Professor Kathleen Higgins, University of Texas at Austin: Emotional Regulation of Grief through Music

Event details

Listening to music is a popular tactic for emotion regulation, which is usually aimed at influencing when and how one experiences relatively short-lived emotions and moods.  Using grief as my focus, I will suggest that listening can also help regulate more temporally extended emotional conditions, including what Ratcliffe has termed “existential feeling.” I will indicate some of the changes to existential feeling that are typical of grief, such as a diminished sense of personal agency and world-distancing, and explain how music can counteract these debilitating effects. I will also consider the possible objections that the virtual character of what is presented in music severely restricts its impact on the existential feeling of belonging to the world; that music facilitates maladaptive regulation strategies of particular concern in connection with grief; and that using music for regulation amounts to ignoring what is musical in music.  I will conclude that: 1) a degree of agency is possible in relation to how one experiences grief; 2) music can help to counteract unwanted changes to existential feeling brought about by grief; 3) music can bolster one’s sense of agency without intensifying the sense of separation from the deceased; and 4) these therapeutic benefits are not achieved at the expense of attending to the music.