Changes in the perception and the psychological structure of musical emotions with advancing age

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: To date, little is known about how advancing age may impact perception of emotions in music. This study was designed to test whether there are age-related changes in emotional judgments and psychological structure for musical emotions.

Twenty-five older (64-81 years) and 25 younger (18-30 years) listeners performed emotional judgments and free categorization tasks on happy, peaceful, sad, and threatening musical excerpts. Correlations, analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), and multidimensional scaling analyses were conducted to examine the effect of age on emotional judgments and categorization performances.

Compared with younger adults, older adults did not discriminate the arousal difference between peaceful and threatening excerpts and showed higher association between arousal and valence judgments. The multidimensional scaling analysis indicated that the emotional space showed by older listeners did not fit younger listeners' bidimensional valence-arousal structure. There was also a better categorization for happy excerpts among the older group.

Altogether, these data are consistent with the view that advancing age may result in the reduction of emotional complexity and a distortion of the emotional processing in a positive direction.