Trial lecture
Designated topic: "Recent advances in the neuroscience of emotions and the contributions of music research to these developments".
Public defence
Thesis introduction:
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Thesis abstract
The notion of music’s emotional power extends deep into the history of the psychology of music, with scholars of various stripes pondering and exploring questions relating to why and how music – without any apparent survival value – has such a strong grip on our emotions (Juslin & Sloboda, 2010). Still, comprehensive research on the different forms of affective musical dispositions remains scarce, particularly regarding their conceptualization, how they relate to personality, and, crucially, their genetic and environmental underpinnings. Leveraging a previously validated, last-generation psychological scale and data from a large Norwegian population-based twin sample (totaling 2611 individuals), the overarching goal of this dissertation was to take a closer look at the nature and origins of individual differences in emotional and aesthetic musical dispositions – specifically, musical sensibility (broadly defined as the tendency to become emotionally and aesthetically engaged by music) and motivations for music use (or the primary reasons people may have for engaging with music).
In the first paper, ‘The underlying architecture of musical sensibility: One general factor, four sub-dimensions, and strong genetic effects,’ we empirically assessed the phenotypic structure, alongside the genetic and environmental architecture of musical sensibility, which, at the time of writing, had not yet been explored in the behavioral genetic literature. This paper provides the most comprehensive exploration of the psychometric model of musical sensibility, examining whether it should be viewed as a single, unified construct or as comprising m