Felt and Perceived Musical Emotions: A Replication and Extension of Kallinen and Ravaja (2006)

In music and emotion research, a crucial consideration is the relationship between felt and perceived emotions. A key study in understanding these relationships was published by Kallinen and Ravaja (2006) titled “Emotion perceived and emotion felt: Same and different”, in which five empirical hypotheses were investigated. However, this study has never been replicated. This study aimed to replicate and conceptually extend Kallinen and Ravaja (2006). Participants (N = 60, mean age = 31.93) listened to 12 one-minute music excerpts selected a priori to express one of four basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear), and provide ratings for 16 emotion adjectives (to calculate dimensions of valence, arousal, positive activation, and negative activation), first for emotions perceived in the music, and second for emotions felt by the participant. Participants completed trait inventories including behavioural inhibition and activation scales, neurotic-anxiety and sensation-seeking questionnaires, and trait empathy measures. Our replication largely reproduced results from the 2006 study: Felt valence was overall more positive than perceived, with opposite patterns found for arousal, positive activation and negative activation; emotion ratings also varied across music expressing joy, sadness, and fear. However, no effects of individual trait characteristics were replicated. Although successful, this replication differs from the original research in its interpretation of how data support the empirical hypotheses, suggesting little support for any hypothesis. Findings highlight complexities of replicating psychological research, and the importance of hypothesis-driven research to develop from theoretical models that enable specific predictions and outline the conditions for relevant evidence.