Valenced Priming with Acquired Affective Concepts in Music: Automatic Reactions to Common Tonal Chords

This study tested whether chords that do not differ in acoustic roughness but that have distinct affective connotations are strong enough to prime negative and positive associations measurable with an affective priming method. We tested whether musically dissonant chords low in valence (diminished, augmented) but that contain little acoustic roughness are strong enough in terms of negative affective connotations to elicit an automatic congruence effect in an affective priming setting, comparable to the major-positive/minor-negative distinction found in past studies. Three out of 4 hypotheses were supported by the empirical data obtained from four distinct sub-experiments (approximately N = 100 each) where the diminished and augmented chords created strong priming effects. Conversely, the minor chord and the suspended fourth failed to generate priming effects. The results demonstrate how automatic responses to consonant/dissonant chords can be driven by acquired, cultural concepts rather than exclusively by acoustic features. The obtained results of automatic responses are notably in line with previous data gathered from self-report studies in terms of the stimuli’s positive vs. negative valence. The results are discussed from the point of view of previous affective priming studies, cross-cultural research, as well as music historical observations

Cross-modal Transfer of Valence or Arousal from Music to Word Targets in Affective Priming?

This registered report considers how emotion induced in an auditory modality (music) can influence affective evaluations of visual stimuli (words). Specifically, it seeks to determine which emotional dimension is transferred across modalities – valence or arousal – or whether the transferred dimension depends on the focus of attention (feature-specific attention allocation). Two experiments were carried out. The first was an affective priming paradigm that will allow for the orthogonal manipulation of valence and arousal in both the words and music, alongside a manipulation to direct participants’ attention to either the valence or the arousal dimension. Secondly, a lexical decision task allowed cross-modal transfer of valence and arousal to be probed without the focus of participants’ attention being manipulated. Congruence effects were present in the affective priming task – valence was transferred in both the valence and arousal tasks, whereas arousal was transferred in the arousal task only. Contrary to predictions, the lexical decision task did not exhibit any congruence effects

Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches

Multiple approaches have been used to investigate how musical cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The most prominent approach is a perception study, where musical stimuli varying in cue levels are assessed by participants in terms of their conveyed emotion. However, this approach limits the number of cues and combinations simultaneously investigated, since each variation produces another musical piece to be evaluated. Another less used approach is a production approach, where participants use cues to change the emotion conveyed in music, allowing participants to explore a larger number of cue combinations than the former approach. These approaches provide different levels of accuracy and economy for identifying how cues are used to convey different emotions in music. However, do these approaches provide converging results? This paper’s aims are two-fold. The role of seven musical cues (tempo, pitch, dynamics, brightness, articulation, mode, and instrumentation) in communicating seven emotions (sadness, joy, calmness, anger, fear, power, and surprise) in music is investigated. Additionally, this paper explores whether the two approaches will yield similar findings on how the cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The first experiment utilises a production approach where participants adjust the cues in real-time to convey target emotions. The second experiment uses a perception approach where participants rate pre-rendered systematic variations of the stimuli for all emotions. Overall, the cues operated similarly in the majority (32/49) of cue-emotion combinations across both experiments, with the most variance produced by the dynamics and instrumentation cues. A comparison of the prediction accuracy rates of cue combinations representing the intended emotions found that prediction rates in Experiment 1 were higher than the ones obtained in Experiment 2, suggesting that a production approach may be a more efficient method to explore how cues are used to shape different emotions in music

Ambivalent Emotional Experiences of Everyday Visual and Musical Objects

Art brings rich, pleasurable experiences to our daily lives. However, many theories of art and aesthetics focus on specific strong experiences—in the contexts of museums, galleries, and concert halls and the aesthetic perception of canonized arts—disregarding the impact of daily experiences. Furthermore, pleasure is often treated as a simplistic concept of merely positive affective character, yet recent psychological research has revealed the experience of pleasure is far more complicated. This study explored the nature of pleasure evoked by everyday aesthetic objects. A mixture of statistical and qualitative methods was applied in the analysis of the data collected through a semi-structured online survey (N = 464). The result asserts the experience of emotional ambivalence occurred and was composed of a variety of nuanced emotions and related association, rather than just a combination of contradicting emotions. Such paradoxical pleasure is defined as a self-conscious hedonic exposure to negative emotions in art reception. The study also depicted four types of attitudinal ambivalence: loss, diversity, socio-ideology, and distance, reflecting contextual elements intertwined into experience, and the connection between ambivalence and intense emotional experienc

Culture influences conscious appraisal of, but not automatic aversion to, acoustically rough musical intervals

There is debate whether the foundations of consonance and dissonance are rooted in culture or in psychoacoustics. In order to disentangle the contribution of culture and psychoacoustics, we considered automatic responses to the perfect fifth and the major second (flattened by 25 cents) intervals alongside conscious evaluations of the same intervals across two cultures and two levels of musical expertise. Four groups of participants completed the tasks: expert performers of Lithuanian Sutartinės, English speaking musicians in Western diatonic genres, Lithuanian non-musicians and English-speaking non-musicians. Sutartinės singers were chosen as this style of singing is an example of ‘beat diaphony’ where intervals of parts form predominantly rough sonorities and audible beats. There was no difference in automatic responses to intervals, suggesting that an aversion to acoustically rough intervals is not governed by cultural familiarity but may have a physical basis in how the human auditory system works. However, conscious evaluations resulted in group differences with Sutartinės singers rating both the flattened major as more positive than did other groups. The results are discussed in the context of recent developments in consonance and dissonance research

A Cross-Sectional Study of Reminiscence Bumps for Music-Related Memories in Adulthood

Music is often intimately linked to identity, as evidenced by the high value many people place on musical activities and the way in which music can become seemingly effortlessly coupled to important memories from throughout one’s lifespan. Previous research has revealed a consistent reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory—the disproportionate recall of memories from between ages 10 to 30 years in comparison with other lifetime periods—which also appears to extend to music-related memories. The present study represents one of the largest explorations of the musical reminiscence bump across adulthood to date. Participants (N = 470; ages 18 to 82 years) were shown the titles and artists of 111 popular songs that had featured in the charts between 1950 and 2015 and rated the degree to which they had autobiographical memories associated with each song, as well as the degree to which they were familiar with and liked the song. We found a reminiscence bump in adolescence (peaking around age 14) for both ratings of the autobiographical salience of songs featured in the charts during that period and the familiarity of these songs. Liking ratings showed more divergent results depending on a participant’s current age, including evidence for a cascading reminiscence bump, in which liking ratings from young adults increased for music from their parents’ adolescent years. We also revealed new evidence that music-related autobiographical memories appear to invoke similar retrieval processes to the common methodology of eliciting autobiographical memories via word cues. We contextualize these results in relation to general theoretical accounts of the reminiscence bump, and age-related differences in the bump are discussed in relation to various sociocultural and technological changes in music listening habits

Combining feature aggregation and geometric similarity for re-identification of patterned animals

Image-based re-identification of animal individuals allows gathering of information such as migration patterns of the animals over time. This, together with large image volumes collected using camera traps and crowdsourcing, opens novel possibilities to study animal populations. For many species, the re-identification can be done by analyzing the permanent fur, feather, or skin patterns that are unique to each individual. In this paper, we address the re-identification by combining two types of pattern similarity metrics: 1) pattern appearance similarity obtained by pattern feature aggregation and 2) geometric pattern similarity obtained by analyzing the geometric consistency of pattern similarities. The proposed combination allows to efficiently utilize both the local and global pattern features, providing a general re-identification approach that can be applied to a wide variety of different pattern types. In the experimental part of the work, we demonstrate that the method achieves promising re-identification accuracies for Saimaa ringed seals and whale sharks.Comment: Camera traps, AI, and Ecology, 3rd International Worksho