Affective priming of music and words

March, James David (2010) Affective priming of music and words. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

In recent times the relationship between language and music has garnered substantial interest (Patel, 2008). The present thesis used an affective priming paradigm, in which musical sequences and words were categorized as happy or sad, to determine whether lexical and musical information of matched affect could act as effective primes (stimulus congruency). Experiment 1 was a replication of previously reported congruency effects using auditory presentation of lexical stimuli. In Experiment 2, two words, two short musical sequences or one of each were presented auditorily and participants responded by categorizing the emotional valence of the second item as happy or sad. Experiment 3 examined the extent to which affective properties of words and musical chords have an impact on judgments in a semantic decision task. Participants responded to the semantic properties of the second item (i.e., whether it was a word or a chord, or neither). In all of the experiments, affective congruency effects were observed, suggesting that affective properties can influence the priming of music and words when they are presented together. However, although similarities were found between affective priming of words and music, there were differences. First, responses to the musical stimuli were slower than those to the word stimuli. Second, in some conditions contrast, rather than congruency was observed. These studies are the first to explore word-music affective priming. In addition, the research expands the existing knowledge of affective priming of lexical and musical stimuli and provides evidence of similarities and differences between musical and lexical processing.

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