Interactive Effects of Mood-Congruency between Music and Text on Cognitive Processing

Jong Wan Kim, Department of Psychology, Yonsei University

Abstract
Music cognition studies have shown that music can influence an interpretation, emotional responses and remembering of film, and music is encoded into cognitive system according to mood-congruency between music and film. The purpose of this study is to investigate the interactive effects of music and text on cognitive appraisal. Participants were presented with a set of text/music PowerPoint slideshow that were either congruent or incongruent in the dimension of valence. Selective attending was systemically manipulated by instructing participants to attend to and remember the music, text, or both. The results from music, text recognition tasks revealed that in congruent pairs, test scores of non-attended media were not significantly different from the scores of attended media. It means that congruent pairs lead to a joint encoding of music/text information as well as an integrated memory code. Incongruent pairs, however, result in an independent encoding in which music or film is only remembered well if it was selectively attended to at the time of encoding. These findings suggest that visual and auditory information can be integrated according to their mood-congruency, and they have a shared resource in the layer of emotion.

Not available

Back to Abstract