Assessing the Role of Emotional Associations in Mediating Crossmodal Correspondences between Classical Music and Red Wine

摘要

Several recent studies have demonstrated that people intuitively make consistent matches between classical music and specific wines. It is not clear, however, what governs such crossmodal mappings. Here, we assess the role of emotion—specifically different dimensional aspects of valence, arousal, and dominance—in mediating such mappings. Participants matched three different red wines to three different pieces of classical music. Subsequently, they made emotion ratings separately for each wine and each musical selection. The results revealed that certain wine–music pairings were rated as being significantly better matches than others. More importantly, there was evidence that the participants’ dominance and arousal ratings for the wines and the music predicted their matching rating for each wine–music pairing. These results therefore support the view that wine–music associations are not arbitrary but can be explained, at least in part, by common emotional associations.