Listening to music is quite common in our daily life. The most common motive for listening to music is to influence emotions. How does listening to music produce emotions and pleasure in listeners?

As the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, I recently warned that we are facing an overreaction epidemic. The response to my warning has been, perhaps predictably, extreme.

Many people think that thoughts and feelings are entirely separate things—that thoughts are products of the mind and emotions stem from the “heart,” or maybe the gut. This romanticized way of thinking ...