Can emotional music and faces influence our worldview? A simultaneously combined bimodal paradigm

Abstract

Individuals’ perceptions of valence ambiguous stimuli can be affected by other emotional stimuli introduced through their modalities. However, there is evidence that modalities influence each other and as a result the effect of the emotional stimuli received by one modality may dominate. Affective priming and mood induction procedures are two widely used paradigms that investigate the effect of emotional stimuli on the individuals. This study combines them into a cross-modal paradigm in which emotional faces are utilised as primes and emotional music as a mood induction cue. A convenience gender balanced sample of 54 individuals (M=28.98years, SD=11.10years) evaluated a set of valence ambiguous images derived from the GAPED database, once preceded by a happy and once by a sad face, derived from the FACES database. During the experiment, participants were also exposed to either the happy song “Barber - Adagio for Strings”, or to the sad one “Mozart - Flute Concerto in D Major”. Indeed, a modality dominance effect was established in this study, as merely the main effect of emotional faces was significant F(1,52) = 18.841, p <.001, η2 =.17 supported by a large effect size. As a result, it could be argued that the visual stimuli dominate the other modalities based on the emotional effect and that affective priming produces more intense affective effects than the mood induction procedure. However, the above results should be cautiously interpreted, because of the small sample size as well as the presence of outliers.