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Welcome back

We’re so pleased you could join us as we continue our journey to understanding Why Bohemian Rhapsody makes you feel so good.
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[SOFT MUSIC PLAYING]
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Hello. And welcome back to the course. We hope you’re ready for another big week of thought-provoking ideas about how music makes us feel emotions. So last week, we discussed the psychology of emotions. We learned that emotions have both physiological component– a quickening heartbeat, goosebumps, for example– and how they have a psychological component, the way that we interpret these physiological symptoms. Additionally, we discussed how we have statistical expectations about how music usually goes based on all our decades of listening to music. Basically, the psychology of emotions and our musical expectations come together in explaining quite a lot of why a song like “Bohemian Rhapsody” makes us feel emotions.
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And that is what we’ll discuss this week, the specific ways in which our statistical expectations play a role in interpreting the physiological symptoms we get from music. So let’s get started on week 2 and find out the details.
Welcome back to the final week of the course. We’re so pleased you could join us as we continue our journey to understanding why Bohemian Rhapsody makes you feel so good.

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.

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Music Psychology: Why Does "Bohemian Rhapsody" Feel so Good?

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