[Effects of musical emotionality upon GSR and respiration rate: the relationship between verbal reports and...

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between verbally reported emotional meanings of music and physiological responses to them. Subjects were 16 female, junior college students in each of GSR and respiration experiments. They listened to 16 musical excerpts and rated each on 11 scales, which consisted of eight adjectives representing for four factors identified by factor analysis and each for familiarity, preference and tempo, while their GSRs or respiration rates were recorded. The respiration rates and their percentages of increase significantly correlated positively with ratings of "cheerful", "gay" and "powerful", and negatively with "calm", "melancholy" and "dismal". The numbers of GSRs (frequencies of marked GSRs) and the percentages of decrease in skin resistance significantly correlated negatively with "calm", and positively with "powerful". The physiological variables employed in this study correlated with the verbal reports of meanings of music.