Paula M. Niedenthal - Emotion Congruence and Selective Perception

Emotion Congruence and Selective Perception

One particular area of study by Dr. Niedenthal looks at the question of "Are we more tuned to perceive things that are more congruent with our mood?". For example, one study done by Dr. Niedenthal and Marc Setterlund in 1994 suggests that happiness and sadness have emotion-congruent effects upon selective perception. In their 1994 study, participants were given earphones so that they could listen to music throughout the experiment. Half of the participants were given classical music that was intended to induce a happy mood (the allegro from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, and parts of Vivaldi’s Concerto in C Major), and half of the participants were given classical music that was intended to induce sad moods (Adagietto by Mahler and the adagio from the piano from the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor by Rachmaninov). Subjects were then asked to perform a lexical decision task. Letters were flashed on a screen: some were real words and some were non-words or words that are not in the dictionary but can still be pronounced in English, such as "blang". The words were put into five categories, happy words, positive words that are unrelated to happiness, neutral words, negative words that are unrelated to sadness, and sad words.

Niedenthal and Setterlund did in fact find that music can induce happy or sad moods. They also found that when in a happy mood, participants were quicker at identifying happy words than sad words. Such findings are in line with the emotion-congruence thesis. This research also makes the conclusion that our existing moods and emotions lead us to selectively perceive emotion-congruent objects and events.