Things are sounding up: affective influences on auditory tone perception.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Affective Science

Background:

• Affective states and cognitive task performance are increasingly linked.
• Cross-modal interactions between affect and perception are an emerging research area.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate cross-modal effects of affective word evaluations on auditory pitch judgments.
• To test the hypothesis that affective valence influences perception of verticality in auditory stimuli.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted using word evaluation primes followed by low- and high-pitch tone discrimination tasks.
• Participants judged the pitch of tones after evaluating the valence of preceding words.

Main Results:

• Positive word evaluations significantly biased tone judgments towards high-pitch perception.
• Negative word evaluations biased tone judgments towards low-pitch perception.
• These affective biases influenced accuracy, response bias, and reaction times.

Conclusions:

• Affective evaluations exert a significant cross-modal influence on auditory perception.
• The findings support the conceptual link between affect and verticality, extending it to auditory-perceptual judgments.