A study was undertaken to determine whether being exposed to another person's perceptions of emotion would bias the perception of music listeners. A sample of 66 undergraduate psychology students at a small, residential, Catholic college and 103 students at a large, non-sectarian, urban university, comprised of commuters, listened to a recorded jazz piano improvisation and indicated their perceptions of emotion on 7-point scales of friendly-angry, happy-sad, and tense-relaxed. Half the participants preceded their listening by reading that a fan of this pianist had said that everything the pianist played was sad. Among the Catholic college students, perceptions of sadness in the music were significantly higher for the primed listeners than for the listeners who had not read the fan's remark. There was no difference in sadness perception between primed and unprimed listeners among the non-sectarian, urban university students.
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