contexts. Based on a specific model of emotions related to music, the Geneva Emotion Music Scale (GEMS), we tested to what extent such dynamic judgments are reliable and might be a promising avenue to better understand how listeners are able to attribute different kinds of emotions expressed through music and how the social contexts might influence such judgments. The results indicate a high reliability between listeners for different musical excerpts and for different contexts of listening including concerts, i.e. a social context, and laboratory experiments.

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