MUSIC, EMOTIONS, COGNITION STUDY
CSIM Masters' Thesis by Nataliya Gorobinskaya, at UPF Barcelona, Spain
4. TAKE QUIZ
4th out of 4 tasks
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SURVEY 2 out of 3:
INDICATE HOW YOU FEEL RIGHT NOW
Using the scale from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) indicate below how you feel right now
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SURVEY 3 out of 3:
INDICATE HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT THE TASKS
Using the scale from 1 (lowest) to 7 (highest) indicate how motivated were the tasks
This is the end of the experiment.
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DEBRIEFING
Emotions, Music, Cognition Study
Thank you! You have just finished participating in the experiment, which tries to identify a universal structural element of music, which can help us learn better. We suggest that timbre is one of the characteristics, which can yield predictable and consistent result at the time of inducing positive emotions, even using very short recordings.
According to previous research we know that when a person has experienced enjoyment emotion, he or she, is performing better in cognitive tasks, related to learning, including encoding and storage of information. What we do not know, is how to make sure that certain piece of music can induce positive emotion, like enjoyment, for everyone, because music carries a lot of personal associations and it is difficult to predict if a particular musical piece will induce enjoyment or not. Timbre has been identified as an element which could do the job in inducing enjoyment regardless of personal baggage, because it acts in subconscious and thus is not affected by individual associations.
The experiment consisted in priming participants, with musical excerpts of different timbres, happy and sad before studying and going through the test. If we confirm our hypothesis, it will help us create more effective learning environments.
For emotional state assessment we used PANAS ( Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1998) and for motion assessment we used the questionnaire from Isen & Reeve (2005) study.
There are 4 groups which get different musical stimuli in order to determine its effect on cognitive performance in a learning setting.
This experiment is based on the methodology, used in the studies "Emotional Design in Multimedia Learning" by Um, Plass and Hayward and "Cross-classification of musical and vocal emotions in the auditory cortex" by S. Paquette et al.