Exploring relations between Big Five personality traits and musical emotions embodied in spontaneous dance

Abstract

We explored the hypothesis that musical emotions are embodied differentially by people according to their personality. Nine hundred and fifty two individuals completed the Big Five personality inventory. A subset of 60 participants were asked to spontaneously move to 30 short musical stimuli while being recorded with a motion-capture system. The musical stimuli were separately rated for perceived emotions. Embodied musical emotions were evaluated as the correlation between features derived from the motion-capture data and the mean ratings of perceived emotions. Correlations between embodied musical emotions and personality traits provided tentative support for our hypothesis. A series of linear regression analyses revealed that scores on Openness and Agreeableness were most strongly, and Neuroticism and Conscientiousness most weakly, predicted by embodied musical emotions. Overall, our results offer tentative support for the existence of differential relationships between embodied musical emotions and personality, and describe statistical models that might be empirically tested in future studies.