Beacon Humanist Meeting notes (2025-04-27): Regulating emotions with and without music

This page is still under construction.

At the Beacon humanist meeting on April 27, 2025, which takes place over Zoom, we will discuss what emotions and moods are, and how we regulate them with music and other strategies.

outline of the meeting

  1. We will each be invited to share some strategies for self-regulation of emotion.
  2. Luc will fill in the gaps with some strategies from some sources, organized in a typology.
  3. We’ll discuss what can go wrong when one fails at self-regulation emotion regulation
  4. Luc will ask members to share their conceptions or definitions of emotion.
  5. Luc will present a taxomomy of mood and emotion concepts and theories.
  6. We’ll discuss self-regulation of moods and emotion with music.

other notes

Emotions vs. Moods vs. affect

I let ChatGPT write the following for me.

In affective science, emotion, mood, and affect are distinct but interrelated constructs. Here’s how they are typically defined and distinguished:

1. Emotion

Definition:
A relatively brief, intense, and targeted psychological and physiological response to a specific stimulus (external or internal) that is personally significant.

Key Characteristics:
– Duration: Short-lived (seconds to minutes)
– Cause: Elicited by a specific event or appraisal (e.g., someone cuts you off in traffic → anger)
– Components: Includes subjective experience, physiological arousal, expressive behavior (e.g., facial expressions), and action tendencies
– Function: Adaptive—helps mobilize responses to significant environmental challenges or opportunities

Example: Feeling fear when you see a snake.

2. Mood

Definition:
A longer-lasting, less intense affective state without a specific identifiable cause. Moods tend to bias perception and cognition over time.

Key Characteristics:
– Duration: Lasts longer (hours to days)
– Cause: Often diffuse or not consciously identifiable
– Specificity: Less specific than emotions; general positive or negative valence
– Cognitive Effects: Influences how people interpret and respond to events (e.g., in a bad mood, one interprets ambiguous faces as hostile)

Example: Feeling irritable all day without knowing exactly why.

3. Affect

Definition:
An umbrella term referring to the experience of feeling or emotion. In narrower technical use (e.g., in Russell’s core affect model), it refers to a neurophysiological state characterized by valence (pleasant–unpleasant) and arousal (activation–deactivation), independent of specific emotion episodes.

Key Characteristics:
– Scope: Most abstract and general; includes both emotions and moods
– Dimensional: Often conceptualized along continuous dimensions (valence and arousal) rather than discrete categories
– Core Affect: The background feeling state always present to some degree

Example: Feeling “tense” (high arousal, negative valence) or “relaxed” (low arousal, positive valence) without a specific emotion label.

Summary Table

Feature Emotion Mood Affect
Duration Short (seconds–minutes) Long (hours–days) Momentary or ongoing
Intensity High Low to moderate Varies
Specific Cause Yes (event or appraisal) Often no identifiable cause May or may not be specific
Targeted? Yes No Not necessarily
Theoretical Role Adaptive, functional Modulates cognition & behavior Underlies emotional states

Would you like a diagram or examples linking these to emotion regulation theories or sleep onset?

Music and emotions

Why is uplifting music uplifting Music? HOW is it uplifting? Why/how is “sad music” sad? We normally simply take it for granted that music can affect our moods and emotions, as people took for granted that apples fell before Newton asked “Why do things fall?” I’m not a musician, but I am a cognitive science guy, so this is a question I am addressing in a chapter of Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind.

Here’s a relevant paper: Frontiers | Cueing musical emotions: An empirical analysis of 24-piece sets by Bach and Chopin documents parallels with emotional speech. That pagper says (circa) :

Our goal was to assess the hypothesis that pitch and timing cues were used in a manner consistent with previous perceptual consequences research on music within a corpus of historically significant and widely performed music. Using our operationalized definitions of pitch height and timing, we found that
– major key pieces were in fact 29% faster in attack rate than minor (however, we note that this difference was driven entirely by Bach). Additionally,
– major key pieces in this corpus were approximately a major second (i.e., two halfsteps) higher – a distance previously shown sufficient to evoke changes in emotional tenor (Ilie and Thompson, 2006).
Both of these results were consistent with our initial hypotheses.

But that doesn’t explain why, or internally how, music moves us.

Here’s a counterexample: watching fast traffic (e.g., watching traffic on a highway) doesn’t lift our spirits. And not all high-tempo tracks move us up.

Juslin’s BREC-VE-MA model

Mnemonic: Breakfast-VEhicle MA

Juslin’s BREC-VE-MA model (updated from his 2008 BRECVEM model) outlines eight mechanisms through which music can induce emotions. The 2008 model was expanded to include musical expectancy and aesthetic judgment more explicitly. Here’s a brief summary:

BREC-VE-MA Mechanisms (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008; updated later)
  1. Brain Stem Reflexes:
    Automatic responses to sudden, loud, or dissonant sounds.

  2. Rhythmic Entrainment:
    Synchronization of internal bodily rhythms (e.g., heart rate) with the music’s rhythm.

  3. Evaluative Conditioning:
    Music becomes associated with positive or negative experiences.

  4. Contagion (Emotional Mimicry):
    Listener mirrors the perceived emotion in the music.

  5. Visual Imagery:
    Music evokes mental images that carry emotional content.

  6. Episodic Memory:
    Music triggers personal memories and associated emotions.

  7. Musical Expectancy (newer addition):
    Emotions arise from fulfilled or violated expectations in musical structure (e.g., harmonic resolution, timing surprises).

  8. Aesthetic Judgment (newer addition):
    Emotions derive from the listener’s evaluation of the music as beautiful, profound, or moving.

Key Idea:

Each mechanism is distinct—they can operate in parallel and contribute differently depending on the listener, context, and music. The model emphasizes the multi-component nature of emotional experience in music listening.

Emotion regulation strategies other than with music

There are methods in clinical psychology that can be applied by individuals.

There are many other resources on those frameworks. You can ask ChatGPT for more information.

Readings and podcasts.

Here are some podcast episodes and readings on emotion regulation. It’s not a complete list, and please feel free to use your own readings and podcasts instead of this. No expert owns this space.

I’m including Apple Podcasts and Spotify versions of some podcast episodes:

Patricia Zurita Ona:

DAVID D. BURNS: Feeling Good podcast:

Ethan Kross:

more to come!