TY - JOUR
T1 - Music for a Brighter World
T2 - Brightness Judgment Bias by Musical Emotion
AU - Bhattacharya, Joydeep
AU - Lindsen, Job P.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Bhattacharya, Lindsen.
Funding Information:
The research was supported by the EPSRC, UK (Research Grant EP/H01294X) and by the European Commission (Grant Agreement No. 612022). This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the funders cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
PY - 2016/2/10
Y1 - 2016/2/10
N2 - A prevalent conceptual metaphor is the association of the concepts of good and evil with brightness and darkness, respectively. Music cognition, like metaphor, is possibly embodied, yet no study has addressed the question whether musical emotion can modulate brightness judgment in a metaphor consistent fashion. In three separate experiments, participants judged the brightness of a grey square that was presented after a short excerpt of emotional music. The results of Experiment 1 showed that short musical excerpts are effective emotional primes that cross-modally influence brightness judgment of visual stimuli. Grey squares were consistently judged as brighter after listening to music with a positive valence, as compared to music with a negative valence. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that the bias in brightness judgment does not require an active evaluation of the emotional content of the music. By applying a different experimental procedure in Experiment 3, we showed that this brightness judgment bias is indeed a robust effect. Altogether, our findings demonstrate a powerful role of musical emotion in biasing brightness judgment and that this bias is aligned with the metaphor viewpoint.
AB - A prevalent conceptual metaphor is the association of the concepts of good and evil with brightness and darkness, respectively. Music cognition, like metaphor, is possibly embodied, yet no study has addressed the question whether musical emotion can modulate brightness judgment in a metaphor consistent fashion. In three separate experiments, participants judged the brightness of a grey square that was presented after a short excerpt of emotional music. The results of Experiment 1 showed that short musical excerpts are effective emotional primes that cross-modally influence brightness judgment of visual stimuli. Grey squares were consistently judged as brighter after listening to music with a positive valence, as compared to music with a negative valence. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that the bias in brightness judgment does not require an active evaluation of the emotional content of the music. By applying a different experimental procedure in Experiment 3, we showed that this brightness judgment bias is indeed a robust effect. Altogether, our findings demonstrate a powerful role of musical emotion in biasing brightness judgment and that this bias is aligned with the metaphor viewpoint.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84959387196&partnerID=MN8TOARS
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0148959
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0148959
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 11
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 2
M1 - e0148959
ER -