Welcome back

In week 1, we discussed:

• the psychology of emotion and the psychology of music relatively separately.
• the pathways by which music enters your mind – the processes of sensation and perception
• the pathways by which we come to experience an emotion, noting the role of both physiological experience, goosebumps, and cognitive appraisal of that experience.

As a result, you’re probably wondering how these things go together.

The answer is fairly simple: to some extent, our emotions are not only physiological and cognitive but they’re also very much about the events that occur to us. We not only feel emotions, but we feel emotions about things.

This week, we will discuss how the physiological and cognitive come together in interpreting events. For example, a new section in a piece of music.

We will now move on to exploring how those ‘statistical expectations’ play a role in how we interpret the feelings we get from music.

Your task

In week 1 you told us about your favourite song and why it stuck with you. Do you have any more to say about that now, given what you’ve learned since? Use the comments link to share your thoughts.