Emotion-Related Responses to Audio News with Rising versus Falling Background Tone Sequences

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 85-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Kallinen ◽  
Niklas Ravaja

We examined the emotional effects of (a) a rising versus a falling chromatic tone sequence in the background of audio news and (b) foreground versus background diatonic and chromatic tone sequences. In experiment one, 26 participants rated audio news messages with rising and falling chromatic background tone sequences on the valence and arousal dimensions. Cardiac activity, electrodermal activity (EDA), and facial muscle activity were also recorded continuously. In experiment two, 24 participants rated six plain tone sequences ( i.e., rising and falling chromatic, major, and minor) and six news messages with the aforementioned tone sequences mixed in the background on the valence and arousal dimensions. In experiment 1, both self-reported arousal and physiological arousal as measured by EDA were higher during the news with a rising-tone sequence compared to those with a falling-tone sequence. In experiment 2, rising-tone sequences prompted both higher arousal and pleasantness ratings. However, the responses were moderated by the type of listening task: foreground listening prompted responses related to musical connotations ( i.e., major tone sequences were rated as most pleasant and minor as most unpleasant), whereas background listening prompted responses dependent on the emotional congruence between the news messages and tone sequences ( i.e., the minor mode versions were rated as most pleasant and the major mode versions as most unpleasant). In addition, level of education-, music listening frequency-, and age-related differences in the responses were found and are discussed.

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Krippl ◽  
Stephanie Ast-Scheitenberger ◽  
Ina Bovenschen ◽  
Gottfried Spangler

In light of Lang’s differentiation of the aversive and the approach system – and assumptions stemming from attachment theory – this study investigates the role of the approach or caregiving system for processing infant emotional stimuli by comparing IAPS pictures, infant pictures, and videos. IAPS pictures, infant pictures, and infant videos of positive, neutral, or negative content were presented to 69 mothers, accompanied by randomized startle probes. The assessment of emotional responses included subjective ratings of valence and arousal, corrugator activity, the startle amplitude, and electrodermal activity. In line with Lang’s original conception, the typical startle response pattern was found for IAPS pictures, whereas no startle modulation was observed for infant pictures. Moreover, the startle amplitudes during negative video scenes depicting crying infants were reduced. The results are discussed with respect to several theoretical and methodological considerations, including Lang’s theory, emotion regulation, opponent process theory, and the parental caregiving system.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Tianyi Zhang ◽  
Abdallah El Ali ◽  
Chen Wang ◽  
Alan Hanjalic ◽  
Pablo Cesar

Recognizing user emotions while they watch short-form videos anytime and anywhere is essential for facilitating video content customization and personalization. However, most works either classify a single emotion per video stimuli, or are restricted to static, desktop environments. To address this, we propose a correlation-based emotion recognition algorithm (CorrNet) to recognize the valence and arousal (V-A) of each instance (fine-grained segment of signals) using only wearable, physiological signals (e.g., electrodermal activity, heart rate). CorrNet takes advantage of features both inside each instance (intra-modality features) and between different instances for the same video stimuli (correlation-based features). We first test our approach on an indoor-desktop affect dataset (CASE), and thereafter on an outdoor-mobile affect dataset (MERCA) which we collected using a smart wristband and wearable eyetracker. Results show that for subject-independent binary classification (high-low), CorrNet yields promising recognition accuracies: 76.37% and 74.03% for V-A on CASE, and 70.29% and 68.15% for V-A on MERCA. Our findings show: (1) instance segment lengths between 1–4 s result in highest recognition accuracies (2) accuracies between laboratory-grade and wearable sensors are comparable, even under low sampling rates (≤64 Hz) (3) large amounts of neutral V-A labels, an artifact of continuous affect annotation, result in varied recognition performance.


2020 ◽  
pp. 102986492097472
Author(s):  
Katherine O’Neill ◽  
Hauke Egermann

Recent research has explored the role of empathy in the context of music listening. Here, through an empathy priming paradigm, situational empathy was shown to act as a causal mechanism in inducing emotion, although the way empathy was primed had low levels of ecological validity. We therefore conducted an online experiment to explore the extent to which information about a composer’s expressive intentions when writing a piece of music would significantly affect the degree to which participants reportedly empathise with the composer and in turn influence emotional responses to expressive music. A total of 229 participants were randomly assigned to three groups. The experimental group read short texts describing the emotions felt by the composer during the process of composition. To control for the effect of text regardless of its content, one control group read texts describing the characteristics of the music they were to hear, and a second control group was not given any textual information. Participants listened to 30-second excerpts of four pieces of music, selected to express emotions from the four quadrants of the circumplex theory of emotion. Having heard each music excerpt, participants rated the valence and arousal they experienced and completed a measure of situational empathy. Results show that situational empathy in response to music is significantly associated with trait empathy. As opposed to those in the control conditions, participants in the experimental group responded with significantly higher levels of situational empathy. Receiving this text significantly moderated the effect of the expressiveness of stimuli on induced emotion, indicating that it induced empathy. We conclude that empathy can be induced during music listening through the provision of information about the specific emotions of a person relating to the music. These findings contribute to an understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underlie emotional responses to music.


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 1027-1041 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshiya Moriguchi ◽  
Alyson Negreira ◽  
Mariann Weierich ◽  
Rebecca Dautoff ◽  
Bradford C. Dickerson ◽  
...  

Emerging evidence indicates that stimulus novelty is affectively potent and reliably engages the amygdala and other portions of the affective workspace in the brain. Using fMRI, we examined whether novel stimuli remain affectively salient across the lifespan, and therefore, whether novelty processing—a potentially survival-relevant function—is preserved with aging. Nineteen young and 22 older healthy adults were scanned during observing novel and familiar affective pictures while estimating their own subjectively experienced aroused levels. We investigated age-related difference of magnitude of activation, hemodynamic time course, and functional connectivity of BOLD responses in the amygdala. Although there were no age-related differences in the peak response of the amygdala to novelty, older individuals showed a narrower, sharper (i.e., “peakier”) hemodynamic time course in response to novel stimuli, as well as decreased connectivity between the left amygdala and the affective areas including orbito-frontal regions. These findings have relevance for understanding age-related differences in memory and affect regulation.


1993 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah J. Blood ◽  
Stephen J. Ferriss

Previous research on music's influence has often been nonconclusive, partly because subjective measures have been used for testing opposite conditions such as sedative versus stimulative music or happy versus sad music. Here, background music's influence upon 104 conversants was explored by manipulating the presence of music, and when present, by the more objectively assessed structural elements of mode and speed. Conversations taking place in the presence of background music were rated as more satisfying. Major mode music elicited higher ratings of satisfaction with communication than minor mode. Modality and speed interacted, illustrating the importance of not confounding music's structural elements when testing opposite conditions in studies of the effects of music. While background music did not affect productivity relative to no music, those hearing background music achieved greater productivity when music was in the major mode.


2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita S. Wolpert

This study questions the assumption that a majority of nonmusicians pay attention to key when not specifically directed to do so. The question asked was "what do people hear," rather than "what can people hear." Musicians and nonmusicians listened to a song sung in a different key from its accompaniment. There were no other differences in the music stimuli. Subjects were asked what differences, if any, they heard. In other words, left to their own devices would listeners pay attention to and report the bitonality of the excerpt? Although 100% of the musicians heard the clash of keys, only 40% of the nonmusicians indicated that they heard the difference in keys between singer and accompaniment. Of these, half also mentioned nonexistent differences, for example, in instrumentation, dynamics, and tempo.


2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-122
Author(s):  
Olivia Ladinig ◽  
David Huron
Keyword(s):  

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 157-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen E. Palmer ◽  
Thomas A. Langlois ◽  
Karen B. Schloss

Prior research has shown that non-synesthetes’ color associations to classical orchestral music are strongly mediated by emotion. The present study examines similar cross-modal music-to-color associations for much better controlled musical stimuli: 64 single-line piano melodies that were generated from four basic melodies by Mozart, whose global musical parameters were manipulated in tempo (slow/fast), note-density (sparse/dense), mode (major/minor) and pitch-height (low/high). Participants first chose the three colors (from 37) that they judged to be most consistent with (and, later, the three that were most inconsistent with) the music they were hearing. They later rated each melody and each color for the strength of its association along four emotional dimensions:happy/sad,agitated/calm,angry/not-angryandstrong/weak. The cross-modal choices showed that faster music in the major mode was associated with lighter, more saturated, yellower (warmer) colors than slower music in the minor mode. These results replicate and extend those of Palmeret al.(2013,Proc. Natl Acad. Sci.110, 8836–8841) with more precisely controlled musical stimuli. Further results replicated strong evidence for emotional mediation of these cross-modal associations, in that the emotional ratings of the melodies were very highly correlated with the emotional associations of the colors chosen as going best/worst with the melodies ( forhappy/sad,strong/weak,angry/not-angryandagitated/calm, respectively). The results are discussed in terms of common emotional associations forming a cross-modal bridge between highly disparate sensory inputs.


1992 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masamitsu Shibagaki ◽  
Tadashige Yamanaka ◽  
Takeshi Furuya

During passive and active listening tasks electrodermal activity of 49 healthy school children was studied. The procedure included baseline recording, a passive listening task, instructions, and simple and discriminative active-listening tasks. On the passive task from Trials 1 to 10, habituation of the amplitude of the skin conductance response (SCR) occurred. Habituation of SCR amplitude did not occur during the active tasks. The children seemed to pay more attention during the active tasks than during the passive task, since the need to press the key is apt to require and may even increase general attention. As for temporal variables of SCR, the frequency of spontaneous SCRs showed a significant negative correlation with SCR latency and rise time. Reaction time exhibited a significant negative correlation with age. An increase in reaction time was found during the discriminative active-listening task over that for the simple active-listening task during the course of 10 trials. The younger children (6–8 yr.) seemed to require longer to pay attention than the older ones (10–12 yr.). Children seemed to pay more attention during the discriminative than during the simple active-listening task, since the need to press the key for discrimination should require and is likely to increase general attention.


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