Emotional Priming: effects of consonant and dissonant chords on emotion word judgments

Abstract

In the present experiment, participants (32 college students with a mean age of 26.7; ± 4.2) were instructed to make judgments regarding the emotional valence of words with positive, negative, and neutral valence presented immediately after a chord, dissonant or consonant to be played In the initial analysis, the negative valence words were most often considered as positive when preceded by dissonant chords. While in the second analysis, we considered the chord classification assigned by participants. This result showed that treble chords were perceived as more positive, while bass chords as more negative. Most importantly, this analysis revealed that neutral valence words when preceded by treble chords were also more often perceived as positive.

Keywords

• primig
• emotional priming
• chords