The Influences Of Situations And Personality Traits On Short-term Music Preferences

Music is a cross-cultural,universal and ubiquitous activity.Individuals show different tastes in music preferences,but know little about the mental structure and influencing factors of music preferences.The early studies on music preferences are mostly under laboratory conditions which cannot induce real enough emotional experience of listening music.Pavelchak et al(Pavelchak,Antil,&Munch,1988)suggest that the situation is a component of emotional experience,and the results from laboratory studies need to be validated from external environments.Therefore,it is necessary for us to study the situational music preferences and influences of situations on music preferences.From view of interaction theories,music preferences can reflect the personality characteristics of individuals.Previous studies have confirmed that there is a significant correlation between individual's personality traits and long-term,stable music preferences.However,it is not confirmed if there exsits a similar correlation between individual's personality traits and short-term music preferences depending on the situation.Based on the Chinese culture,the everyday life situations where we listen to music,the music genres that Chinese people are exposed to,and the experience of music emotions they have,we will eplore the re lationship between the situations,personality traits and short-term music preferences.In study 1,we recruited 470 subjects,each of whom was assigned one of the eleven situations.They rated the pleasure,arousal and dominance of the situation through the PAD emotion scales of Chinese simplified version.Results show that the pleasure,arousal,dominance scores are significantly different across the situations.So PAD emotional state model can be used as the classification standard of situations.In study 2,we measured the music preferences of 192 participants under the assigned situation.Then we use exploratory factor analysis to construct five-factor model of music preferences which contains 'cure','arousal','traditional','sad' and'detached' these five factors.In study 3,according to the scores of emotional attributes of the specific situations and big five personality traits rated by another 192 participants,we explored the relationship of the situations,personality traits and short-term music preferences,and examined the moderating affects of demographic variables and music professional knowledge.The results show that the situations has a dominant impact on music preferences.The correlation between the big five personality traits and short-term music prefernces are mostly not significant.There is no moderating affects of the demographic variables and music professional knowledge.In conclusion(1)PAD emotional State model can be the classification standard of situations;(2)A five-factor model of short-term music preferences was constructed,which contains 'cure','arousal','traditional','sad' and 'detached' these five factors.;(3)The relationship between situations,personality traits and short-term music preferences is that the situations do have influence on music preferences,and the significant correlations between personality traits and music preferences found in the previous researches are weaken in terms of specific situations.Only agreeableness and conscientiousness are positively related to the 'traditional' dimension of music preferences.(4)Gender,age,and musical cannot moderate relationship between the situation and music preferences.Age can affect the 'traditional' dimension.