A crucial issue in research on music and emotion is whether music evokes genuine emotional responses in listeners (the emotivist position) or whether listeners merely perceive emotions expressed by the music (the cognitivist position). To investigate this issue, we measured self-reported emotion, facial muscle activity, and autonomic activity in 32 participants while they listened to popular music composed with either a happy or a sad emotional expression. Results revealed a coherent manifestation in the experiential, expressive, and physiological components of the emotional response system, which supports the emotivist position. Happy music generated more zygomatic facial muscle activity, greater skin conductance, lower finger temperature, more happiness and less sadness than sad music. The finding that the emotion induced in the listener was the same as the emotion expressed in the music is consistent with the notion that music may induce emotions through a process of emotional contagion.

The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) is among the most widely used scales assessing autistic traits in the general population. However, some aspects of the AQ are questionable. To test its scale properties, the AQ was translated into Swedish, and data were collected from 349 adults, 130 with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 219 without ASD, and analysed with Rasch. Several scale properties of the AQ were satisfactory but it did not meet the criterion of a unidimensional measure of autistic traits. The Rasch analysis showed that the 50-item AQ could be reduced to a 12-item subset with little loss of explanatory power, with the potential to efficiently measure the degree to which adults with and without ASD show autistic traits.

Empirical studies have indicated that listeners value music primarily for its ability to arouse emotions. Yet little is known about which emotions listeners normally experience when listening to music, or about the causes of these emotions. The goal of this study was therefore to explore the prevalence of emotional reactions to music in everyday life and how this is influenced by various factors in the listener, the music, and the situation. A self-administered mail questionnaire was sent to a random and nationally representative sample of 1,500 Swedish citizens between the ages of 18 and 65, and 762 participants (51%) responded to the questionnaire. Thirty-two items explored both musical emotions in general (semantic estimates) and the most recent emotion episode featuring music for each participant (episodic estimates). The results revealed several variables (e.g., personality, age, gender, listener activity) that were correlated with particular emotions. A multiple discriminant analysis indicated that three of the most common emotion categories in a set of musical episodes (i.e., happiness , sadness , nostalgia ) could be predicted with a mean accuracy of 70% correct based on data obtained from the questionnaire. The results may inform theorizing about musical emotions and guide the selection of causal variables for manipulation in future experiments.