A comparative study of verbal descriptions of emotions induced by music between adults with and without visual impairments

This study aimed to investigate the differences in verbal descriptions of emotions induced by music between adults who are visually impaired (VI) and adults who have normal vision (NV). Thirty participants (15 VI, 15 NV) listened to music excerpts and were interviewed. A content analysis and a syntactic analysis were performed. Among the VI group, contextual verbalism was more highly observed compared to media or educational verbalism and a high ratio of affective words, expressions and descriptions via senses other than vision was found. The VI more frequently employed situational descriptions while the NV more often described episodic memories.