Lindquist et al.'s data analysis in the target article can support continuous rather than episodic involvement of emotion in “mental engagement” (Gardiner Reference Gardiner2008c), my terminology for the functional action of the brain that generates behavior.
Study of the emotional components of musical experience (Gardiner Reference Gardiner, Lerner, Schaimberg, Anderson and Miller2003; Reference Gardiner2008b; Juslin & Vastfjall Reference Juslin and Vastfjall2008) can help to develop our understanding of emotional participation in mental engagement, once we enlarge theoretical orientation towards musical evidence. Juslin and Vastfjall and others search for specific features within heard music that evoke emotion. But to account for much of the richness, variety, and subtlety of emotion within musical experience (Dewey Reference Dewey1934/1980), we should view emotion as most generally generated by integral participation in, rather than response to, music.
Emotion (Damasio Reference Damasio1999) is related to an adjustment of body physiology and brain activation and restoration that maintains overall homeostatic equilibrium while also addressing the behavioral needs of an organism. Body and brain activities are marshaled for fleeing, fighting, or pursuing a mate, with restoration taking place during relaxation and rest. But activation and restoration must be addressed and balanced throughout every behavioral state, as the recovery of every nerve after firing illustrates. At least in humans, conscious awareness concerning emotion (Damasio Reference Damasio1999) must have a role as well. Emotion and feeling reflect (James & Lange Reference James and Lange1922) and influence (Cannon Reference Cannon1929) adjustments of body and brain physiology, but the details of how this occurs are still not fully resolved.
Emotions include not only primary emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust (Damasio Reference Damasio1999), but also social emotions such as embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, and pride, and background emotions such as well-being, malaise, calm, and tension. Emotion and feeling thus concern not just shorter term physiological adjustments, but also have influence on longer term adjustments of behavior. Variety, mixtures, and fluctuation of experienced states can frustrate verbal classification, but normal experience shows no breaks in emotion and feeling.
Detection of specific sensory stimuli signaling a critical need for action can trigger almost immediate emotional response (Damasio Reference Damasio1999; LeDoux Reference LeDoux1996), but, especially in humans, emotional reaction to most stimuli depends greatly on context.
Consider now the calm, peace, and admiration of beauty one can experience while walking quietly through a beautiful forest. Similar emotional components can be experienced during what Dewey terms the musical experience (Dewey Reference Dewey1934/1980), produced as one progresses at a slow rhythmical-walking (“andante”) pace through listening to music at the beginning of the “andante” of Mozart's Piano Sonata K.V. 283, while admiring its beauty, or still more, if one is able to move easily through the activity of playing this music while conscious of its beauty.
Here, similarity in sensory stimuli reaching one during these non-musical and musical activities cannot account for any similarity of experienced emotion. But both the non-musical and musical activities involve progression through activity at a similar rhythmic and “andante” rate to which body and brain may well make similar physiological adjustment. Both activities involve awareness of and emotional reaction to the enjoyment of beauty. And both may well involve emotion registering and interacting with the ease and lack of impediment with which behavior progresses. As this example illustrates, the involvement of emotion in non-musical behaviors can help us understand its involvement in musical behaviors as well.
The growing evidence relating emotion to adjustment of physiology to maintain homeostasis (Damasio Reference Damasio1999) should direct us towards further developing our understanding of connections between details of mental engagement and emotion. Every act of mental engagement, whether it produces motor behavior or not, depends upon and may well also affect physiology of brain and body. I propose that accumulating evidence implies that much of mental engagement involves interaction within complexes that incorporate interconnected levels of engagement (see also, Chase & Simon Reference Chase and Simon1973; DeGroot Reference DeGroot1965). Higher-order motor acts, such as the utterance of a verbal phrase or the playing of a melodic phrase, are built from lower-level motor acts that generate the utterances of phonemes, or the playing of individual musical notes. Listening acts involving speech or music are as much acts of mental engagement as are acts that produce motor consequences such as talking or singing. The dynamic structure of these acts of composite engagement make continuous demands on brain and body physiology. If indeed emotion is intimately related to adjustment to demands on physiology, as work for more than a century implies, then it would be very useful for humans and other creatures to have evolved not only the large-scale emotion-related adjustments that are already increasingly well understood, but also as deep an involvement of emotion-related detailed physiological adjustment interacting with mental engagement at all its levels, about which far less is known so far. The influence on and interaction with emotion plausibly comes, I propose, at every level of the mental engagement that compositely generates behavior – this including the highest levels of engagement that generate coordinated activity over significant periods of time, such as, in the example discussed, walking through a forest, or playing a piece of music (see also Clynes Reference Clynes1977).
Detailed involvement of emotion at all levels of mental engagement is of course extremely difficult to explore. Here I believe that music in its rich connection to emotional experience can give us many important windows of opportunity. As an example, consider the extent to which seemingly subtle changes in music can lead to striking shifts from positive to negative emotional experiences. The positive emotions experienced while engaged in listening to or playing the beginning of the Mozart Piano Sonata K.V. 283 andante written in the key of C Major can shift immediately to negative emotions of brooding sadness if one plays this music, or listens to it played, instead in the key of C Minor, even if all other features of the performance remain unchanged. The musical change involves only a small difference in certain critical musical notes, in particular every E lowered to E flat. An opposite effect can be demonstrated with the opening of the Mozart Piano Sonata K.V. 310 in A Minor, where the experience of intense grief – related, I suspect, to the death of Mozart's mother – is immediately changed to a sense of triumph and exhilaration if the piece is played in A Major. I trace such differences in emotion to differences in the musical scales, which affect tensions and their release within melodies and associated harmonies, major scales promoting a sense of forward and upward movement, and minor ones pushing rather down and against forward movement. Negative emotions such as sadness or grief may then reflect, in part, the sense of continuous obstruction to movement that the music illustrates.
Humanity may well have developed music (see Gardiner Reference Gardiner2000; Reference Gardiner, Lerner, Schaimberg, Anderson and Miller2003; Reference Gardiner, Vrobel, Rössler and Marks-Tarlow2008a; Reference Gardiner2008b; Reference Gardiner2008c; Gardner et al. Reference Gardiner, Fox, Knowles and Jeffrey1996) to produce experiences that further exploited to its own benefit its evolved capabilities for mental engagement importantly including engagement involving emotion. We should continue to use our musical creations to further study ourselves.
Lindquist et al.'s data analysis in the target article can support continuous rather than episodic involvement of emotion in “mental engagement” (Gardiner Reference Gardiner2008c), my terminology for the functional action of the brain that generates behavior.
Study of the emotional components of musical experience (Gardiner Reference Gardiner, Lerner, Schaimberg, Anderson and Miller2003; Reference Gardiner2008b; Juslin & Vastfjall Reference Juslin and Vastfjall2008) can help to develop our understanding of emotional participation in mental engagement, once we enlarge theoretical orientation towards musical evidence. Juslin and Vastfjall and others search for specific features within heard music that evoke emotion. But to account for much of the richness, variety, and subtlety of emotion within musical experience (Dewey Reference Dewey1934/1980), we should view emotion as most generally generated by integral participation in, rather than response to, music.
Emotion (Damasio Reference Damasio1999) is related to an adjustment of body physiology and brain activation and restoration that maintains overall homeostatic equilibrium while also addressing the behavioral needs of an organism. Body and brain activities are marshaled for fleeing, fighting, or pursuing a mate, with restoration taking place during relaxation and rest. But activation and restoration must be addressed and balanced throughout every behavioral state, as the recovery of every nerve after firing illustrates. At least in humans, conscious awareness concerning emotion (Damasio Reference Damasio1999) must have a role as well. Emotion and feeling reflect (James & Lange Reference James and Lange1922) and influence (Cannon Reference Cannon1929) adjustments of body and brain physiology, but the details of how this occurs are still not fully resolved.
Emotions include not only primary emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust (Damasio Reference Damasio1999), but also social emotions such as embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, and pride, and background emotions such as well-being, malaise, calm, and tension. Emotion and feeling thus concern not just shorter term physiological adjustments, but also have influence on longer term adjustments of behavior. Variety, mixtures, and fluctuation of experienced states can frustrate verbal classification, but normal experience shows no breaks in emotion and feeling.
Detection of specific sensory stimuli signaling a critical need for action can trigger almost immediate emotional response (Damasio Reference Damasio1999; LeDoux Reference LeDoux1996), but, especially in humans, emotional reaction to most stimuli depends greatly on context.
Consider now the calm, peace, and admiration of beauty one can experience while walking quietly through a beautiful forest. Similar emotional components can be experienced during what Dewey terms the musical experience (Dewey Reference Dewey1934/1980), produced as one progresses at a slow rhythmical-walking (“andante”) pace through listening to music at the beginning of the “andante” of Mozart's Piano Sonata K.V. 283, while admiring its beauty, or still more, if one is able to move easily through the activity of playing this music while conscious of its beauty.
Here, similarity in sensory stimuli reaching one during these non-musical and musical activities cannot account for any similarity of experienced emotion. But both the non-musical and musical activities involve progression through activity at a similar rhythmic and “andante” rate to which body and brain may well make similar physiological adjustment. Both activities involve awareness of and emotional reaction to the enjoyment of beauty. And both may well involve emotion registering and interacting with the ease and lack of impediment with which behavior progresses. As this example illustrates, the involvement of emotion in non-musical behaviors can help us understand its involvement in musical behaviors as well.
The growing evidence relating emotion to adjustment of physiology to maintain homeostasis (Damasio Reference Damasio1999) should direct us towards further developing our understanding of connections between details of mental engagement and emotion. Every act of mental engagement, whether it produces motor behavior or not, depends upon and may well also affect physiology of brain and body. I propose that accumulating evidence implies that much of mental engagement involves interaction within complexes that incorporate interconnected levels of engagement (see also, Chase & Simon Reference Chase and Simon1973; DeGroot Reference DeGroot1965). Higher-order motor acts, such as the utterance of a verbal phrase or the playing of a melodic phrase, are built from lower-level motor acts that generate the utterances of phonemes, or the playing of individual musical notes. Listening acts involving speech or music are as much acts of mental engagement as are acts that produce motor consequences such as talking or singing. The dynamic structure of these acts of composite engagement make continuous demands on brain and body physiology. If indeed emotion is intimately related to adjustment to demands on physiology, as work for more than a century implies, then it would be very useful for humans and other creatures to have evolved not only the large-scale emotion-related adjustments that are already increasingly well understood, but also as deep an involvement of emotion-related detailed physiological adjustment interacting with mental engagement at all its levels, about which far less is known so far. The influence on and interaction with emotion plausibly comes, I propose, at every level of the mental engagement that compositely generates behavior – this including the highest levels of engagement that generate coordinated activity over significant periods of time, such as, in the example discussed, walking through a forest, or playing a piece of music (see also Clynes Reference Clynes1977).
Detailed involvement of emotion at all levels of mental engagement is of course extremely difficult to explore. Here I believe that music in its rich connection to emotional experience can give us many important windows of opportunity. As an example, consider the extent to which seemingly subtle changes in music can lead to striking shifts from positive to negative emotional experiences. The positive emotions experienced while engaged in listening to or playing the beginning of the Mozart Piano Sonata K.V. 283 andante written in the key of C Major can shift immediately to negative emotions of brooding sadness if one plays this music, or listens to it played, instead in the key of C Minor, even if all other features of the performance remain unchanged. The musical change involves only a small difference in certain critical musical notes, in particular every E lowered to E flat. An opposite effect can be demonstrated with the opening of the Mozart Piano Sonata K.V. 310 in A Minor, where the experience of intense grief – related, I suspect, to the death of Mozart's mother – is immediately changed to a sense of triumph and exhilaration if the piece is played in A Major. I trace such differences in emotion to differences in the musical scales, which affect tensions and their release within melodies and associated harmonies, major scales promoting a sense of forward and upward movement, and minor ones pushing rather down and against forward movement. Negative emotions such as sadness or grief may then reflect, in part, the sense of continuous obstruction to movement that the music illustrates.
Humanity may well have developed music (see Gardiner Reference Gardiner2000; Reference Gardiner, Lerner, Schaimberg, Anderson and Miller2003; Reference Gardiner, Vrobel, Rössler and Marks-Tarlow2008a; Reference Gardiner2008b; Reference Gardiner2008c; Gardner et al. Reference Gardiner, Fox, Knowles and Jeffrey1996) to produce experiences that further exploited to its own benefit its evolved capabilities for mental engagement importantly including engagement involving emotion. We should continue to use our musical creations to further study ourselves.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This commentary was prepared with support from the Popplestone Foundation.