Abstract
This study investigates the mood congruent effects of music on word recognition within the activity dimension of two-dimensional emotion space in order to verify whether exciting or relaxing music automatically arouse exciting or relaxing emotions. In the experiment, high-activity and low-activity personality trait words and non-words were presented on a display with music that was either high-active (exciting) or low-active (relaxing) in nature. Thirty “music group” participants and twelve “control group” participants were asked to judge whether presented character strings were high-activity trait words, low-activity trait words or non-words as quickly as possible. They were also asked to recall the words presented during the judgment task. Mood congruent effects were only observed in terms of response times when participants were presented with both high-activity trait words and high-activity music. This result suggests that music arouses emotional responses in the activity dimension.
