An SEM approach to validating the psychological model of musical groove.

In music psychology, the experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. According to the psychological model of musical groove by Senn et al., the causes for the urge to move are linked to the properties of the music itself, to the personal background of the listener, to the listening situation, and to feedback loops between body movement and cognition. The model formulates eight hypotheses stating that the music affects a listener's urge to move mediated through a variety of cognitive processes. This study develops a method based on structural equation modeling (SEM) to empirically test the model hypotheses. It evaluates five of the model hypotheses using data from an online listening experiment with 135 participants and 16 stylistically diverse musical stimuli (