Music is an important part of our lives, often accompanying us and influencing our mood and experience of the situation. Recently, more and more research has focused on the emotional experience of listening to music, which can be influenced by several factors, including personality. The aim of this master thesis was to investigate the relationship between different personality traits with the emotional experience of valence and arousal while listening to musical excerpts. The sample consisted of 95 individuals (M = 21,01 years, SD = 3,62 years) who completed the Big Five Inventory and performed a music listening task in which they listened to 47 musical excerpts and reported their experienced emotions for each one. The results showed that the degree of openness was statistically significantly predictive of the average experienced emotional valence - more open individuals on average assigned higher values to the experienced valence while listening to the music. We further showed that this correlation is specific to music excerpts with low levels of arousal, and that more open individuals experienced more different emotions on average while listening to music compared to less open individuals. There were no statistically significant associations between other personality traits and the experience of emotional valence. For the arousal dimension, the results also showed no significant associations with personality traits. The master's thesis thus sheds light on the important role of trait openness in the emotional experience of music on a dimensional level and provides a basis for further research in an area that remains largely unexplored. At the same time, it offers a starting point for the development of interventions using music that could be tailored to the individual's personality characteristics.
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