Processing violence and misogyny in extreme metal lyrics to optimise psychosocial benefits

This thesis investigated how fans process, appraise, and respond emotionally to violent lyrics in extreme metal music to derive enjoyment and psychosocial benefits. Four studies were conducted. The goal of the first study was to characterise the nature of passion, ingroup identification, and emotional responses among extreme metal music fans. Study 2 was conducted to examine potential differences in how violent linguistic stimuli capture the attention of fans and non-fans, while Study 3 examined the possibility that fans suppress their awareness of, or suppress their emotional responses to, violent extreme metal lyrics. Finally, Study 4 examined the role of cognitive reappraisal in processing themes of violence against women in extreme metal music. The results of Study 1 showed that fans with harmonious passion for extreme metal music experienced high levels of satisfaction as members of the extreme metal community, whereas fans with obsessive passion tended to define themselves more by using their in-group membership. Using an attentional blink paradigm in Study 2, no differences were observed between fans and nonfans, or between males and females, in the way attention is captured by violent linguistic material. Using a recognition memory task, Study 3 revealed participants had poorer discrimination performance (ability to discriminate between targets and foils) for violent lyrics relative to neutral lyrics. Finally, Study 4 revealed that listening to metal songs with lyrical themes of sexual violence against women led to a decrease in positive affect, but non-threatening interpretations of those lyrics (cognitive reappraisal) successfully mitigated such effects. Overall, the results suggest that fans and non-fans of extreme metal process violent stimuli similarly at early stages of attention and encoding, but fans may engage higher order processes such as cognitive reappraisal to derive enjoyment and psychosocial benefits from extreme metal with violent and/or misogynistic lyrics.