Music-related emotions: Attributions and arousal of adolescents with and without borderline personality disorder traits

The relationship between music and emotions has often been investigated. It has been shown that there are differences between the emotions aroused in listeners by music and the emotional content or quality of music, as perceived by listeners, but the effect on listeners of ascribing emotions to the composer of the music has not yet been studied. Since emotional responses to music are modulated by personal attitudes to managing emotion, the relationships among emotions aroused in listeners, perceived emotional quality of the music, and emotions ascribed to the composer should vary depending on the extent to which the listener has mastered emotion-regulation skills. We therefore investigated potential differences between these three different types of emotion attribution. We also investigated the effect of emotional dysregulation on emotional responses to music by comparing the emotion attributions of adolescents with borderline personality disorder (BPD) traits with those of a healthy control group. Participants listened to 10 excerpts from pieces of music selected for their different emotional qualities and rated them for felt emotion (myself), perceived emotional quality (song), and the emotion ascribed to the composer (composer). Participants’ skin conductance level was measured to assess their physiological arousal while they were listening to each excerpt. In comparison to controls, participants with BPD traits demonstrated significantly lower levels of arousal. There were no differences between the emotion attributions of the two groups but, overall, participants gave higher ratings for perceived emotional quality and higher ratings for excerpts representing happiness and anger. For excerpts representing fear, higher ratings were given for felt emotion and perceived emotional quality than the emotion ascribed to the composer. These findings contribute to the understanding of emotional responses to music in adolescence and reveal patterns of responses to music representing emotions that are not affected by emotional dysregulation.