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What is open-earedness?

What is ‘open-earedness’, and how can it be measured?

David J. Hargreaves & Arielle Bonneville-Roussy

Applied Music Research CentreUniversity of Roehampton

Roehampton LaneLondon

SW15 5SL, UK

Abstract

Recent years have seen some fundamental changes in the study of responses to music: the growth of neuroscientific approaches, in particular, is throwing new light on the role of imagination, affect and emotion. One focus has been on the nature of musical preferences in relation to other affective and cognitive judgements, and another has been on the issue of changes in musical preference across the lifespan. One explanatory concept which has proved useful in this respect is that of ‘open-earedness’, first formulated by one of us in 1982 in the suggestion that ‘younger children may be more “open-eared” to forms of music regarded by adults as unconventional; their responses may show less evidence of acculturation to normative standards of good taste than those of older subjects’ (p. 51). Louven (2016) recently published a critique of the ways in which this concept has been operationalised in subsequent research, proposing his own definition. In this paper we take a broad ranging view of ‘open-earedness’, proposing four different possible definitions, and ways in which these can be operationalised and measured. We use some data from a new test of preferences for musical genres and clips to test some of these operationalisations: the results suggest the similarities between these four definitions are probably greater than the differences between them, but that they nevertheless provide a richer and more nuanced concept of open-earedness than hitherto.

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Listening to music: imagination, affect and emotion Recent years have seen some fundamental changes in our conceptions and definitions of different components of listeners’ responses to music: the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, for example (see eg. Brattico & Pearce, 2013) emphasizes the role of central neural and cognitive processes in affective and emotional responses, and makes a central distinction between three main types of listening response, namely preferences (liking for certain pieces rather than others), emotions (spontaneous and largely affective reactions), and judgements (considered, reflective evaluations).

Hargreaves, Hargreaves and North (2012) put forward the case for viewing listening as a creative activity which has been neglected in recent empirical studies of musical creativity. In the light of recent neuroscientific research evidence, Hargreaves (2012) proposed a revised version of his original reciprocal-feedback model of musical communication. This has now been reconceptualised as a model of music processing with imagination at its core, with perception (listening) and production (performance, composition and improvisation) having equal status within that core, which is seen as having reciprocal-feedback relationships with each of the three main interacting components of any musical experience, namely the person (listener, composer, improviser or performer), the music, and the listening situation.

On the basis of this revised model, Schubert Hargreaves and North (2014) proposed a dynamically minimalist cognitive explanation of musical preference which gives familiarity a central role in the development of preference, operating according to Schubert's (1996, 2012) mechanism of ‘spreading activation’ through associative networks. Schubert, North & Hargreaves (in press) have taken this approach further in proposing an Affect Space Framework (ASF) with three dimensions, namely are internal vs. external locus, ‘affect-valence’ vs. ‘emotion-valence’, and ‘deep vs. shallow’ hedonic tone. Schubert, North & Hargreaves (submitted) have also presented some empirical data which supports the ASF by comparing responses to liked and disliked music.

Louven (2016) recently offered a critical discussion of the term ‘open-earedness’, which was introduced by one of us over 30 years ago (Hargreaves, 1982). He points out that this term has appealed to scholars and researchers, and has generated a significant body of research: but that this ‘appealing term of iridescent indetermination’, as he puts it, has been used imprecisely and inconsistently. Louven offers his own definition and operationalisations of the concept, upon which we will comment later in this paper. However, we feel any reconceptualization of the original idea of open-earedness must be grounded in these new advances in our understanding of the aesthetic response to music, and that is the main aim of this paper.

Life-span changes in musical preferenceResearch on musical preferences has proliferated in recent years, with many studies devoted to the development of scales to measure preference, with a corresponding growthin qualitative research, and with studies of the relationships between musical preferencesand other aspects of social life and behaviour (see review by Greasley & Lamont, 2016). One very popular scale is the Short Test of Musical Preferences, based on musical genrelabels (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003), which Rentfrow and his colleagues subsequentlyrevised as the MUSIC scale with five underlying dimensions (‘Mellow’, ‘Unpretentious’,‘Sophisticated’, ‘Intense’ and ‘Contemporary’): this attempts to bring together somecommon features from a range of earlier measures (eg. Rentfrow, Goldberg & Levitin,

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2011; Rentfrow, Goldberg, Stillwell, Kosinski, Gosling & Levitin, 2012). Using theMUSIC model, Bonneville-Roussy, Rentfrow, Xu and Potter (2013) found large-scalechanges with age in their study of over 254,000 participants aged between 12 and 65.Preference for the ‘Unpretentious’ and ‘Sophisticated’ dimensions increased linearly withage, preference for the ‘Mellow’ dimension showed a peak in early adulthood and a slightdecline in later adulthood, and preference for the ‘Intense’ and ‘Contemporary’ factorsgradually declined across the age range.

Bonneville-Roussy et al. (2013) ascribe these changing preferences to life stage and age-related processes. Rock and heavy metal was preferred more in adolescence than at other ages, perhaps reflecting adolescents’ search for identity and independence: preference for ‘Mellow’ music in early adulthood might reflect the intimacy of building lasting social and family relationships, while preference for ‘Unpretentious’ and ‘Sophisticated’ music in later adulthood might reflect pressures of family and career life on the one hand and the desire to establish social status on the other. Explanations such as these are inevitably speculative, however, and with the exception of ‘Contemporary’ and possibly also ‘Intense’, the other three scales in the MUSIC measure involve subjective evaluation, and so it is very difficult to provide a definitive explanation of lifespan developments in musical preference. One important distinction is that between factors which derive from the social and cultural contexts in which people of different ages find themselves, and those based on individual differences such as gender, socioeconomic status, personality traits such as openness to new experiences, and indeed age: our main focus here is on the latter.

Further studies by Bonneville-Roussy (e.g. Bonneville-Roussy, 2014; see also Bonneville-Roussy, Stillwell, Kosinski, & Rust, 2016) have shown that the dimensions of musical preferences and their increase or decrease in liking with age were robust to the method of assessment. In addition, those studies have shown that the perceived musical properties were more important in explaining age differences in musical preferences than any other psychological variables investigated.

The concept of ‘open-earedness’This concept (O-E) was first mentioned in a paper by Hargreaves (1982), who used this metaphor in suggesting that ‘younger children may be more “open-eared” to forms of music regarded by adults as unconventional; their responses may show less evidence of acculturation to normative standards of good taste than those of older subjects’ (p. 51). Although the O-E metaphor was little more than a figure of speech at this stage, and was consequently not carefully defined or developed in any way, it was nevertheless adopted and developed by LeBlanc (1991), who was carrying out his own research on lifespan changes in musical preference. LeBlanc also used the term ‘tolerance’ as being synonymous with O-E; he operationalized both concepts in terms of preferences; and he formulated a life-span developmental model of O-E which was based on four generalizations: that ‘younger children are more open-eared … open-earedness declines as the child enters adolescence … there is a partial rebound of open-earedness as the listener matures from adolescence to young adulthood … open-earedness declines as the listener matures to old age’ (pp. 36–38).

LeBlanc’s model led on to a considerable body of further empirical research: the review by Hargreaves, North & Tarrant (2016) is probably one of the most extensive, though it omits a lot of the literature which is only available in German. It is interesting to note that

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the vast majority of this research operationalises O-E in terms of preference (including that by Hargreaves); and that Hargreaves, North and Tarrant’s review shows that with one or two exceptions, LeBlanc’s generalizations receive general support. The ‘dip’ in open-earedness in later childhood seems to occur at around the age of 10 or 11 years, and this typically shows itself in very strongly expressed preferences for a narrow range of pop styles, and strong general dislike for all other styles. After this, there seems to be a general decline in liking for popular music styles across the rest of the lifespan, and a corresponding general increase in ‘classical’ styles.

Hargreaves & Lamont (2017) have carried out another more recent review of this literature which includes some of the German research (eg. Kopiez and Lehmann, 2008; Schurig, Busch & Strauss, 2012; Bunte, 2014; Bunte & Busch, 2015, and some of which forms part of an issue of the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Musikpsychologie which is devoted to the topic (Auhagen, Bullerjahn & Georgi, 2014). Gembris and Schellberg (2003), for example, assessed the likes and dislikes of 591 children between the ages of 5 and 13 for eight short excerpts from four different styles (classical music, pop music, 20th-century art (avant-garde) music, and ethnic music). They found highly significant age-related declines in liking for all of these styles; pop music was the most preferred, and the younger the children, the more positive were their ratings for classical, avant-garde, and ethnic music. With increasing age, however, all the ratings became strongly negative. Once again, it is important to note that most of this literature operationalizes O-E in terms of musical preferences, although there is one notable exception to this which we mentioned earlier and will deal with next.

Louven’s (2016) critique: Conceptual issues in defining O-ELouven (2016) presents his own account of the origins of the concept: his main objection is to its imprecision and inaccuracy, and he claims that ‘such an ambiguous term might lead to conceptual and methodological inconsistencies in scientific contexts, which in turn calls into question the validity of any results that have been published as a result’ (p. 235). He is correct to say that Hargreaves never tried to develop it any further than in the quotation above, and in that sense did not present a formal definition. Louven goes on to reformulate the notion of O-E in terms of openness, curiosity and tolerance, which leads to his own operationalisation as listening time to initially disliked music, expressed in terms of subsequent preference ratings, for which he proposes a measure, namely the Osnabrück Open-Earedness Index (OOI), along with the development of a software tool called OpenEar. This new operationalization of O-E was tested in an ingenious cross-sectional study by Louven and Ritter (2012), the results of which seem to suggest that the well-established age trends in O-E first proposed by LeBlanc are not apparent when O-E is measured by the OOI, but rather that it remains more or less unchanged over the age range of the participants in the study (approximately 6-30 years).

Louven’s critique raises some important issues, and we agree with his conclusion that ‘the indecisiveness of the term must be overcome and put on a theoretical basis that is accurately defined to enable us to then consistently and empirically operationalize and verify it’ (p. 244). However, we suggest that there are four conceptual and/or empirical problems associated with Louven’s operationalistion of O-E. First, we feel that Louven’s formulation of O-E is over-specified: it goes one stage further than Einstein’s view, cited by Louven, that ‘Tolerance is the humane understanding for characteristics, opinions, and actions of other individuals that are foreign to one's own customs, convictions and tastes’ (Einstein, 1979, p. 154), or indeed to Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter’s more recent

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view, stated in their ‘open letter to the next generation of artists’, that ‘The world needs more one-on-one interaction among people of diverse origins with a greater emphasis on art, culture and education.’ (Hancock & Shorter, 2016). Both of these statements emphasise openness to alternative points of view, but neither of them extend this to the active seeking out of elements which are actively disliked.

A second difficulty for this definition lies in the definition of liking, or preference: although Louven makes a clear empirical distinction between listening time and liking, it is by no means obvious that this distinction is universally valid. The differences between short-term ‘on the spot’ preferences and longer-term patterns of musical ‘taste’ are well established in the research literature, for example, and it is not at all clear that short-term and long-term preferences are best measured by listening time and ratings respectively. Infant habituation studies, for example, (eg. Kagan & Lewis, 1965) use attentional measures as direct indices of liking, and here the distinction is completely blurred.

The third and fourth problems are in a sense more technical than conceptual. The third is that ‘initially disliked’ music confounds highly subjectively simple music, for which liking would be further reduced by further exposure, and highly subjectively complex music, liking for which would be increased by further exposure. Different predictions concerning the development of O-E would be likely to emerge from each of these, such that Louven’s operationalisation is unclear. This leads to our fourth issue, namely that the formula which he provides for the computation of the OOI seems excessively hermetic and abstruse: it may not be easily accessible to independent researchers who might want to replicate the results. The decision to compute the ratio of the listening durations for disliked samples to that for the overall average of all listening durations rather than to that for the liked samples is implicit here, for example, and different theoretical assumptions may well underlie each possible approach.

These four areas of concern lead us to conclude that other operationalisations of O-E are likely to be preferable to Louven’s solution, and we would like to conclude this analysis, following our comments at the start of the paper, by critically evaluating four alternative approaches, namely those based on patterns of music preference; on the recent sociologically-based concept of ‘omnivorousness’ in musical taste; on the notion of imaginative or creative listening: and on the personality dimension of openness to new experiences.

Four possible definitions and measures of O-E1. Patterns of musical preferenceAs mentioned above, the vast majority of the research on O-E, from LeBlanc (1991) onwards, operationalizes O-E in terms of musical preferences. We also noted that LeBlanc used the term ‘tolerance’ as being synonymous with O-E; he operationalized both concepts in terms of preferences, and formulated his life-span developmentalmodel on this basis. We would like to add two comments: first, that Hargreaves’ original use of the term O-E implied only ‘openness’ or ‘open-mindedness’, without necessarily including the connotations of ‘curiosity’ or ‘tolerance’ which have been introduced by others: and second, that preferences are essentially positively valenced, such that Louven’s introduction of initially disliked music is incompatible with the original usage.

2. Omnivorousness of long-term musical taste

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Following Adorno’s (1976) seminal work in the sociology of music, which was ‘dedicated to exploring the hypothesis that musical organisation is a simulacrum for social organisation’ (p. 2), Bourdieu (e.g. Bourdieu, 1971) famously proposed that social forces impose and shape norms of cultural taste, and that dominant social groups ‘legitimate’ their standards of taste in relation to those of other groups. One important distinction here was in the definition of what constituted ‘serious’ as distinct from ‘popular’ music. Bourdieu saw the musical establishment as legitimating the former, suggesting that there existed a homology between taste and social position. Taste was seen as being a significant indicator of social class as well as vice versa, in that that people's likes and dislikes were seen to contribute significantly to the perpetuation of social hierarchies.

An alternative to the Bourdieusian homology argument is that based on the concept of omnivorousness (see eg. Peterson & Kern, 1996): Chan & Goldthorpe (2007), for example, present two alternative perspectives: the individualisation argument, which places greater emphasis on individual characteristics such as age, gender or musical training than on social status in the formation of musical taste, and the omnivore-univore argument, in which so-called ‘highbrow’, ‘middle-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ taste patterns are defined in terms of cultural consumption rather than of social status. This latter argument is supported by Elvers, Omigie, Fuhrmann and Fischinger’s (2015) empirical demonstration that musical ‘omnivorousness’ – the tendency to appreciate a wide range of musical styles, including those regarded as ‘highbrow’ or ‘sophisticated’ - tends to be positively related to musical training/sophistication. The results of Chan & Goldthorpe's regression analysis, which includes a range of demographic and stratification variables, ‘provide little support for the homology or individualisation arguments. They are more consonant with the omnivore-univore argument….’ (p.1). This would seem to lead to the suggestion that O-E has much in common with omnivorousness, and this seems to refer to long-term musical tastes rather than to short-term preferences. Whether omnivorousness derives from the social and cultural contexts in which individuals find themselves, or from the intrinsic differences between those individuals remains unclear, although it is clear that the concept is based on musical likes and dislikes, and is therefore closely related to our first definition above.

3. Imaginative/creative listeningIn this proposed new approach we go back to the basic determinants of musical response, drawing on some of the concepts mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this paper. Hargreaves, Hargreaves and North’s (2012) view of listening as a creative activity with the same neural foundations as composition or performance involves the operation of associative networks (see also Martindale, & Moore, 1988). We propose that these are of three main types, namely musical, cultural and personal networks, and that the flexibility and inclusivity of each listener’s associative network system may be what underlies that individual’s level of O-E. In Schubert, Hargreaves & North’s (2014)’s terms, spreading activation is more likely to occur, and to be more extensive, for a greater number of musical stimuli in listeners with more flexible network systems.

In operational terms, this may be revealed by the flexibility of individuals’ genre construct systems, which might be defined in terms of both the number of genre labels and the number of short excerpts of music which they consider to be differentially representative of these labels. It is important to recognize that this operationalisation is not equivalent to (1) above, ie. based on measures of preference, but on the relationship between preferred genre labels and sounds. To be more specific, we can say that this flexibility is not

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necessarily based on liking or preferences: it is equally likely to include disliked genre labels and sounds, and Schubert’s (2012) explicit quotation from Martindale and Moore’s (1988) activation theory emphasizes this point: ‘perception or recognition has to do with exactly which cognitive units are activated, whereas aesthetic pleasure has to do with the net amount of activation of these units’ (p. 662).

4. Openness to new experiencesOpenness to new experiences (or simply openness), is the personality trait that involves the cognitive need for exploration (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003). It includes intellectual curiosity, imagination, sensitivity to arts and aesthetic experiences, and preference for diversity (McCrae & Costa, 1997). In musical terms, openness has been linked with preferences for sophistication, multiple musical genres and forms, and aesthetic chills (Bonneville-Roussy, Rentfrow, Xu, & Potter, 2013; Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez, & Altenmüller, 2007 [as associated with openness in McCrae, 2007]). The links between open-earedness and age found in LeBlanc (1991), that is, the dip in open-earedness found in the middle of childhood and early adolescence, and its rebound in early adulthood, mirror the findings in the development of openness to experience in childhood and adulthood (Soto, John, Gosling, & Potter, 2011). Therefore, a very strong association between the psychological trait of openness to experience and the musical trait of ‘open-earedness’ might exist. Recent support for this notion emerges from a study by Colver and El-Alayli (2016) which found that openness to experience was positively correlated with the frequency of frisson (pleasurable aesthetic chills) in response to music in 100 college students. This is not a direct measure of O-E of course, but we speculate that it may well be related.

Empirical tests of definitions 3 and 4Rationale: the definition of O-E in terms of preference patterns (definition 1) has been the basis of most of the previous research in the field: here we are mainly concerned with trying to establish more fundamental underlying cognitive determinants of those patterns, and so do not want to conduct any further empirical tests of definition 1. This aim is primarily psychological, whereas definition 2 (omnivorousness) is essentially sociological. Whilst these may indeed be complementary, it would be difficult to formulate an empirical test of definition 2, and in any case Chan and Goldthorpe’s (2007) closely-related individualisation argument also reverts to psychological issues. We therefore draw on some existing data to conduct tests of definitions 3 and 4 which have the potential to expand our understanding of the nature of O-E.

We propose an exploratory operationalization of O-E which draws on some previously collected data on the Music Genre-Clips test (MG-CT: see Bonneville-Roussy et al., 2017). The MG–CT test is based on Bonneville-Roussy’s Musical Preferences in Adulthood Model (MPAM), which in turn derives from Hargreaves’s (2012) reciprocal feedback model, mentioned earlier: it is described in more detail in the Method section. In brief, the MPAM suggests that musical preferences in adulthood are affected by two classes of psychological determinants – those which are extrinsic to the music, such as individual differences and social influences, and those which are intrinsic to the music (its properties). In this paper we draw on Bonneville-Roussy et al.’s paradigm in order to explore some of the conceptual issues underlining the nature of O-E by testing definitions 3 and 4 above.

Participants: 311 adults aged between 18 and 65 years old (M = 31.00, SD = 11.97), of

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which 54% were women, participated in the study. 44.1 % of the sample had no formal musical education. Of those who had some musical training, 64.1% had less than five years of formal musical training, 3.6% had between 5 and 10 years of musical education, and 32.3 % had more than 10 years of formal training. Of the participants who had received some musical training, 64.1% were classically educated, 3.6 % were educated in jazz music, 32.3% in pop music, and the remainder had other unnamed types of formal music education. In terms of highest level of education, 3.5% had less than a high school diploma, 11% had a high school degree, 4.2 % had some vocational training, 36.5% had some university education, 25.2% had obtained an undergraduate degree, and finally 19.7% had attended university at the postgraduate level.

Method: The participants were recruited on the Internet between November 2012 and April 2013, using mailing lists and forum postings. Participants were all volunteers, and were asked to answer questions about their personality, and preferences for music genres and music clips, using the Music Genre-Clips Test (MG-CT, see Bonneville-Roussy et al. 2017). The MG-CT is a thoroughly validated test of musical preferences available on the Internet that tests liking for music genres and music clips in parallel (the 63 clips version is used in the present study; see Supplementary Material of Bonneville-Roussy et al., 2017, for a complete description of the test and its validation).

Music Genre-Clips Test. The participants in the present study answered questions about their musical likes and dislikes using the Music Genre-Clips test (MG-CT, see Bonneville-Roussy et al. 2017). They first rated the 21 genre labels of the genres sub-test of the MG-CT on 5-point dislike-like scales, and were given scores for the number (sum) of genres they liked or disliked. They then heard a random selection of 30 15-second music clips taken from the 63 clips (three clips per genre) of the clips subtest of the MG-CT, which provided a score for liked and disliked clips-within-genres. The genres and clips measures were dichotomized to obtain two separate measures of likes and dislikes. Liked genres or clips were defined as those rated “4” or higher (“I like” and “I like very much”) on the scale, and disliked genres or clips as those rated them “2” or less (“I dislike” or “I dislike very much”). The ratings of the three clips per genre were averaged to give a single measure of liked or disliked clips-per-genre. The following points summarize the dichotomization method:

1. 1-2 = Dislike, coded “Zero (0)”2. 3 = Treated as missing3. 4-5 = Like, coded “One (1)”

This gives rise to four new potential constituent measures of open-earedness, each ranging from 0 (minimum) to 21 (maximum), with the average likes/dislikes of the present sample, as follows:

1. Genres – likes (M = 8.63, SD = 3.13)2. Genres – dislikes (M = 4.34, SD = 2.90)3. Clips – likes (average comes from the aggregated three clips per

genre; M = 5.07, SD = 2.68)4. Clips – dislikes (average comes from the aggregated three clips per

genre; M = 4.31, SD = 2.28)

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Openness to experience. Openness to experience was measured using the two items of the Openness subscale of the Brief Measure of Big Five Personality (Gosling et al., 2003). The items were measured on a Likert scale 1(“I strongly disagree”) to 5(“I strongly agree”), with ratings based on the extent to which participants felt that the two openness traits (“Open to new experiences, complex”or“Conventional, uncreative”, reversed) applied to them (M = 4.09, SD = 0.69).

Analysis: In order to examine the effects of age and openness to experience on the four measures of likes and dislikes, we first performed a series of hierarchical polynomial multiple regressions. Since past research has mostly found that relationships between age and musical preferences are curvilinear (Bonneville-Roussy et al., 2017; Bonneville-Roussy et al., 2013; Holbrook & Schindler, 1989), quadratic trends of age were assessed. Scores on each the four measures of likes-dislikes were regressed on the linear and quadratic terms of age, and on Openness to experience scores. Specifically, the linear terms of age and openness were entered in Step 1 and the quadratic term of age was entered at Step 2. To avoid multicollinearity, the age variable was first standardized before being squared.

Results: The results of the regression analyses are shown in Table 1: openness to experience was related to the number of genres and clips individuals liked (β = 0.12, p = .032 and 0.11, p = .048 respectively). We also found a significant quadratic trend of age for the number of genres liked (quadratic β = -0.31, p < .001) which is presented graphically in Figure 1, with the number of genres liked for the younger and older age groups estimated at 6.26 and 9.14, respectively, and a peak at around 49 years of age, with an estimated 9.63 genres liked. We did not find quadratic trends of age for the number of clips liked, nor dislikes for genres or clips (quadratic βs < 0.07, ns). No other significant results were found.

------- Table 1, Figure 1 and Table 2 about here -------

To examine the construct validity of these different likes-dislikes, correlation analyses were performed: Pearson correlation coefficients between each of the four measures are presented in Table 2. We found a strong (negative) correlation between likes and dislikes, regardless of the assessment method (clips and/or genres). We also found strong positive correlations between measures for genres and clips.

DiscussionOur clear finding that Openness to experience predicts the number of genres as well as the number of clips-within-genres that people like provides support for the notion that both of these indices may be viable component measures of O-E: it also provides some direct support for our 4th definition of the construct. The corresponding finding that Openness does not significantly predict the number of genres or clips that people dislike confirms that ‘like’ is indeed acting as the inverse of ‘dislike’, i.e. that our participants are using the scales in a predictable and consistent fashion.

Our finding that age predicts the number of genres that individuals like, but not the number of clips that they like, nor their dislikes for genres or clips, provides support for the evidence in the literature concerning age trends: if these are indeed viable component measures of O-E, this result supports the wealth of evidence in the literature in favour of LeBlanc's (1991) lifespan model. The regression line in Figure 1 shows this very clearly:

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the number of genres liked by our participants rises steadily between the ages of 18 to a peak at around the ages of 45 to 55 years, and then starts to decline as predicted by LeBlanc's model. This suggests that the definition of O-E in terms of liking for genres, if not for clips, is more appropriate than Louven’s (2016) alternative, and indeed our results refute his contention that O-E remains more or less constant in the years of early adulthood. We should also remember that the participants in Louven’s study were aged between 6 and 30, most of them from the lower end of this age range, whereas our sample is comprised of adults. It seems reasonable to conclude that most of the preference-based research evidence on changes in O-E across the lifespan supports LeBlanc’s lifespan model, which includes a decline in O-E in childhood.

The patterns of correlations between the four potential component measures of O-E (Table 2) are entirely consistent with the interpretation above. The strong negative correlations between like and dislike ratings for both clips as well as genres confirm that our participants are using these in the consistent and predictable manner, in that ‘dislike’ is functioning as the inverse of ‘like’, and the strong positive correlations between ‘like’ as well as ‘dislike’ ratings for clips and genres also confirm that these ratings are meaningful and valid.

These data still do not provide a definitive operationalisation of O-E: they provide only indirect evidence for or against the four definitions suggested earlier, but they nevertheless guide us towards a more consistent and increasingly sophisticated conceptualization. The use of simple measures of preference to define O-E (definition 1) is probably inadequate, as Louven (2016) suggests, although their use in conjunction with other information, as in the other three definitions, seems to hold more promise. Our data provide little support for Louven’s own definition, which we suggest may be over-specified and possibly erroneous, extrapolating too far from the original concept of O-E. As we said earlier, our second possible definition, based on the notion of omnivorousness, is also based on musical likes and dislikes – in this case long-term patterns of taste rather than short-term preferences: the key question here is whether the origins of omnivorousness are primarily social/cultural or individual. Definitions 3 and 4 both receive support from our data – this is clear and unambigous in the latter case, deriving as it does from the administration of an independent personality measure. The former – based on the notion of imaginative/creative listening – is in many ways the most appealing, based as it is in some of the most recent thinking about cognitive and affective aspects of musical response. The definition of O-E in terms of the flexibility of individuals’ genre construct systems, as well as in terms of the ways in which their reactions to specific musical excerpts (clips) relate to these, is at the heart of the MG–CT test. More specifically, our data reveal very strong positive correlations between like ratings for both clips and genre labels, as well as correspondingly very strong negative correlations between like and dislike ratings for both clips and genre labels: they also show strong, but lower, negative correlations between liking for genre labels and disliking for clips, as well as between liking for clips and disliking for genre labels. We interpret this pattern of relationships in terms of the flexibility with which individuals link specific clips with genre labels, which we see as suggestive if not conclusive evidence that this may form the basis of open-earedness. They are, nevertheless, still based on musical likes and dislikes, which forces us to the conclusion that the interdependence of and similarities between the four definitions we have proposed in this paper are probably greater than the differences between them. Taken together,

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however, they nevertheless provide a much richer and more nuanced concept of O-E than hitherto.

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Table 1. Results of the polynomial regression analyses of the sum of musical likes and dislikes on age, age quadratic and openness to experience

Variable B SE B β1. Genres – Likes Age (z) 1.00 0.24 .32***

Age2 -0.71 0.18 -.31***Openness 0.40 0.18 .12*

2. Genres – Dislikes Age (z) -0.11 0.23 -.04Age2 0.05 0.17 .02Openness 0.18 0.18 .06

3. Clips – Likes Age (z) 0.06 0.22 .02Age2 0.01 0.16 .01Openness 0.32 0.16 .11*

4. Clips – Dislikes Age (z) 0.11 0.18 .05Age2 0.06 0.14 .04Openness 0.15 0.14 .06

Note. N = 311. R2 = .07, R2 = .004, R2 = .01, R2 = .01, for the four measures of open-earedness, respectively. *p < .05, ** p < .001.

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Table 2. Pearson correlation coefficients between the four open-earedness measures

LikeClips

Dislike Clips

Like Genres

Dislike Genres

Like Clips

--

Dislike Clips

-.58*** --

Like Genres

.47*** -.39*** --

Dislike Genres

-.43*** .56*** -.63*** --

Notes. N = 311. All correlations are significant p < .001.

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Figure 1. Number of genres liked as a function of age (18-65 years). Regression coefficients are presented in section 1 of Table 1

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schubert, e., north, a.c. & hargreaves, d.j. (2016). an ...€¦ · web viewscores on each...

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