Do Sex Differences in Musical Perception and Emotional Response Exist?

Even before birth, humans demonstrate the ability to perceive sound and respond to this stimulus by eliciting heart rate changes and movement (Abrams 1995). This auditory perception may be useful in allowing newborn infants to recognize their mother’s voice and quickly develop an intimate relationship (DeCasper and Prescott 1984). With regards to music, mothers often communicate with infants by exaggerating melodic contour, or the ups and downs of melody, to convey emotional meaning even before the infant can understand their language (Fernald et al. 1989). This communicative strategy simultaneously initiates the infant’s musical development. Several perceptive mechanisms in music emerge from this beginning: harmony, rhythm, pitch relations, scale structure, and discrimination between consonance and dissonance (Winkler et al. 2009).

Some of these mechanisms undergo unique development that mirror essential aspects of human brain activity. For example, infants can actually outperform adults in remembering artificial scales, due to adult enculturation of conventional scales at the expense of unfamiliar ones (Trehub et al. 1999). Composers like Debussy often employ similarly unfamiliar scales in their music, such as the popular Claire de Lune. Alternatively, another study comparing infants and adults discovered that both groups prefer consonant intervals, suggesting that humans may possess a congenital preference for consonance in music, irrespective of specific development (Schellenberg and Trainor 1996). Investigations of brain activity have even discovered specific brain regions that process consonance, regions also involved in the emotional response (Blood et al. 1999). Perhaps this indicates an innate, emotional attraction toward certain sounds in music. Other perceptive mechanisms, such as pitch relations, have been manipulated to confuse listener’s perception. One intriguing project, the Shepard scale, utilizes ambiguous timbre and seemingly never-ending pitch height to arouse emotions (Shepard 1964). This evoked emotional arousal occurs when expectancies of upcoming pitches are not met (Huron 2006), and may further reflect the connection between music and emotion seen in consonance.

Among all the senses, sound has a unique power to arouse intense feelings. As championed by philosopher John Dewey (1934), “sounds come from outside the body, but sound itself is near, intimate; an excitation of the organism . . . vision arouses emotion in the form of interest . . . it is sound that makes us jump.” Music, or the organization of sound, is thus a robust way to convey emotion and immerse oneself in feeling. Emotional contagion (the phenomenon that perceiving an emotion induces the same emotion) occurs frequently in music to dramatic effect: fast, bright music with exaggerated rhythmic contrast may motivate the audience to jovial action whereas a slow, soft performance heavy in vibrato may generate sadness or longing (Thompson 2009). In addition to these psychophysical cues, music can trigger visual images (e.g., a stormy night) that may include emotional connotations, or music itself may remind someone of an emotionally significant memory (e.g., a romantic evening) (Juslin and Sloboda 2013). These evoked emotions, whether psychophysical, multisensory, or relational, sometimes differ between the sexes.

Sex differences in musical perception, especially related to emotion, are intriguing despite a lack of consensus by scholars. For example, a study in which children were subjected to harmonious and inharmonious chord progressions yielded clear differences in electric brain potentials: boys showed lateralized activation in the right brain hemisphere while girls demonstrated bilateral activation (especially Figure 3C, Koelsch et al. 2003).

Alternatively, some researchers have uncovered opposite mental recruitment in adult males (Koelsch et al. 2002) or actually increased lateralization in women (Evers et al. 1999). These disparate results suggest that during childhood development, neurological investment in musical perception shifts – an indication of neuroplasticity. However, other studies conclude that no sex difference in physiological responses (e.g., skin conductance, finger temperature, heart rate, and facial expression) occurs during exposure to emotionally powerful music (Lundqvist et al. 2009; Rickard 2004; Robazza et al. 1994). Although this null result is compelling, their conclusion seems questionable considering that they relied on physiological responses instead of brain imaging. Thus, sex differences in the brain’s emotional response may differ by sex even though the body’s responses to emotionally significant music are similar in all people. Further research should explore a potential connection between these lateralized activational studies and induced physiological responses, so that a more complete portrayal of musical perception and emotion can be understood. This future work may not only identify sex differences in this pathway, but evaluate the influence of age, cultural background, and musical training on experiencing the sound of music.

References

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