More horror due to specific music placement? Effects of film music on psychophysiological responses to a horror film

Abstract

Previous studies have explored the impact of music on emotional visual material and examined the impact of the placement of music on neutral film scenes, but there has not been any link between these two topics so far. In our study, a horror film scene extracted from the Spanish film REC with several shock moments was presented to participants ( N = 39) who are divided into three groups. The scene was underscored with specially composed horror film music that had either congruent shock moments (synchronous condition) or preponed shock moments (asynchronous condition). For the third group, there was no musical background (control group), but the same sound design and same dialogues. As physiological data we use skin conductance and heart rate, but only the skin conductance reached significant values for differences between the groups. The results show that there was an additional effect of the music even though there is already a strong emotional statement of the visual material. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the placement of music prior to the shock moment can lead to the stress level increasing earlier than in the other conditions.