Music is often used to alleviate depression, an affective disorder. Yet, little is known about how listeners suffering from depression respond emotionally to music. The goal of this study was to investigate whether listeners show different patterns of emotional reactions to music depending on level of depression. In previous research, depression has been linked with negative biases in cognitive processes such as memory and attention. Here we indirectly investigated whether such biases may also influence psychological mechanisms involved in the arousal of emotions during musical experiences. Seventy-seven listeners (19–65 years old) took part in an experiment which compared depressed individuals with non-depressed controls. The participants listened to music stimuli designed to target specific induction mechanisms (brain stem reflex, contagion, episodic memory), and were asked to rate felt emotions. Based on previous studies on cognitive bias, we made predictions about how depression would affect reactions to each stimulus. The predictions received partial support: depressed listeners reported significantly lower levels of happiness in the memory condition and non-significantly higher levels of anxiety in the brain stem condition, than did controls. Conversely, no difference in reported sadness was found in the contagion condition. Observed differences were mainly attributable to the severely depressed listeners.
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