A systematic review of the studies measuring mood and emotion in response to music

The difficulty of distinguishing between mood and emotion is an issue that confronts many researchers investigating affective response to music. This paper reports a systematic interpretive review of 95 articles in which the focus was on questioning how researchers conceptualized mood and emotion, measured it, and drew conclusions from their findings. Results revealed a significant difference in the length of musical stimuli between studies of emotional response and those measuring mood changes, suggesting that this is the primary criterion by which researchers currently distinguish moods and emotions. However, it is argued that mood studies, in particular, could benefit from study designs that use appropriately worded instruments administered at several post-stimulus time points in order to better distinguish the phenomenon of interest.