An SEM Approach to Validating the Psychological Model of Musical Groove

The experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. According to the psychological model of musical groove by Senn et al. (2019), the causes for the urge to move are linked to the properties of the music itself, to the personal background of the listener, to the listening situation, and to feedback loops between body movement and cognition. The model formulates eight hypotheses stating that the music affects a listener’s urge to move mediated through a variety of cognitive processes. This study develops a method based on Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to empirically test the model hypotheses. It evaluates five model hypotheses using data from an online listening experiment with 135 participants and 16 stylistically diverse musical stimuli (n=2160 observations). The SEM model had a good fit with the data (CFI=.958, RMSEA=.051) and explained a large proportion of the variance in the latent urge to move variable (R2=.737). Results show that music affects the urge to move mediated through listeners’ experiences of energetic arousal, listening pleasure, and temporal regularity. The stimuli themselves showed direct effects on the urge to move that were not mediated through the hypothesised mediation pathways. This suggests that the model is not yet complete. The current study demonstrates that the mediation structure of the psychological groove model can successfully be implemented using an SEM approach. The methodology may be adapted to investigate different repertoires, populations, and hypotheses in the future.