From 2012 to 2023, the American Psychological Association served as publisher of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain. Annabel Cohen and Mark Schmuckler were the successive editors-in-chiefs during this time. As the journal is ceasing publication, the two editors reflect on the development and progress of the journal in the context of the history of psychology and publication trends. They present their review in 10 short movements each with a unique musical emotional expressivity: overture, amabile, vivace, elegy doloroso, sforzando, capriccio, con brio, pendolo, agilmente, and finale risonante, ending on a very upbeat note! Early on, Psychomusicology offered a much-needed research forum for the psychology of music. More recently, the recognized importance of music psychology to almost all areas of psychology has led to increasing numbers of outlets for publication. During the 12 recent years under APA's stewardship, the journal more than doubled the number of articles published since the journal's inception in 1981. The entire corpus of almost 600 articles represents foundational and well-cited contributions to such current research areas as musical expectancy, performance excellence, musical development, neuroscience, emotion, preference, and film music, among others. Cohen and Schmuckler express deep gratitude to the authors, past editorial board members, and reviewers for their contributions to this corpus, and to the American Psychological Association Publications office and staff both for support and, importantly, for holding and making accessible in perpetuity the outstanding scholarship within the archives of Psychomusicology: Music Mind & Brain and Psychomusicology: A Journal of Music Cognition.
Growing evidence suggests that pitch influences musical processing, with melodic processing being enhanced in higher pitch ranges (e.g., Fujioka et al., 2005) and rhythmic processing being enhanced in lower pitches, and these effects may have a basis in elementary properties of the auditory system (e.g., Hove et al., 2014). As such, pitch may constitute a fundamental constraint on the mechanisms that underpin musical learning. One such mechanism is implicit learning: the ability to learn from mere exposure without intention and without a clear awareness of what has been learned. The present study examined whether the high pitch effects that enhance melodic processing extend to implicit learning of melodic structure as well. In an artificial melodic grammar experiment, it was found that participants learned melodic structure better when instantiated in a lower rather than a higher pitch range. We propose that hearing melodies in lower pitch ranges attracts more attention, because melodic information is usually instantiated in higher pitches, and lower pitch melodies may cause attention to shift leading to more learning.
Having participants listen and react to musical stimuli is one of music cognition's foundational methods. Whereas most researchers have used stimuli adapted from existing musical traditions in such work, others have incorporated artificial stimuli (i.e., stimuli generated specifically for research that are not borrowed from any existing musical system) into their research designs. No review of this growing literature on artificial stimuli exists, leaving open the question of how useful they are in helping formulate and test research questions in music cognition. To this end, a systematic narrative review of empirical studies utilizing artificial musical stimuli (N = 52) was conducted. Comparing these studies to analogous works involving conventional stimuli in the areas of music preference, music learning, and musical emotion revealed the power of artificial stimuli in reducing concerns regarding stimulus familiarity and musical enculturation confounds, as well as in refining theory by reiterating the need for the development of composite predictive models in music cognition. This review also suggests that using artificial stimuli has the potential to help clarify the neurological and sociocognitive factors surrounding music listening behavior. Furthermore, because artificial stimuli are not tied to any existing sociocultural musical system, they may also lead to more generalizable findings. This enhanced generalizability may also coincide with expanded inclusivity, toward which the field of music cognition (and psychology more generally) are increasingly striving. Other potential uses, benefits, and limitations of artificial musical stimuli are discussed, as well as recommendations for researchers seeking to utilize such stimuli in future studies.
Sixty-nine participants made continuous response judgments of perceived arousal and valence while listening to 30-s extracts of 100 unfamiliar pieces within a novel recommender system. Our purpose was to take advantage of the relatively large number of participants and pieces studied (compared with prior work on time series analysis [TSA] of continuous affective responses to music) to test the generality of the deductions made from prior evidence in smaller studies. Accordingly, we expected highly autoregressive responses, and hypothesized that acoustic intensity fluctuation would be a major (population-wide, fixed-effect) predictor of arousal and to a lesser degree valence responses in multivariate models, operating in conjunction with broad features of the spectral profile of the music (such as spectral flatness and centroid). We expected considerable interparticipant variability and were interested in the degree to which there was also interpiece variability (both being features of group-specific, random effects). The basic expectations were supported, and we also demonstrated, partly by means of a novel use of cluster analysis, that the observed group variabilities in response features could not be readily attributed to indices of a range of participant-preference and piece-feature characteristics, determined prior to the experiments. A Bayesian analysis was developed, possibly for the first time in the TSA of continuous affect responses to music, since it provides a more comprehensive description of the parameters of the analysis (not only their best estimate point values) and their effects, and a comprehensive range of tests for meaningful effects.
Nostalgia, a past-oriented emotion characterized by complex affective responses, is a pervasive and fundamental human experience. Prior research has demonstrated that nostalgia serves various socioemotional functions, such as promoting a sense of belonging, enhancing one's perception of meaning in life, and boosting self-esteem. These positive emotions, in turn, can prompt individuals to engage in other-oriented behaviors, such as charitable giving. Building on this view, this study examined the impact of listening to nostalgic music on donation decisions. Undergraduate students in the United States (n = 83) and Mexico (n = 97) voluntarily participated in an online, one-on-one, experiment in which they listened to a series of self-selected nostalgic musical pieces and participated in a donation dictator game. Results indicated a significant relationship between music-evoked nostalgia and the amount of subsequent donations. Moreover, the study also found that individual differences in empathy, agreeableness (one of the Big Five personality traits), and perceived financial well-being also influenced the participants' donation decisions. Notably, the effects of these factors showed slight variations across the U.S. and Mexican samples, suggesting the role of culture in individual donation decisions.
