Assessing aesthetic music-evoked emotions in a minute or less: A comparison of the GEMS-45 and the GEMS-9

The Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS) is a widely used instrument to measure emotions evoked by music. Its original version includes 45 emotion-related adjectives that can be grouped into nine dimensions and three second-order factors. Because time is often critical, the same authors introduced a checklist that assesses each dimension with one item only (GEMS-9). The checklist is being increasingly used, but it remains at present unclear whether the two instruments produce comparable scores. To redress this gap, we had 192 participants rate 18 music excerpts from various music genres with both instruments. We found that although scores on the nine GEMS emotions did converge in terms of profile similarity, the GEMS-9 tended to produce somewhat higher absolute scores. Yet, when dimensions of the GEMS-45 were represented by their highest-scoring scale item, the absolute scores were consistent as well. We conclude that if researchers have time constraints but still wish to capture some of the distinct features of music-evoked emotion, the GEMS-9 provides an interesting alternative to the GEMS-45.