Cross-Cultural Consistency in Bodily Maps of Music-Induced Sensations
In the study, the intricate relationship between music, emotions, and bodily sensations was explored, with a focus on cross-cultural consistency. The research aimed to investigate how both the emotional and structural aspects of music influence bodily sensations and whether these sensations exhibit cultural consistency.
Cross-Cultural Consistency
The findings revealed that music-induced bodily sensations varied based on the emotional qualities of the music, and these sensations, along with the corresponding emotions, were consistent across Western and East Asian cultures.
The study involved participants from Western Cross-Cultural Consistency (European and North American) and East Asian (Chinese) cultures, totaling 903 and 1035 participants, respectively. The participants were presented with silhouettes of human bodies and were asked to indicate the bodily regions where they felt changes in activity while listening to Western and Asian musical pieces. The resulting bodily sensation maps (BSMs) varied depending on the emotional qualities of the songs, particularly in limb, chest, and head regions.
Notably, the music-induced emotions and corresponding BSMs were replicable across Western and East Asian subjects. The BSMs clustered similarly across cultures, and the cluster structures were comparable for BSMs and self-reports of emotional experience. The acoustic and structural features of music consistently influenced the emotional experiences and bodily sensations across cultures.
The study highlighted the significance of subjective bodily experience in music-induced emotions and demonstrated consistent associations between musical features, music-induced emotions, and bodily sensations across distant cultures. The cross-cultural similarities in bodily sensations suggested a universal embodiment of musical emotions, emphasizing the shared links between musical features, bodily sensations, and emotions across different cultural contexts.
