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3 days ago | 
psychologytoday.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D |Michelle Quirk
People imagine stories while listening to music that may seem highly subjective and personal. For most listeners, forming a narrative in their mind’s eye is a way to engage with music. People with shared cultural background tend to imagine similar stories while listening to music. Source: ANDRI TEGAR MAHARDIKA / PixabayThe scientific literature considers music either as an abstract stimulus, devoid of explicit meaning, or a universal language.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
psychologytoday.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D
Sadness is generally seen as a negative emotion, but we tend to find it pleasurable in an aesthetic context. What is the nature of pleasure that people experience from listening to sad music? Accumulated evidence suggests that pleasure in response to sad music is related to several factors (Huron, 2024). 1. Emotional expressions in voice and music. Music expresses particular emotions by emulating the vocal sounds produced by the human voice.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
qoshe.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D
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Dec 25, 2024 | 
psychologytoday.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D
Music is remarkable in its ability to evoke profound emotions — chills and thrills — in listeners. And being emotionally moved by music is an inherently pleasurable experience. Most music listeners use emotional expression as the most important factor in valuing music and the decision to buy a song (Juslin, 2019). How does music move us? 1. Conditioned responseWe hear certain kinds of music as sad because we have learned to associate them with sad events like funerals.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
qoshe.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D
Aa Aa Aa - A + Humans devote ample time to producing and listening to music. What music offers to humans is universally valued. This universality raises the question of the origin of human musicality. What is music for, and why does every human culture have it? Current theories focus on emotion regulation, social cohesion, such as group bonding, or the bond between parents and children, and communication. Here are six main reasons why we appreciate music (Spitzer, 2021).
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
psychologytoday.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D
Music listening can improve a person's attention. Music in the workplace can reduce distractions and boost productivity. Slow music is more suitable for complex learning activities. Attention is a cognitive ability essential to our daily lives and one of the key productive factors in the modern economy. It is a way of prioritizing information. Our capacity to acquire and process information is fundamentally limited.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
qoshe.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D
Attention is a cognitive ability essential to our daily lives and one of the key productive factors in the modern economy. It is a way of prioritizing information. Our capacity to acquire and process information is fundamentally limited. Attending to one task or source of information necessarily excludes other potential efforts. Individual resources (e.g., cognitive ability) and environmental factors (e.g., the presence of reward or stimulation) influence attention capacity.
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Oct 10, 2024 | 
qoshe.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D
Aa Aa Aa - A + Self-disclosure is typically viewed as the revelation of private, personal information about feelings, experiences, and desires. Self-disclosure plays an important role in interpersonal relationships. Effective disclosures contribute to greater intimacy, trust, and closeness. Revealing intimate information can also be risky or awkward, and it may draw judgment from close others.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
qoshe.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D
Aa Aa Aa - A + Attention is a way of giving priority to information. Attention is one of the key productive factors in the modern economy. Our capacity to acquire and process information is fundamentally limited. Attending to one task or source of information necessarily excludes other potential efforts, thereby generating opportunity costs. This means that we must often make consequential choices about what we pay attention to.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
psychologytoday.com | Shahram Heshmat Ph.D
Being in sync with music is a source of pleasure. The urge to move to music is universal among humans. Being in synchrony with a group of people is generally regarded as a very pleasant experience. Music listening is a ubiquitous and constant phenomenon in our lives. This desire is driven by music’s core effects on motivation, pleasure, and social connection. These effects promote health and well-being (Levitin, 2024).
