Abstract
Understanding how music can evoke emotions and in turn affect language use has significant implications not only in clinical settings but also in the emotional development of children. The relationship between music and emotion is an intricate one that has been closely studied. However, how the use of emotion words can be influenced by auditory priming is a question which is still not known. The main interest in this study was to examine how manipulation of mode and tempo in music affects the emotions induced and the subsequent effects on the use of emotion words. Fifty university students in Singapore were asked to select emotion words after exposure to various music excerpts. The results showed that major modes and faster tempos elicited greater responses for positive words and high arousal words respectively, while minor modes elicited more high arousal words and original tempos resulted in more positive words being selected. In the Major-Fast, Major-Slow and Minor-Slow conditions, positive correlations were found between the number of high arousal words and their rated intensities. Upon further analysis, categorization of emotion words differed from the circumplex model. Taken together, the findings highlight the prominence of affective auditory priming and allow us to better understand our emotive responses to music.
Highlights
“What happens when the music stops? Where does it go? What’s left? What sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance? Is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude? And how might that change their lives?
A repeated two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted in SPSS with the number of times a positive or high arousal word was chosen as the dependent variable, while Tempo and Mode were the two within-subject factors
To determine whether a relationship existed between the emotional state of participants before the experiment and the number of times positive or high arousal words selected, a Spearman rank-order correlation was carried out
Summary
The present study investigates whether affective priming effects would occur when music excerpts were used as an auditory prime and whether responses would be affected in a word selection task. If there are significant affective priming effects of music on language, participants will choose more positive valence and high arousal words when music pieces with faster tempos in the major key are played, compared to trials with music excerpts that are opposite in arousal and valence which are slow pieces in the minor mode. This study will provide insights to how emotions primed through music may influence word choice in Singapore’s context where the participants are either bilingual or multilingual, are exposed to different types of music and are collective in personality traits. Writing – review & editing: Rosabel Yu Ling Tay, Bee Chin Ng
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