Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Publication Date
Spring 5-1-2022
Journal
Undergraduate Honours Theses
Abstract
Previous research has investigated the impact of lyrics compared to melodies in directing emotional perceptions of music by presenting listeners with incongruent songs in which the lyrics portray one emotion and the instrumental music portrays another. This earlier research has shown that the music is more salient in directing emotion compared to lyrics. The current study revaluated these findings and investigated how listening to incongruent songs would impact subsequent emotional judgements of neutral faces. Pretest mood and musical sophistication were also measured as covariates. Participants were placed into one of four conditions where they listened to either emotionally congruent happy excerpts, emotionally congruent sad excerpts, emotionally incongruent excerpts with happy music and sad lyrics, or emotionally incongruent excerpts with sad music and happy lyrics and rated them on both perceived happiness and sadness. They were then presented with a set of neutral faces and rated them on the same dimensions. Results showed that emotionally incongruent excerpts as well as emotionally congruent sad excerpts all had similar ratings of happiness and sadness. Only emotionally congruent happy excerpts were rated as significantly more happy and significantly less sad than the rest of the excerpts indicating a sense of ambiguity, not only in incongruent music, but also in sad music. There was no significant effect of the musical stimuli on perceptions of neutral faces, however, pretest mood and musical sophistication were both significant covariates in sadness ratings. Limitations and possible confounds as well as future directions for this area of research are discussed.
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Notes
Thesis Advisor(s):
Dr. Christine Tsang