In this study 391 students (aged 13 to 16) were asked to imagine a highly emotional situation (such as joy, contentment, anger, grief) and to state on a semantic differential, what kind of music they would wish to listen to in such a situation. A duster analysis revealed extreme diff erences of musical choices, especially in the negative situations ( anger and grief), which indicates that music can have various different functions. The author comes to the conclusion that studies on the relations between personality and music preferences have been so far rather unsuccessful because the great variety of possibilities in using music to influence an emotional state has not been adequately considered.

Problems of children's individual motivation to practise a musical instrument have not been investigated systematically so far. Starting to fill the gap this explorative study with 37 young piano students of both sexes aims at two scopes: 1 . comparative testing of different issues on motivation theory by application to practical behaviour in juvenile musical education. 2. Design and proof of a variety of new and adequate empirical methods ; besides a practical experiment and an extensive questionnaire emphasis was laid on projective techniques. Three levels of achievement related motives seemed to influence the musical behaviour independently: 1 . a general, "abstract" achievement motivation ; 2. a specific, i.e. music orientated achievement motivation; 3 . a sensual-aesthetic motive, i.e. pleasure and joy to play certain pieces of music. This last aspect needs more attention compared to abstract motivation, which dominates theories of achievement motivation. Many children suffered by anxiety and conflicts about achievement ; but anxiety did not seem to enhance achievement beyond a certain limit. The study shows remarkable effects of age and sex, which had to be analysed further. The design of a drawing test, where the child portrays itself in the performance situation, was very appropriate to reflect the complex aspects in children's emotional experience. Combined with studies of individual cases decoding and validation of central visual elements in the drawings as indicators is very promising.

In the essay an attempt is made to develop a musical aesthetics on the basis of daily life experiences. The functions in which we use music serve also as criterions of music evaluation. This not yet is accepted by the historically orientated academic music aesthetics. But there is same evidence from musical live world studies undertaken by the author. Content analysis of 1 53 free writings to the theme »My musical life world« reveals six evaluated categories of use functions in music. These functions partially call for a reconsideration from the positions of culture critics. The methodological proceedings of content analysis leads to a controversy against the experimental settings of Konecni's New experimental aesthetics. Supplementarily to the content analysis an experiment has been carried out with the tool of the semantic differential to see, which set of adjectives most adequately describes the emotional situations of music listening. The corresponding music examples belong to a wide range of musical stiles, but the connected semantic characteristics under all probands are very similar. Finally the existence or non-existence of a pure aesthetic world besides daily life is discussed.

Film music is always intended to be functional and, amongst other things, it should be used to introduce and underline the plot, particularly at the beginning of the film. In an experiment 69 students were asked to monitor their response to the film music during a normal screening, in order to test whether this intention had been realized successfully. The particular piece used was the opening music to Hitchcock's "Spellbound", for which Mikl6s R6sza composed two motifs, contrasted in every respect in accordance with the plot. lt was found that the ability to perceive the intention was dependent on the way in which the listener appreciated and understood the music. Those who perceived it unconciously as background music experienced a rather vague response and only identified a single, diffuse quality, described as "drama". In contrast, those who perceived the changing musical motifs as figures on a visual background and moreover recognized the variation in the structure and expression of the opening music experienced graded bipolar response structures in line with the composer's intention. Even by those, who were not familiar with the film, graded structures were found.

The chapter focusses on the psychological aspects of two phenomena of popular rock music : collective improvization and the induction of altered states of consciousness. If analyzed in terms of serial information processing (Pressing, 1984) the extraordinarily large demands on reaction time, attention, and decision making raise the question as to why musicians are so enthusiastic about doing it. A partial answer is obtained by studying the pleasure derived from intuition, orientation, and socially-binding empathy. Examining the impacts of monotony and sensory overload brought about by repetitive rhythms, amplified noise and flickering strobelights, the resulting modification of the state of consciousness indicates right hemispheric dominance, pleasant for the audience and helpful for the musicians, the latter because increased gestalt perception reduces the cognitive effort. The relations of these phenomena to present cultural trends are discussed.

The article explores the three fold relations of meaning to art perception, art creation and the work of art itself, by applying the theoretically-grounded, comprehensive und empirically-tested psychosemantic theory by Kreitler & Kreitler. Studies were described that enabled clarifying the chracteristics of "aesthetic" perception and identifying short- and long-term effects of art exposure on the cognitive functioning of art spectators; the raising of creativity in general and of symbol production in particular by training specific aspects of meaning; and understanding the structure of works of art, and of musical compositions specifically, through analyzing them in terms of the meaning system. lt is hoped that the described experiments research tools and theoretical assumptions constitute the elements for a new psychosemantic approach to the psychology of art.

This study examines the influence of self-awareness on the aesthetic preference for musical complexity. lt was proposed that under high self-awareness music should be experienced more extreme. This hypothesis was tested for the situational and dispositional (private self-consciousness) approach. The results are not obvious. By multivariate analysis the hypothesis was only confirmed for subjects with high optimal complexity level. For private self-consciousness, a similar result was not obtained. Nevertheless, high self-conscious experienced the music more positive than low self-conscious subjects. The results are discussed in relation to the approach of the new experimental aesthetics.