Affective Priming with Music: Cognitive, Psychoacoustic and Cultural Perspectives

This thesis explores the concept of affective priming with music: when we hear a musical sound just before being presented with a second stimulus, such as a word or image, the sound influences our affective judgements about the second stimulus. For instance, in a word classification task in which words are classed as positive or negative, words are typically classified more quickly when preceded by a sound that has the same valence (e.g., a positive word is classified faster when preceded by a positive sound compared to a negative sound). This thesis considers how cognition, psychoacoustics and culture influence affective priming. Firstly, the thesis considers which dimension of emotion, valence or arousal, is transferred during priming. It then addresses how attention and affect interact in priming by considering the relationship between trait anxiety and affective priming. The results suggest that priming is the consequence of the interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes: primes engage attentional resources in a bottom-up process that conflicts with responses to the top-down word classification task. Chapter 8 considers whether stimulus features, namely harmonicity and roughness, influence priming. Harmonicity was not found to influence affective priming, whereas roughness was found to be a contributing factor to priming. Finally, the thesis compares results in priming and rating tasks for Western participants and Lithuanian Sutartinės singers. Whilst culture influences participants’ ratings of musical stimuli, automatic evaluations, indexed by results of a priming task, are not influenced by culture. Combining the findings from Chapters 6 to 9, it is argued that affective priming is governed by the ability of the prime to demand allocation of attentional resources away from the target. Stimulus features which may contribute to the bottom-up process include acoustic roughness and the summation of musical features such as tempo, rhythm, dynamics and timbre