Conceptualizing Control in Everyday Music Listening: Defining Dominance

Abstract

Mehrabian and Russell’s Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance model states that people’s interactions and interpretation of their surroundings result from variations in three factors – pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Applied to music, pleasure has been operationalized as how much a person likes the music heard, arousal as how arousing the person considers the music to be, and dominance as the person’s control over the music heard. However, conceptualizing dominance broadly as control means that the construct is not well defined. This research aimed to define the elements related to a listener’s desire for control over music encountered in everyday life. Participants residing in Australia and USA (N = 590) completed an online questionnaire. An exploratory factor analysis of the quantitative items identified five components defining control over music listening: “being personally in charge”, “selection by other people”, “contextual control”, “playback variety”, and “no need for control”. A thematic analysis of open-ended responses indicated additional facets of control including mood regulation, emotional investment, and identity. While the quantitative findings reaffirm previous research, the qualitative findings indicate previous conceptualizations of the control dimension have been limited. These results contribute to our understanding of the model’s dominance component with regard to explaining everyday music listening.