The Sound of Emotions in Times of War: Capturing Collective Emotions through Music Charts in Israel1

Karina Mross2, Christoph Dworschak3, Simon Hug4, Sandra Penić5, Sarah Zahreddine6

Mar 12, 2026

First version: July 2025, this preliminary version: Mar 12, 2026
Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Boston, September 3-7, 2026)

Abstract

Intense or traumatic events such as violent conflict have a deep emotional impact. This affects individuals that are directly involved, but also the broader emotional atmosphere of the society in conflict. This latter aspect of emotions at the societal level is, however, particularly difficult to capture, especially as it evolves over time in a conflict. We leverage temporally fine-grained data from music charts that reflect the collective choices of individuals and assess features of the most popular music to characterize the emotional state of a society in conflict, namely Israel during the Gaza war following the October 7th, 2023 attack. To validate this innovative way to proxy collective emotions by using collective music-listening practices as a societal mood barometer, we combine daily Spotify chart data with aggregated responses on conflict-related emotions from a rolling cross-section survey over an eight-month period in Israel. By showing how specific characteristics of most commonly streamed music (such as valence, arousal or speechiness) are linked to conflict-related emotions during the Gaza war, we provide evidence that music choices offer measures that tap into collectively held emotions. Our findings contribute to the methodological toolkit for studying collective emotions and highlight the potential of digital trace data to illuminate otherwise hidden affective states at the societal level. This even more so as collective emotions are usually measured through large and resource-intensive surveys and consequently are rarely captured over extended time periods or across multiple countries. Hence, our research note demonstrates that music charts offer a new way to generate unobtrusive measures of collective emotions.

Footnotes:

1Funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No. 219891, PI Sandra Penić) is gratefully acknowledged.
2German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), Bonn. email Karina.Mross@idos-research.de
3German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval), Bonn. email christoph.dworschak@deval.org
4Département de science politique et relations internationales; Université de Genève, Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA), and CeFES, Milano-Bicocca email simon.hug@unige.ch
5Département de science politique et relations internationales; Université de Genève, and Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA) email Sandra.PenicJunge@unige.ch
6Département de science politique et relations internationales; Université de Genève, and Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA) email sarah.zahreddine@unige.ch


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