Virtual Lab | Cognition of Musical Rhythm · Web viewThis would show that music induces emotion,...
Transcript of Virtual Lab | Cognition of Musical Rhythm · Web viewThis would show that music induces emotion,...
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Julia Hosch
Professor Poudrier
Cognition of Musical Rhythm
11 December 2013
The Power of Music in Decision-Making Situations
1. Introduction
In the field of music cognition research, there exists an expansive literature about
how music impacts emotion. A wide variety of perspectives that could possibly affect a
listener’s emotions such as rhythm, tempo, tone quality, and genre have already been
explored (Schellenberg, Krysciak, & Campbell, 2000; Webster & Weir, 2005). Even
intuitively, it seems more than reasonable that hearing music can impact how we feel and
express ourselves. Through these lenses of research, it has become apparent that the study
of the effects of music on emotion has earned a place in the field of human psychology.
By the same token, gone are the days that we might consider emotion to be an
invalid component of decision-making that should be quashed and left at the door in
reasonable debate. Rather, our emotions are our instinctual bias of telling us what is
“right” or “wrong,” and are indicators of our automatic judgments that me make, often
before we are conscious that we’ve made them (Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983).
Emotions play a greater role in our decision-making than we often realize. The point,
then, of research in emotion and decision-making is not to prove that emotion impacts
judgment, but to inform the general public on how to make better choices. “Informed” in
this case would not necessarily mean informed of product choices or pros and cons of a
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situation, but instead informed about the trends and instincts of one’s own mind in given
situations with given influences, both internal and environmental.
Imagine a Venn diagram with three major cirlces of emotion, music, and decision-making
fields. From three fields, cross-sections of interdisciplinary research emerge. Emotion
and music overlap to form music perception and cognition, and emotion and decision-
making form the field of behavioral neuroscience, commonly called behavioral
economics. Decision-making and music intersect in music and marketing studies.
(Although it is certainly plausible that the emotion of customers is definitely a part of this
research, I am excluding it from the intersection with emotion because in the realm of
advertising, emotion is not the main research focus, only the financial implications of
decisions made after priming by music. In this study, I hope to explore music’s power to
induce emotion and how music-induced emotion impacted by music can, in turn, impact
economic decisions.
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Figure 1: Venn diagram of the intersections of emotion, decision-making, and music cognition research. The major fields of emotion, music, and decision-making are the outer and most prominent circles, while the interdisciplinary fields of perception and cognition of rhythm; behavioral economics; and music and marketing research are intersections of these fields. Music and marketing research is probably the closest to the intersection point of all three fields, but because the focus of this research is the direct impact on consumer sales rather than development of psychology, I am excluding it from the emotional circle. This study focuses on the intersection of all three fields, integrating emotion studies into both decision-making and music.
2. Previous research in Music and Emotion
2.1 Music and Emotion: Felt Emotion versus Perceived Emotion
The main questions asked in the field of music psychology center around the
debate on whether a listener perceives emotion in music through a process of decoding
the emotions expressed by a particular combination of musical features, or whether
listening to a musical work causes the listener to experience a particular emotion. The
first, the cognitivist position, states that listeners can perceive emotions expressed in the
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music without necessarily feeling those emotions (Hodges, 2011). Arguments for this
theory include the widespread ability, regardless of technical talent or even neurotypical
development, to discern certain basic emotional traits of music. In one example, Peretz
and Gagnon (1999) describe a woman with right and left temporal lobe lesions unable to
recognize familiar melodies, but able to discriminate music on the basis of the emotion
conveyed. This “affective blindness” demonstrates that even though the woman was
unable to actually feel the emotion of the music, she could discern it well enough to use it
as her primary mode of definition between pieces. Finally, one of the strongest arguments
for this theory is recent research suggesting that music induces emotions in only 55-65
percent of recent listening experiences (Juslin, Liljestrom, Vastfjall, & Lundqvist, 2010).
Because it is unlikely that close to 35-45% of all musical experiences are entirely devoid
of all emotion whatsoever, it seems plausible that there must be some attention necessary
to create an induced emotion.
The emotivist position argues that listeners actually do feel real emotions that are
induced by music, and that perceived emotions and felt emotions can be exactly the same.
Goldstein (1980) conducted a survey of intense emotional experiences, and observed that
shudders, tingling sensations, chills, and other physical responses to emotion are also
found in response to music. Sloboda (1991) also developed a list of physical reactions
that an emotional experience might induce, such as shivers, laughter, tears, racing heart,
and sweating. When he asked participants to rank the frequency of these reactions in their
experiences listening to music, he found that almost all participants reported feeling these
reactions, especially shivers down the spine. Both studies show significant support for the
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emotivist theory because of the high correlation and similarity between physical reactions
to music and physical reactions widely seen in emotional situations.
More recently, a third argument has arisen due to the fact that it is possible to
have both a perception of an emotion and the feeling of the actual emotion in the same
listener, even at different times in the same piece. This theory, suggested by Konecni
(2005), is called the Aesthetic Trinity Theory, or ATT, and states that profound responses
to music involve 1) awe, 2) being moved, and 3) thrills. Another study on this idea of the
importance of “chills” in music as a physical response was designed by Jaak Panksepp,
who hypothesized that because “feelings of sadness typically arise from the severance of
established social bonds, there may exist basic neurochemical similarities between the
chilling emotions evoked by music and those engendered by social loss.” Research on
this response was intended to clarify how music interacts with a specific emotional
process of the normal human brain (Panksepp, 1995). Not a great deal of research has
been devoted to this theory besides this previous work on chills. However, the theory
does suggest that the cognitivist and emotivist positions alone might not explain all of the
methods necessary to demonstrate differences between or existence of felt and perceived
emotion in music; there may be differences that arise from very specific emotions and
very specific physical responses, such as sadness and chills or goosebumps.
3. Previous Research in the fields of Emotion and Economics
3.1. Immediate/Integral Emotions and Expected Emotions
The consequentialist theory of economics is a prominent economic theory that
“assumes that decision makers choose between alternative courses of action by assessing
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the desirability and likelihood of their consequences and integrating this information
through some type of expectation-based calculus” (Rick & Lowenstein, 2008). In short,
emotions are considered a quantity that could be factored into this ‘calculus’ and
determined to be a helpful or hurtful factor.
The problem with this theory is that “emotion” is far too broad concept to be
mathematically calculated in its entirety. To help split up the idea of all human emotional
capacity, Lowenstein created two types of emotions: expected and integral/immediate
(Lowenstein et al. 2001; Lowenstein & Lerner 2003). Expected emotions are those that
one predicts that he or she will feel after an emotional event, either negative or positive.
Often, these predictions of future emotional states are wildly overestimated; people
predict that they will be joyful or hurt far longer and far more than they actually feel after
the predicted event actually arrives. In one particularly illustrative study, lottery winners
were asked to track their daily “happiness levels” and guess their happiness levels after a
year based on their windfalls. A year later, those lottery winners reported a significantly
lower happiness level as the year before, even though they had anticipated feeling
overjoyed and living in luxury for years. (Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978).
Through studies like these, psychology has taught us that we are not accurate predictors
of our own minds’ feelings in any moment other than the present, and expected emotions
weigh heavily in our decision-making abilities.
Immediate emotions, or integral emotions, are entirely different both in nature and
their prevalence in psychology studies. Like expected emotions, they arise from thinking
about the future consequences of one’s choice. However, unlike expected emotions, they
arise at the moment of choice. Therefore, often they can be influenced by “dispositional
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or situational sources” such as a person’s mood at that particular moment of the decision,
the sound of the television playing in the background, or the crying of a baby heard while
the decision-maker is on the telephone. These are significantly harder to study because
they are difficult to isolate: mood is difficult to control for everyone in walk-in
psychology studies, and there are simply two many factors to control in any given
environment to know what conditions will be the most influential on a given situation,
especially if all the environmental distractions are fairly small (Hodges, 2011).
All that said, there have been some studies based on integral emotion, even with
the research constraints. One of the most interesting studies of decision-making involving
integral emotion was completed by Hirshliefer and Shumway, who found that during
years when it was particularly sunny as opposed to cloudy, people were more willing to
take risks with their economic stocks. While citizens thought that this willingness to risk
was based on the upward nature of the market, actually, the induced emotion given by the
presence of sunshine was a mood inducer that gave citizens confidence to undergo riskier
business transactions for greater potential payoff (Hirshliefer and Shumway, 2007).
This study shows that integral emotions do have an effect on decisions, but why?
One theory presented is that integral emotions use somatic “tagging.” Somatic markers
are affective ‘tags’ attached to sensory images, ‘marking’ each image with an emotional
association These marks reduce the number of options under consideration, making
decision-making process more efficient, and decision-making to happen automatically
without spending brain energy to make a decision (Thompson, 2009).
In sum, these two types of emotion, expected, and integral, change the way that
we perceive our own emotions, while we still often believe that we are being highly
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rational. The crucial difference between the two lies in when they are experienced: the
“key feature of expected emotions is that they are experienced when the outcomes of a
decision materialize, but not at the moment of choice; at the moment of choice, they are
only cognitions about future emotions” (Rick & Lowenstein, 2008). In this study, I will
focus primarily on integral emotions because these immediate responses are generated, or
at least perceived by the hearing of music.
3.2. Economic Game Theory
There are two “games” heavily studied in the field of behavioral economics. Both
illustrate the moral leanings of participants, and both show how different situational
variables can change an outcome drastically. The first game is the “Ultimatum game.” In
the basic format of this game, there are two players. One player has a set amount of
capital, and can choose to give the other player an arbitrary amount of that capital. If the
other player accepts the amount that he or she is given, both players keep their new
amounts of capital. If the other player rejects, then both of the players lose their capital.
Although in any scenario, both players logically make money from the experience, the
second player often becomes indignant and rejects the sum if it appears to be too small.
Because of this, it would seem evident that participants would learn very quickly that
cooperating is the best method. Often this is the case; however, variations on this
experiment show that with variables such as an audience present for the experiment; a
primed mindset of what has been given or received in previous trials; or a vision of the
other player; people have been known to change the value amounts given (Pinker, 1997).
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The other is the Dictator game. In this game, the first player (the “dictator”) has a
set amount of capita. He or she can choose whether to give any amount to the other
player. The second player has no say in the experiment. Although this task might seem
obvious, the results of the game and amounts given by the dictator depend on many
factors, just like the Ultimatum game. Some of these variables are the same, such as
whether an audience is present or whether the Dictator feels as though he or she is being
watched. There are also variables specific to this game, such as whether the recipient has
been made known to the giver, and if so, if the giver feels as though the recipient is
somehow “morally worthy” of the gift. In all of these occasions, givers have been known
to increase or decrease their giving amounts based on these external factors (Pinker,
1997).
Both of these games have shown valuable insights into economic factors dealing
with emotion, both social and antisocial.
IV. Music and Marketing Research
The field of music and marketing research predominantly focuses on how to best
predict the actions of a consumer with priming by the advertiser. Music has become
integral to successful advertising, both in direct and indirect ways.
An example of a direct music to consumer advertisement might be the radio jingle
concept. The impact of this type of advertising often is not immediate; people do not
necessarily immediately act on the commercials that they see on television and run to the
store to purchase the item. Therefore, the key niche of effective advertising is to develop
a tag or “hook” that will draw in the customer when he or she next has the opportunity to
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act on the suggestion of the advertisement. Radio jingles work like this: although
listening to the radio in the car might not put a person in the position to buy a certain
brand of milk, when the listener is next in the grocery store and sees the brand, the jingle
may come to mind.
The indirect method of music and advertising has no delay between the
advertisement and the opportunity of purchase. One highly studied aspect of music’s
impact on marketing is the effect of volume on a customer’s actions. Smith and Curnow
found that louder and faster music overall sells more of products, but that slower, more
soothing music tends to allow customers to make decisions more slowly so that they are
happier about their purchases. Customers happy with their purchases are more likely to
come back, and the stores make more revenue over longer periods of time. In another
example of the impact of music on direct purchasing power in a store, a study on French
and German music played on alternating days in a wine section of a grocery store found
that people overwhelmingly tended to purchase the type of wine that matched the
nationality of the music, whether they recognized that the music was impacting their
purchasing decisions or not (Heargraves & North, 1999).
These examples are only two of an entirely full literature of music and marketing
research focusing on product placement and musical factors that change customer
decisions (such as tempo, key, and even nationality of origin.) Until this point, however,
researchers have focused primarily on how these studies can best move capital towards
the purchasing of products, and not on furthering the studies on how exactly music
impacts the emotions during the decisions made. I hope to look at the next study through
this interdisciplinary angle.
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5. Case Study
5.1 Background
Professor Dan Ariely at the Duke Fuqua School of Business and Professor
Eduardo Andrade from University of California wrote a research paper discussing how
people’s “fleeting incidental emotions” can become a basis for future decisions. If a
decision is made by an individual in a certain emotional state, he or she will tend to
repeat the same decisions made in the same contexts even if they no longer feel the
emotion that they did in the previous decision. In summary, “given that people often do
not realize they are being influenced by the incidental emotional state, decisions based on
a fleeting incidental emotion can become the basis for future decisions and hence outlive
the original cause of the behavior (i.e., the emotion itself)” (Andrade & Ariely, 2009).
This theory hinges on a few assumptions from previous research. All make logical
sense, but it is matter of putting all of the pieces into the puzzle. First, people do not fully
realize that immediate emotions might be influencing their decisions. If they do, they
tend to correct for the misattribution (Schwartz & Clore, 1983). Once a choice is made,
people tend to stay consistent to that choice, if they believe it to be rational. Secondly,
when asked to guess the monetary value of products, people tend to be incorrect,
sometimes overshooting or undershooting prices by over 300%. However, when asked to
measure the price differences between two products, people are significantly closer to
accurate—“individuals do not know with high accuracy how much they value different
products, but that once they make a decision, they use that initial decision as an anchor
for basing later decisions” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Combining these ideas, it
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seems that if people can be kept in ignorance of the fact that their emotions are being
affected in an immediate way, the decisions that they make while under that state will last
past what the participants themselves would estimate if asked.
From these theories, Andrade and Ariely built an experiment to test their
hypotheses.
5.2 Research Methods
In this section, I will briefly summarize the most important points each part
(which Ariely refers to as ‘studies’) for the purpose of contrast when describing my own
research based on this experiment.
Study 1. Incidental emotion manipulation
110 students participated in the experiment in a computer-based environment. To
begin, all of the participants watched a 5-minute clip of a movie and were asked to then
write a personal experience relating to the movie. However, the video clip was different
depending on a randomly assigned group affiliation for each participant. Targeted
participants, those who would play the receivers in the second part of the study, were
assigned to either the angry or a happy condition. In the angry condition, the participants
watched an angry movie, watching the actor behave violently, such as breaking furniture.
The happy condition group watched a clip of a comedic television show. The last group,
who played the proposers in study two, watched a non-emotional nature documentary.
Study 2. First ultimatum game
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In the second part of the study, targeted participants were told the conditions of
the ultimatum game (as described earlier). Specifically, they were instructed that the
other player had been given $10 and would choose to share any amount. (In actuality,
proposers were only given options of giving $7.5 and keeping $2.5, or keeping $7.5 and
giving $2.5 for the purpose of easier post-experiment analysis.)
Study 3. Emotion mitigation
The third part of the study was a filler task so that all participants could neutralize
their previous positive or negative emotions from the video stimuli. All pictures shown
were neutral in content, and the display lasted about 20 minutes.
Study 4. Second ultimatum game
The fourth part of the study returned to the Ultimatum game. In this study,
participants played the reverse role that they played in the second study. In other words,
those who had watched the angry or sad movies became the proposers, and those who
had watched the nature documentary became the receivers. All other conditions were
identical.
Study 5. Dictator Game
In the last study, the proposers from study 4 remained proposers, but played the
Dictator game rather than the Ultimatum game. This “allowed the researchers to
investigate the extent to which behavioral consistency and/or false consensus were the
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driving mechanisms.” In other words, the Dictator game allowed for control in case the
other results in the forced-choice scenarios gave varying results.
5.3 Results
In the second study (the first Ultimatum game), 93% of the proposers chose to
keep the larger amount of money and give the smaller amount, which is logical. Also
expected were the results of the rejections by the participants in the receiver groups—the
participants primed to be angry were significantly more likely to reject the low amount
offered than the group primed with the happy video.
However, these logical results led to more impressive, less intuitive results in
Study 4, even after emotional mitigation. Those primed with the angry videos actually
kept less of the money for themselves, giving more to the party that was only primed with
a nature video than did the group primed with the happy video. The same result was
shown in the Dictator game; the group primed with the angry condition was more likely
to keep less money and make a fairer offer than those primed with the happy condition.
In summary, the rationale behind the fairer offers from angry participants was that
consistency with past behavior—which was unconsciously impacted by the incidental
emotion—had a strong influence on future action, even once the emotion had technically
been erased. The point of the study was not to demonstrate that the angry condition made
people more willing to share, or even to discuss the implications of the anger condition.
The main premise of the research was to show that emotions from earlier in the study
lingered long enough to influence the next decision that the participant made, even
though the person thought that he or she was making a logical, rational decision.
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6. Proposal for Research
6.1 Purpose and Hypothesis
For my proposed extension on Ariely’s research, I intend to recreate his study, but
change the initial happy or angry movie stimuli conditions to musical stimuli. Ariely
states that the video was intended to induce an “integral” emotion, just like the integral
emotions heard and felt in music. Because it is significantly harder to study integral
versus expected or perceived emotions in music, this could be a key moment to explore
questions about the emotivist emotional theory of emotion and music. The point of this
research would not be limited to simply looking at the emotivist versus cognitivist
emotion theories, however. Since it has already been shown in background literature
(discussed at the beginning of this proposal) that music has an impact on decision-making
and market studies, this research might also help to illuminate questions about where
emotion might enter this equation. As previously mentioned, most market research has
focused on the specifics of gaining as much capital for corporations as possible rather
than the implications of study involving emotion. However, this experiment might be
able to combine music’s correlation with advertising techniques by introducing emotional
study.
There are two possible hypotheses for this experiment:
H1: Listening to music has been shown to have an impact on decision-making in a great
many marketing studies. The reason that this is the case may be that the effect that music
has on temporary mood can also affect judgment.
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To prove this hypothesis true, it would be necessary to find the same results as in
the Ariely study. This would show that induced, integral emotions have the power to
stretch into further decisions past the immediate decisions at hand, and that music would
be a powerful enough stimulus to induce those emotions.
H2: Listening to music has been shown to have an impact on decision-making in a great
many marketing studies. However, this is due to other factors other than emotional
manipulation due to music.
If the results of the experiment do not match Ariely’s results, this would show
that one of several pitfalls. There are two main reasons that can be discussed this far in
advance of the experiment: first, that music might not induce the same valence of
emotions as a video; and second, even if the emotion was perceived, it might not be
entirely induced in such a short length of time in a laboratory scenario. (Music might take
longer than a video to induce the same emotion.) As the experiment unfolds and data is
collected, the factors leaning toward one conclusion or another will become clear.
6.2 Participants
In this study, I hope to have at least 50 college undergraduate participants. I hope
to test a wide range of participants within these 50, specifically in such variables as
musical training and academic area of study. (If too many economics and psychology
majors participate in this experiment, it is highly possible that they will have already had
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a large amount of experience with these economics games and they will give biased
results based on academic study rather than by musical influence.) I will also consider
musical preferences and age.
6.3 Variations on Ariely’s Method
Study 1. Incidental emotion manipulation
To create the groupings of participants in Ariely’s study, I will use musical clips
as stimuli for the happy or angry conditions. These stimuli will be chosen based on a
French 2010 study in which 27 selections of classical, non-vocal music were chosen and
participants ranked them on different emotions felt during each. This study showed that
a) people are able to generally tell the emotions of different musical selections generally
come to the same conclusions about thrm; and b) these conclusions are made regardless
of the length of the clip of music or the musical experience of the participant (Bigand,
Vieillard, Madurell, Marozeau, & Dacquet, 2010).
Here are selected titles from their study that were shown to clearly demonstrate
either “happy” emotions (high valence and or “angry” emotions, as determined
participants in the study. The descriptions following each title are copied directly from
the experiment.
Happy
10. J. Brahms. Trio, piano, violin and horn, mvt 2. A strident major chord, with the arrangement of the parts and the timbre of the French horn confering a very full sonority.
11. F. Liszt. Poeme symphonique. Powerful orchestral tutti on a major chord, with a triumphant character marked by the strong trumpet presence, and an amplitude envelope which grows drama- tically.
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22. W.-F. Bach. Duetto for two flutes in G, Allegro. Five arpeggiated flute notes from a perfect major chord with a soft timbre and a swift, regular metre.
Angry
12. S. Prokovief. Sonata for piano, no. 3, op. 28. Complex melodic line of nine notes in contrary motion at a lively tempo, marked by aggressive attacks and many dissonances.
17. F. Liszt. Tasso Lamento & Triomfo. Biting explosion of an orchestral tutti on a dissonant chord, strengthened by the percussion in a clearly romantic style of orchestration.
26. D. Shostakovitch. Trio 2 for violin, cello, and piano, moderato. Three snatched intervals in the strings, containing many high and very dissonant harmonics, separating themselves from a low piano note with a rapid tempo.
27. F. Liszt. Totentanz. Aggressive march played in the low register of the piano, in a minor harmony, with a mechanical character indicating a very stable, rapid tempo.
This study neatly fits the criteria for this current experiment for several reasons.
Although it cannot be certain that every participant “felt” the emotion of the music, the
instructions given to the participants stated that they should focus on induced emotions
rather than what they necessarily perceived from the music that they heard. This means
that they were asked to focus on integral, immediate emotions, just like one would feel
while watching a video clip. Secondly, these clips have already been tested in a
laboratory setting to evoke fairly specific emotions from participants, so I can use the
results at face value in my experiment to determine whether they will be “happy” or
“angry” stimuli. The pieces will each be played for five minutes, just as in the Ariely
study, and the participants will give attention to them because they will be asked to
integrate the clips into their personal lives in writing.
The only foreseeable problem with using this study as reference stimuli is that all
stimuli are classical music. It could be that some people have such a strong dislike of
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classical music that they will never experience induced emotions. It also could be that a
participant is such an experienced musician that all of the excerpts will be met with an
induced reaction based on individual memories of performing or practicing the piece. I
hope to have enough participants for data that I will be able to “weed out” these
participants as outliers.
Just as in Ariely’s study, my participants will be divided into groups. The first
group (the receivers of the Ultimatum game in Study 2) will listen to either happy stimuli
or angry stimuli. Upon hearing one of these two stimuli, all members of the first group
will be asked to write for 5 minutes about an experience that the music calls to mind, just
as Ariely’s study asked participants to do while watching the video clips.
I will also split the emotionally neutral group. (This is a change from the Ariely
study, where the neutral group all listened to the nature video.) One half will listen to
tracks of nature sounds (just as Ariely’s neutral group heard in the nature documentary)
and one group will hear no stimulus at all. The group listening to the neutral stimuli will
write about the same prompt as the first group, while the second will write about a neutral
experience, such as the last meal that they ate.
Studies 2, 3, 4, and 5
All of the following studies after emotional induction will match (as closely as
possible) the procedures outlined in the Ariely study.
Conclusion of the Experiment
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At the conclusion of my experiment, I will ask participants to fill out a
questionnaire with biographical information including age, first language, musical
experience, personal preference in musical genres, number of psychology or economics
classes taken at Yale, and current emotional state. (For the current emotional state, I will
ask the participant to rank their emotion on a numbered scale, and I will provide
descriptions at each number.) These factors will demonstrate outliers that I should look
for when analyzing data as well as potential confounds.
6.4 Data Analysis
Data analysis will match that outlined in Ariely’s study. ANOVA scales will be
used to determine statistical relevance of one group’s “generosity” to the other group in
the economic games.
6.5 Expected Results
I anticipate that I will see a replicated version of Ariely’s results. Because these
musical stimuli have already been tested to induce integral emotiosn, like the integral
emotions induced by video clips, it follows that the results will be similar. Perhaps the
same trends of generosity from the agitated listeners will be seen as was demonstrated in
the agitated group in the video condition. I also anticipate that the decisions made in each
emotional state will be statistically different, and that even once the induced states fade,
the decisions made will carry over through the rest of the economic games. This would
show that music induces emotion, which in turn induces change in decision-making (even
after the initial emotion fades!) If this is the case, then this would show that there may be
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a great deal more to learn about induced emotions and the effect of induced emotions and
music psychology. .
7. Conclusion
After this study is complete, I hope to look at future research implications for my
hypothesis about music’s connection with emotion and decision-making research. The
fairly obvious application for this type of study is in marketing and business, but I hope
also to extend this research for use in general public knowledge in daily situations of
decision-making.
One of the simplest ways to transfer these results to daily life might be to
reconsider methods of practicing for stressful events. For example, if my hypothesis is
true, people might consider listening to calm music while practicing to give public
speeches, or while preparing for stressful interviews. By practicing making decisions in
an emotional state partially controlled by environmental factors of your choosing (such as
calm music), perhaps those situations could be made easier in real-world settings. In the
same vein, perhaps people needing to give inspirational messages, actors and actresses, or
even teachers could practice giving lessons while listening to music with an upbeat,
bright tempo so that the energy imparted by the music could be transferred again while
giving the speech.
As data comes to fruition, I hope to extend this study further and edit this proposal
to make it more complete. Some additions I will make to this proposal before actually
completing the research will be:
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1. Adding more stimuli in other genres to accommodate for the problem of
preference previously mentioned.
2. Continuing research on other theories besides cognitivist and emotivist theories
that might further my opinion on how best to impart musical stimuli.
3. Researching further in marketing literature in case there are other applications
to this sort of study that I might change the type of game that I ask participants to play, or
that I ask them to answer at the end of the survey.
In conclusion, while this proposal is not fully complete, it provides a basic outline
for the project that I hope to complete this spring analyzing a theory of music, emotion,
and decision-making. The results can and should be repeatable for further study, and
already show promise for furthering the field of music cognition research.
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Bibliography
Andrade, Eduardo B., & Ariely, Dan. (2009). The enduring impact of transient emotions
on decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,
109(1), 1-8.
Bigand, E., Vieillard, S., Madurell, F., Marozeau, J., & Dacquet, A. (2005).
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