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The notion of music’s emotional power extends deep into the history of the psychology of music, with scholars of various stripes pondering and exploring questions relating to why and how music – without any apparent survival value – has such a strong grip on our emotions (Juslin & Sloboda, 2010). Still, comprehensive research on the different forms of affective musical dispositions remains scarce, particularly regarding their conceptualization, how they relate to personality, and, crucially, their genetic and environmental underpinnings. Leveraging a previously validated, last-generation psychological scale and data from a large Norwegian population-based twin sample (totaling 2611 individuals), the overarching goal of this dissertation was to take a closer look at the nature and origins of individual differences in emotional and aesthetic musical dispositions – specifically, musical sensibility (broadly defined as the tendency to become emotionally and aesthetically engaged by music) and motivations for music use (or the primary reasons people may have for engaging with music).
In the first paper, ‘The underlying architecture of musical sensibility: One general factor, four sub-dimensions, and strong genetic effects,’ we empirically assessed the phenotypic structure, alongside the genetic and environmental architecture of musical sensibility, which, at the time of writing, had not yet been explored in the behavioral genetic literature. This paper provides the most comprehensive exploration of the psychometric model of musical sensibility, examining whether it should be viewed as a single, unified construct or as comprising multiple correlated components. Using a four-dimensional measure, we demonstrated that the structure of musical sensibility consists of four first-order factors, each loading highly on a higher-order musical sensibility factor. Additionally, we found that heritable influences on the identified factors were strong and considerably overlapping.
In the second paper, ‘The role of Big Five personality domains and facets in musical sensibility: A twin study,’ we examined the role of the Big Five personality traits in the understanding of the phenomenon of musical sensibility. These relationships were mapped both at the level of broad personality domains and the conceptually narrower facets, uncovering that open-mindedness (particularly the facet of aesthetic sensitivity) and, to a lesser degree, agreeableness (specifically the facet of compassion), as well as negative emotionality, were all robustly associated with musical sensibility. Genetic correlations of musical sensibility with these personality traits were all significant and especially strong for the aesthetic sensitivity facet of open-mindedness, pointing to considerable overlap in the biological mechanisms underlying the two traits. Overall, these findings positioned musical sensibility within a broader network of emotional and aesthetic personality dispositions, potentially connected through shared affective systems.
In the third and final paper, ‘Dimensions of music use motivations: Genetic and environmental underpinnings, and associations with Big Five- and empathy traits,’ we introduced yet another concept to the behavioral genetic literature, this time focusing on the etiology and facet-level personality associations of four dimensions of motivations for music use. Alongside moderate heritability and substantial overlap in etiological factors across the music use motivation dimensions, we found that two personality facets – aesthetic sensitivity of open-mindedness and fantasy of trait empathy – emerged as robust cross-domain correlates. In contrast, other facets, like those indexing negative emotionality and agreeableness, were more strongly linked only with specific motivational dimensions. Our findings further highlighted that personality-related genetic and, to a lesser extent, environmental factors – particularly those underlying aesthetic sensitivity and fantasy – largely overlap with those underlying individual differences in music use motivations.
Together, the current work expands our understanding of the structure and substance of particularly musical sensibility, paints a fine-grained picture of how musical sensibility and motivations for music use map onto well-established personality traits, and yields original evidence into the etiology of emotional and aesthetic musical dispositions.
