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Research in music and emotion has long acknowledged the importance of extra-musical cues, yet has been unable to measure their effect on emotion communication in music. The aim of this research was to understand how extra-musical cues affect emotion responses to music in two distinguishable cultures. Australian and Cuban participants (N = 276) were instructed to name an emotion in response to written lyric excerpts from eight distinct music genres, using genre labels as cues. Lyrics were presented primed with genre labels (original priming and a false, lured genre label) or unprimed. For some genres, emotion responses to the same lyrics changed based on the primed genre label. We explain these results as emotion expectations induced by extra-musical cues. This suggests that prior knowledge elicited by lyrics and music genre labels are able to affect the musical emotion responses that music can communicate, independent of the emotion contribution made by psychoacoustic features. For example, the results show a lyric excerpt that is believed to belong to the Heavy Metal genre triggers high valence/high arousal emotions compared to the same excerpt primed as Japanese Gagaku, without the need of playing any music. The present study provides novel empirical evidence of extra-musical effects on emotion and music, and supports this interpretation from a multi-genre, cross-cultural perspective. Further findings were noted in relation to fandom that also supported the emotion expectation account. Participants with high levels of fandom for a genre reported a wider range of emotions in response to the lyrics labelled as being a song from that same specific genre, compared to lower levels of fandom. Both within and across culture differences were observed, and the importance of a culture effect discussed., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Cognitive and behavioral studies ranging from biomechanics to motor functions and neural mirroring explorations have extensively investigated the communication of emotions in music and dance. Recognized for their ability to convey and elicit emotions, various studies aim to validate the extent to which auditory expressive cues and embodied expressive movements are able to convey emotions. However, is expressing and evoking emotions a generalized intention of music and dance? Although much data exists based on audience responses (decoders), composers' and choreographers' (encoders) intentions beyond experimental instructions are still being determined. This paper reports two studies investigating the intention of composers and choreographers when creating new works. Results revealed that expressing emotions is not a primary goal yet a significant underlying intention. Furthermore, composers and choreographers aimed for their expressed emotions to be perceived rather than felt. Moreover, the genre conventions determined by stylistic and cultural factors influenced emotion expression, with some genres allowing more expressive cues than others, likely affecting the extent to which emotions are meaningfully conveyed. These findings point to potential cue variance between actual intentions and experiment-intended stimuli to express and thus communicate emotions. An argument for the importance of ecological validity in laboratory-based experiments is presented.

Anger perception in music was investigated to determine if this emotion is cross-culturally decoded. A literature review of studies which investigated anger cross-culturally revealed variance between encoders and decoders. In an attempt to explain this variance, these data were examined using existing cross-cultural theories in music psychology, but each was poor in explaining some of the variance observed. For example, none were able to explain explicitly why anger expressed in Japanese music was poorly decoded by Indian, Japanese, and Swedish listeners. New interpretations of the published data were conducted through Hofstede’s cross-cultural dimensions theory and the theory of musical fit. Building on these theories, the Stereotype Theory of Emotion in Music (STEM) was proposed. According to STEM, listeners filter the emotion they perceive according to stereotypes of the encoding culture. For example, Japanese culture is stereotyped as an anger-reticent culture, explaining the low anger decoder ratings for ‘anger-encoded’ music. STEM suggests that anger perception is culturally influenced by a stereotyping process. The theory predicts that anger will be perceived if the decoding culture has no stereotype associated with the culture the music is believed to be from, leaving the music free to be interpreted through psychophysical or culture-specific cues. STEM presents a new way forward in understanding the cognitive processing of emotion in music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]