Music-emotion,
smell-emotion, colour-emotion… are they types of synesthesia?
Emotions
can be a synesthetic inducer, i.e. a stimulus triggering a synesthetic
experience, but they are not normally considered a concurrent or
synesthetic experience in itself, except for a few specific exceptions.
Emotion
as an inducer of synesthesia:
Emotion-colour
is a type of synesthesia where feeling a specific emotion triggers a colour
perception. An example would be perceiving the colour purple or seeing a haze
of that colour clouding your vision on feeling sad. The colours are
perceived consistently (same emotion = same colour) and they do not usually
coincide with culturally-accepted colour symbolisms such as green=envy, etc.
Go to the page on emotion-colour and other related synesthesia types
There
is also a type of synesthesia in which emotions perceived in other people
trigger colour sensations.
Go to the page on perceived emotion-to-colour (and other concurrents)
Emotion
as a synesthetic concurrent:
It
is common for emotion to accompany a synesthetic concurrent, but it is not
normally considered a concurrent in itself. The only type of
synesthesia with an exclusively emotional concurrent that is accepted as such
today is tactile-emotion (or texture-emotion), a rare type that has been demonstrated
to have similarities with other types of synesthesia. In a study in 2008, V.
S. Ramachandran and D. Brang discussed two possible cases where certain tactile
stimuli (textures) triggered specific, consistent and culturally atypical
emotions.
Go to the page on tactile-emotion synesthesia
The
following manifestations are NOT considered synesthesia:
Colour-emotion: Most
people associate the different colours with emotions, and this is not
considered synesthesia. In general, the colour-emotion
pairings follow a set of learnt and accepted cultural norms (red = anger,
passion; yellow = happiness; green = envy, for example).
Smell-emotion: Smells
can trigger not only memories of past events and places but also a very wide
range of emotional sensations. With sensitivity and concentration,
they can produce experiences that are quite out of the ordinary and even sublime.
No other sense is able to evoke images and sensations as immediate and
emotionally moving as the sense of smell. This experience isn’t considered
synesthesia though. More information on this
interesting phenomenon on the page about smell and memories.
Music-emotion: Feeling
strong, consistent emotions on listening to certain types of music (happiness,
sadness, nostalgia, enthusiasm, fear, uncertainty…) is common to most people
and is certainly an indicator of musical sensitivity, but it isn’t synesthesia.
Frisson,
ASMR and grima are three automatic, involuntary physical reactions to auditory
stimuli that are connected with emotion, and none are considered synesthesia. There
is more information on these three phenomena in the last section of the page on auditory-tactile synesthesia.
Misophonia:
sound-emotion? Misophonia is a condition where
certain sounds such as people eating, slurping or whistling create anger and
repugnance and provoke a sudden overwhelming feeling of extreme stress, a
“fight or flight” reaction.
Despite
a few similarities that have inspired some people to include it on lists of types
of synesthesia, it is different for many reasons and it is mistaken to consider
it as such. It differs from synesthesia in that it is not
idiosyncratic, it is exclusively negative and the onset is at a much later age,
among other reasons. Go to the page on misophonia
However,
emotion is a kind of “by-product” of synesthesia.
Synesthetic
experiences are frequently characterised by having a strong emotional charge, normally
positive. Some examples: a person with
taste-colour or taste-shape synesthesia might feel a rush of happiness or
euphoria on perceiving their photisms; for an auditory-visual synesthete,
“watching” music can create peace and contentment as they see and feel the
colours and shapes; grapheme-colour synesthetes consider the colours of their
letters and numbers harmonious and correct and can often have a reaction of
malaise and confusion if they see them represented in another colour (the “Stroop
effect”).
