The same, only different: what can responses to music in autism tell us about the nature of musical emotions

We propose addressing the theme of this special issue by examining the affective responses that music evokes in the indi-vidual. The logical first step is to enquire how far these responses resemble natu-ralistic emotions, i.e., those that are not specifically musical, but have ordinary non-musical content. The literature is ambivalent on this. Many authors suggest that whilst certain emotions are exclusive to music (Scherer and Zentner, 2008), there is considerable overlap between “musical ” and “naturalistic ” emotions (Zentner et al., 2008); others deny that musically induced emotions are natu-ralistic (Konecni, 2005, 2008), a view elaborated by the nineteenth century criti