Musical Valence Affects Spatial Attention in a Likert Scale Rating Task

摘要

Music has wide usage in many situations in everyday life, and has been shown to affect a widerange of behaviors from basic line bisection to driving performance. One hundred fourteenparticipants performed a rating task on works of art in silence or while listening to music with asad or happy valence. The results demonstrated a replication of earlier work on pseudoneglect inline bisection tasks when the ratings were performed in silence, but demonstrated a reversal ofthe effect when happy music was present and a negation of the effect when sad music waspresent. The presence of music and its valence impacted spatial attention as evidenced by ratingson a visual analog scale. The results are framed within theory regarding hemisphericspecialization in the brain, and how the findings might be applied to situations in everyday life.Specifically, the results suggest a way to potentially ameliorate pseudoneglect on rating andresponse scales, improving the efficacy of such instruments in research and user experienceenvironments.