Religious Ecstatics, "Deep Listeners," and Musical Emotion (original) (raw)
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European Journal of Investigation in Health, Psychology and Education
The present study investigates the psychophysiological activation patterns of religious experiences in worship practices using Heart Rate (HR) and Respiratory Rate (RR) analyses. For this, 60 evangelical individuals participated in an experiment where they worshipped to six selected conditions and continuously indicated how strongly they sensed what they believed to be the presence of God. These ratings were correlated with the biometric data to indicate whether the experience has an activating effect on the believer’s vegetative system (activation hypothesis) or a soothing effect thereupon (pacification hypothesis). Statistical analyses showed that the psychological disposition during the religious worship experience speeds up the physiological responses, which was indicated by increases in HR and RR. Hence, the activation hypothesis was accepted, and the pacification hypothesis was rejected.
The Emotional Effects of Music
Eastern Journal of Dialogue and Culture, 2023
ABSTRACT The joy of singing a favourite song and praising God, the happiness of hearing of it and singing along in a worship service, the thrill of worshipping with music on a Sunday morning—elicit positive emotional responses on the worshipper or listener. Alongside it has the ability to induce negative emotional responses—instilling sadness upon hearing the music/lyrics making them remember a particular sin and come to God’s presence in humiliation and reverence. This emotional reaction can be caused only by full, conscious, and active participation in worship which gratify the cognitive appreciation that helps humans make and experience meaning by impacting mood and emotion within any listener. Worship expresses personal feelings and can have an enormous impact on mood and emotional states. In worship, humans express joy, sadness, tears, feelings of humility or shame. Although these worship practices are included in the liturgical traditions, this kind of display of emotions during worship services is modern appealing which is more effusive as an expression than as a tradition or ritual. These kinds of worship in a Christian church evoke subtle emotional expression that can kindle not only feelings but also can aggravate emotional states when we are in worship. In this regard, Music may be the most obvious emotionally suggestive component of worship and all acts of worship have the capacity to bring about emotional responses. This paper ascertains the ability of contemporary worship music particularly ‘God Will Make a Way’ and its ability in impacting mood and emotion within the listener. Key Words: Music, Mood, Emotion, Pleasure, Contemporary Worship, Feeling, Worship.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
In western cultures, when it comes to places of worship and liturgies, music, acoustics and architecture go hand in hand. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether the emotions evoked by music are enhanced by the acoustics of the space where the music was composed to be played on. We explored whether the emotional responses of western naïve listeners to two vocal pieces from the Renaissance, one liturgical and one secular, convolved with the impulse responses of four Christian temples from the United Kingdom, were modulated by the appropriate piece/space matching. In an alternative forced choice task where participants had to indicate their preference for the original recording of the piece (not convolved with any temple-like acoustics) vs. the convolved one, no significant differences were found. However, in the tasks where participants rated their emotional in response to each piece and acoustic condition, the factorial ANCOVA analyses performed on the results revealed...
Peter Kivy, Sacred Music, and Affective Response: Knowing God Through Music
Knowing God Personally: Essays in Analytic Spirituality, ed. Joshua Cockayne and David Worsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
Knowing someone personally centrally involves engaging in various patterns of affective response. Inasmuch as humans can know God personally, this basic insight about the relationship between personal knowledge and affective response also applies to God: knowing God involves responding to him, and to the world, in various affectively toned ways. In light of this insight, I explore how one particular practice might contribute to human knowledge of God: namely, engaging with sacred music – in particular, sacred music in the Western, classical tradition. In investigating this topic, I tackle an issue at the interface between the philosophy of religion and aesthetics: sacred music’s capacity to arouse religious emotions. I use as a springboard Peter Kivy’s view that ‘music alone’ can only arouse emotions about itself. This view, I argue, has a counterintuitive consequence: the music in sacred works would play no part in arousing emotions with religious objects. In contrast, I develop an account of how music combines with religious factors to arouse religious emotions. I then draw out two consequences for how music can facilitate understanding between religious and non-religious outlooks. The upshot of all this, I suggest, is that by expanding the listener’s religious-emotional landscape, sacred music can enrich her knowledge of God – and that this is possible whether or not the listener subscribes propositionally to God’s reality or to any other religious doctrines.
A psychodynamic inquiry into the spiritually evocative potential of music
Music has the uncanny potential to transport its listeners to normally inaccessible realms of the psyche. Grounded in an object relations perspective informed by the burgeoning neo-monistic philosophical discipline of somaesthetics, it is suggested that the synthesis of conscious (necessarily explicit), unconscious (potentially explicit), and nonconscious (necessarily implicit) elements comprises a more utilitarian concept of the psychic essence of an individual: the “foundational self.” This foundational self, or the “spiritual self,” represents the irreducible and ultimately unformulatable core of human experience that results from the dialectical fusion of true-self object relations with concomitant developmentally primitive psychosomatic self states. It is argued that certain types of so-called “sacred music” – music whose form aligns with implicit affective registries that are filtered through intrapsychic constellations of true self object relations – act as perhaps the most potent catalyst in facilitating experiences of spirituality. The phonological qualities of sacred music share the same spectrum of transitional space in which the foundational self enjoys its fullest expression. Sacred music possesses the ability to dissolve explicit representational boundaries in service of achieving symbolic interpersonal fusion with the foundational self, in so doing facilitating a blissfully ego-boundless sensation of unio mystica.
Frontiers in psychology, 2014
Music has a unique power to elicit moments of intense emotional and psychophysiological response. These moments - termed "chills," "thrills", "frissons," etc. - are subjects of introspection and philosophical debate, as well as scientific study in music perception and cognition. The present article integrates the existing multidisciplinary literature in an attempt to define a comprehensive, testable, and ecologically valid model of transcendent psychophysiological moments in music.
Musically Induced Emotions: Subjective Measures of Arousal and Valence
Music and Medicine, 2011
This study was designed to investigate whether US participants would experience the same emotions when listening to specific pieces of music as were labeled by participants in a previous study done in the Netherlands. It examined whether musical excerpts would fall into quadrants of serene, happy, agitated, and sad created by an interaction of the dimensions of arousal (calm-excited) and valence (unpleasant-pleasant) and whether the mean scores would fall within quadrant positions similar to those in the previous study. Participants heard 12 musical excerpts and responded by turning dials depicting different degrees of arousal and valence. After one of the pieces of music was reallocated to a different category, they experienced 3 of the 4 emotions as did earlier participants. Implications for the study of emotion in music and its use in music therapy and music medicine are discussed.