Perceiving emotions in music: Effects of sound quality, alexithymia, and empathy

In the present paper, we explored personality and environmental effects on individuals’ emotion perception in music listening. In a large experimental study, 503 participants listened to music pieces displaying different emotions with blurred or normal sound quality and indicated what emotions they perceived. Two personality traits were then assessed, empathy and alexithymia, which have been shown to be related to emotion processing. We found that the sound quality was detrimental to individuals’ perception of different emotions in music, especially so for the two most active excerpts (energy and happiness). Results also showed that specific subfacets of empathy and alexithymia affected participants’ perception of several different emotions in the music pieces. The empathy facet of Fantasy enhanced respondents’ perception of three emotions displayed in music (happiness, calmness, sadness). Empathic concern, another empathy facet promoted individuals’ emotion recognition in the nostalgic music, while individuals’ Difficulty to verbalize emotions as an alexithymia facet impaired emotion perception accuracy for energetic music. We found no interaction effects on emotion recognition between the manipulated environmental factor and the assessed personality traits. That is, the individuals’ level of empathy and alexithymia played no role for how malleable their emotion perception was to the music pieces’s sound quality.