Keep Calm and Pump Up the Jams: How Musical Mood and Arousal Affect Visual Attention

Music is a prevalent part of everyday life and there has been a great deal of interest in the possibility that music facilitates cognition, including memory. Listening to background music has a modulatory effect on internal mood and arousal states, putting the listeners at the optimal levels necessary to enhance memory performance. However, there has been little research on how music-induced mood and arousal influence other aspects of cognition, in particular attention. The aim of the current study was to examine the effect of background music on visual attention. Participants rated an assortment of music clips on mood and arousal levels. The clips that participants rated most positive or negative in mood and highest or lowest in arousal were used during an adaptation of the Posner cueing task (Posner, 1980). This visual attention task was either performed in silence or while listening to background music. A significant interaction between mood and arousal was observed. Participants were fastest when listening to high arousal positive music and slowest when listening to high arousal negative music. Intermediate performance occurred for low arousal negative and low arousal positive music. Thus, changes in music-induced mood and arousal can indeed alter reaction times, with opposite effects observed for high arousal music based on whether it is perceived as positive or negative in mood. However, there is no evidence that musical mood and arousal affect attention because mood and arousal levels do not alter the effect of congruency on either reaction times or accuracy. Thus, although reaction times are faster in the presence of high arousal positive music, this appears unrelated to effects on attention.