Music listening is a highly pleasurable experience for its fans and is associated with physiological rewards and positive affective experiences. However, these rewards are likely to differ from those described for music performers, who have agency over the production of music and an embodied experience that is more detailed than a listener’s response. Thus, it remains an open question as to whether passion facilitates well-being equally for music listeners and performers.
The relationships between harmonious passion, positive experiences in activity engagement, and well-being have been described as a spiral-up relationship, whereby harmonious passion for an activity leads to the enjoyment and positive outcomes that, in turn, permeate psychological well-being.
As music is one of the forms of media most often consumed worldwide, positive affective experiences with music listening should occur regularly enough to promote and sustain the experience of psychological well-being for its fans.
As harmonious passion for music listening leads to positive emotional experiences, these positive experiences should promote psychological well-being.
Evidence suggests that in work and academic contexts, obsessive passion is associated with task conflict and rumination, which in turn contribute to experiences of psychological ill-being and burnout. However, this conflict and rumination pertain more to the experience of negative emotions when the individual is unable to perform a desired activity, rather than experiencing negative emotions from the activity itself.
