ArticlePloS one2022
Emotional responses in Papua New Guinea show negligible evidence for a universal effect of major versus minor music.
Article in PloS one, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- Expressing emotions through music.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Solitary silence and social sounds: music can influence mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The emotional geography of National anthems.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Biological principles for music and mental health.Translational psychiatry · 2023Review
- Thematic Contents of Mental Imagery are Shaped by Concurrent Task-Irrelevant Music.Imagination, cognition and personality · 2023Article
- Universality, domain-specificity, and development of psychological responses to music.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- The Exceptions and the Rules in Global Musical Diversity.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Music is a vital part of most cultures and has a strong impact on emotions [1-5]. In Western cultures, emotive valence is strongly influenced by major and minor melodies and harmony (chords and their progressions) [6-13]. Yet, how pitch and harmony affect our emotions, and to what extent these effects are culturally mediated or universal, is hotly debated [2, 5, 14-20]. Here, we report an experiment conducted in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea, across several communities with similar traditional music but differing levels of exposure to Western-influenced tonal music. One hundred and seventy participants were presented with pairs of major and minor cadences (chord progressions) and melodies, and chose which of them made them happier. The experiment was repeated by 60 non-musicians and 19 musicians in Sydney, Australia. Bayesian analyses show that, for cadences, there is strong evidence that greater happiness was reported for major than minor in every community except one: the community with minimal exposure to Western-like music. For melodies, there is strong evidence that greater happiness was reported for those with higher mean pitch (major melodies) than those with lower mean pitch (minor melodies) in only one of the three PNG communities and in both Sydney groups. The results show that the emotive valence of major and minor is strongly associated with exposure to Western-influenced music and culture, although we cannot exclude the possibility of universality.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.