We examined the emotional effects of (a) a rising versus a falling chromatic tone sequence in the background of audio news and (b) foreground versus background diatonic and chromatic tone sequences. In experiment one, 26 participants rated audio news messages with rising and falling chromatic background tone sequences on the valence and arousal dimensions. Cardiac activity, electrodermal activity (EDA), and facial muscle activity were also recorded continuously. In experiment two, 24 participants rated six plain tone sequences (i.e., rising and falling chromatic, major, and minor) and six news messages with the aforementioned tone sequences mixed in the background on the valence and arousal dimensions. In experiment 1, both self-reported arousal and physiological arousal as measured by EDA were higher during the news with a rising-tone sequence compared to those with a falling-tone sequence. In experiment 2, rising-tone sequences prompted both higher arousal and pleasantness ratings. However, the responses were moderated by the type of listening task: foreground listening prompted responses related to musical connotations (i.e., major tone sequences were rated as most pleasant and minor as most unpleasant), whereas background listening prompted responses dependent on the emotional congruence between the news messages and tone sequences (i.e., the minor mode versions were rated as most pleasant and the major mode versions as most unpleasant). In addition, level of education-, music listening frequency-, and age-related differences in the responses were found and are discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AlpertJ.AlpertM. (1990). Music influences on mood and purchase intentions. Psychology & Marketing, 7, 109–33.
2.
CarstensCHuskinsE.HounshellG. (1995). Listening to Mozart may not enhance performance on the revised Minnesota paper form board test. Psychological Reports, 77, 111–4.
3.
CollierW.HubbardT. (2001). Judgments of happiness, brightness, speed and tempo change of auditory stimuli varying in pitch and tempo. Psychomusicology, 17 (1–2), 36–55.
4.
CostaM.BittiP.E.R.BonfiglioliL. (2000). Psychological connotations of harmonic musical intervals. Psychology of Music, 28, 4–44.
5.
CoxA. (2001). The mimetic hypothesis and embodied musical meaning. Musica Sciantia, 5 (2), 195–212.
6.
CsikszentmihalyiM.CsikszentmihalyiI. (1988). Optimal experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness. New York: Cambridge University Press.
7.
DawsonM.E.SchellA.M.FilionD.L. (2000). The electrodermal system. In CacioppoJ.T.TassinaryL.G.BerntsonG.G. (Eds), Handbook of psychophysiology(2nd ed., pp. 200–23). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
8.
DowlingW.J. (1978). Scale and contour: Two components of theory of memory for melodies. Psychological Review, 85, 342–54.
9.
EkmanP. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6, 169–200.
10.
EkmanPFriesenW. V. (1975). Unmasking the Face. A guide to recognizing emotions from facial expressions. New Jersey: Prentice — Hall Inc.
11.
FernaldA. (1992). Meaningful melodies in mothers' speech to infants. In PapousekH.JurgensU.PapousekM. (Eds), Nonverbal vocal communication: Comparative and developmental approaches (pp. 262–82). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
12.
FernaldA.TaeschnerTDunnJ.PapouiekM.de Boysson-BardiesB.FukuiI. (1989). A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language, 16, 447–501.
13.
FreedmanE. (1999). The role of diatonicism in the abstraction and representation of contour and interval information. Music Perception, 16 (3), 365–87.
14.
FridlundA. J.CacioppoJ. T. (1986). Guidelines for human electromyographic research. Psychophysiology, 23, 567–89.
15.
GabrielssonA.LindströmE. (2001). The Influence of Musical Structure on Emotional Expression. In JuslinP.SlobodaJ. (Eds), Music and Emotion. Theory and Research (pp. 223–48). New York: Oxford University Press.
16.
GerardiG.M.GerkenL. (1995). The development of affective responses to modality and melodic contour. Music Perception, 12 (3), 279–90.
17.
GregoryA. (1996). The development of emotional responses to music in young children. Motivation and Emotion, 20 (4), 341–8.
18.
HetlandL. (2001). The Relationship between Music and Spatial Processes: A Meta-Analysis. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, 61 (10-A), 3934.
19.
HevnerK. (1936). Experimental studies of the elements of expression in music. American Journal of Psychology, 48, 246–68.
20.
JenningsJ.R. (1986). Bodily changes during attending. In ColesM.G.H.DonclinE.PorgesS.W. (Eds), Psychophysiology: Systems, Processes, and Applications (pp. 268–89). New York: Guilford.
21.
KellarisJ.J.RiceR.C. (1993). The influence of tempo, loudness, and gender of listeners on responses to music. Psychology & Marketing, 10, 15–29.
22.
KrumhanslC. (1991). Memory for musical surface. Memory-and-Cognition, 19 (4), 401–11.
23.
LaceyJ.I.LaceyB.C. (1970). Some autonomic-central nervous system interrelationships. In BlackP. (Ed.), Physiological correlates of emotion (pp. 205–27). New York: Academic Press.
24.
LangP.J. (1980). Behavioral treatment and bio-behavioral assessment: Computer applications. In SidowskiJ.B.JohnsonJ.H.WilliamsTA. (Eds), Technology in mental health care delivery systems (pp. 119–37). Norwood: Ablex.
25.
LarsenR.J.DienerE. (1992). Promises and problems with the circumplex model of emotion. In ClarkM. (Ed.), Review of personality and social psychology (Vol. 13, pp. 25–59). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
26.
MartinR.WogalterM.FarlanoJ. (1988). Reading comprehension in the presence of unattended speech and music. Journal of Memory and Language, 27 (4), 382–98.
27.
McCunrheonL. (2000). Another failure to generalize the Mozart effect. Psychological Reports, 87 (1), 325–30.
28.
MulderG.MulderL.J. (1981). Information processing and cardiovascular control. Psychophysiology, 18, 392–402.
29.
NantaisK.SchellenbergE. (1999). The Mozart Effect: An Artifact of Preference. Psychological Science, 10 (4), 370–3.
30.
NassC.L.LeeKM. (2001). Does computer-synthesized speech manifest personality? Experimental tests of recognition, similarity-attraction, and consistency-attraction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied7, 171–81.
31.
OliverM. (1997). The effect of background music on mood and reading comprehension performance of at-risk college freshmen. Dissertation abstracts, 57 (12-A), 5039.
32.
PalmerC. (1997). Monitoring and planning capacities in the acquisition of music performance skills. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 51 (4), 369–84.
33.
PapilloJ.R.ShapiroD. (1990). The cardiovascular system. In CacioppoJ.T.TassinaryL.G. (Eds), Principles of psychophysiology: Physical, social, and inferential elements (pp. 456–512). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
34.
PapouiekM.PapouiekH.SymmesD. (1991). The meanings of melodies in motherese in tone and stress languages. Infant Behavior and Development, 14, 415–40.
35.
PovelD. (2002). Harmonic factors in the perception of tonal melodies. Music Perception, 20 (1), 51–85.
36.
RadocyR.E.BoyleJ.D. (1988). Psychological foundations of musical behaviour (2nd ed.). Sprinfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
37.
RandshellS.E.GilroyL. (2001). The effects of background music on word processed writing. Computers in Human Behavior, 17, 141–8.
38.
RauscherF.ShawG.KyK. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature, 365, 611.
39.
RauscherEShawG.KyK. (1995). Listening to Mozart enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: Towards of neuropsychological basis. Neuroscience letters, 185, 44–7.
40.
RavajaN. (in press). Effects of a small talking facial image on autonomic activity: The moderating influence of dispositional BIS and BAS sensitivities and emotions. Biological Psychology.
SalameP.BaddeleyA. (1989) Effects of background music on phonological short term memory. Qarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 41 (1-A), 107–22.
43.
SlobodaJ.A.O'NeillS.IvaldiA. (2001). Functions of music in everyday life: An exploratory study using the Experience Sampling Method. Musica Scientia, V (1), 932.
44.
SternD.N.HoferLHaftWThoreJ. (1985). Affect attunement: The sharing of feeling states between mother and infant by means of intermodal fluency. In FieldT.N.FoxN. (Eds), Social perception in infants (pp. 249–68). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
45.
ThayerJ.LevensonR. (1983). Effects of Music on Psychophysiological Responses to a Stressful film. Psychomusicology, 3 (1), 44–52.
46.
ThompsonWSchellenbergE.HusainG. (2001). Arousal, Mood, and the Mozart Effect. Psychological Science, 12 (3), 248–51.
47.
TrehubS. (2000). Human processing predispositions and musical universals. In WallinN.MerkerB. (Eds), The origins of music (pp. 427–48). Cambridge, MA, US: The MIT Press.
48.
TrehubS.FitnakataT. (2001). Emotion and music in infancy. Musica Sciantia, Special Issue 2001–2002, 37–61.
49.
TurinoT. (1999). Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience. A Peircian Semio tic Theory for Music. Ethnomusicology, 43 (2), 221–55.
50.
WeidnerG.FriendR.FicarrottoTMendellN. (1989). Hostility and cardiovascular reactivity to stress in women and men. Psychosomatic Medicine, 51 (1), 36–45.
51.
WitvlietC. (1998). The impact of music-prompted emotional valence and arousal on self-report, autonomic, facial EMG, and starde responses across experimental contexts. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 58 (12-B), 6832.
52.
WitvlietCVranaS. (1995). Psychophysiological responses as indices of affective dimensions. Psychophysiology, 32, 436–43.
