And now for something completely different…

Together with three other students (Lies , Desiree and Kim) I researched the perception of emotions through lyrics and lyrics accompanied by music. This research was done for the course ‘Onderzoekspracticum’.

I will not bore you with all details regarding our research (such as first and second research subject), so I will just state what we did, how we did it and what the results were. First, we selected the six basic emotions. These are happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise (remember those). Consequently, we searched for English pop songs that were relatively unknown and fitted one of the emotions. As you might think, it was hard (if not impossible) to find two pop songs that could be associated with disgust. However, we did manage to find two! Subsequently, we selected ten second parts of every song and wrote down the lyrics.

Design

The design was as follows (I will not describe the generic parts such as introduction and audio test): First, the lyric was shown to the respondent. The respondent had to indicate which of the six basic emotions fitted best. In addition, the respondent had to rate the chosen emotion in how much they believed it was applicable. The second part was actually the same as the first part, except for the addition of music and one extra question (yes, we actually added the song to the lyrics). The extra question consisted of stating whether the respondent already knew the song before filling in the survey.

Test

Afterwards, we analyzed the results. Before I am going to state what these results were, there is one thing I would like you to do. Play the song below this part of text (press the ‘play’  button in the media player). Please think for yourself which of the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise) you believe it belongs to:

NOTE: Due to a so-called 'watermark' the player will first play a three second commercial jingle of the site were I got the player from (podsnack.com). Afterwards, the ten second song will play:

We also used this song in our survey and you probably want to know which emotion is belongs to… Well, read this blog and you will find the answer!

Results

In the mean time, I will continue with the results. The mean age of the respondents was 21.9 years, whereof 10 were male and 38 were female (N-48). All respondents were students are the University of Tilburg. We performed a dependent t-test on two songs of the same emotion and the difference between the two conditions (which were ‘lyrics’ and ‘lyrics with music’). For example, we calculated if there was a difference between the assigned emotion for lyrics in Anger 1 and in Anger 2. Since all respondents also had to rate the degree of which they believed the emotion fitted the emotion, we also have results regarding that. We found significant results for Anger 1, Happiness 2, Fear 2, Sadness 2 and Disgust 1. This means that all respondents rated, for example, the song in Anger 1 as ‘anger’. However, the degree of which the respondents believed it fitted the emotion, differed.

Interestingly, we found some significant differences between man and women. Regarding the first condition (just lyrics) and what emotion fitted that lyric, differences were found for Disgust 1 & 2 and Anger 2. In addition, in the second condition (lyrics and music), significant differences were found for Happiness 1, Fear 1 and Anger 2. The survey itself had no significant influence on the current emotional state of the respondents.

Some of the music we used in our survey was familiar to respondents. The song for Disgust 1 ‘Gives You Hell’ by ‘The All-American Rejects’ was known to 38 respondents. However, this number was rather high and fortunately it was the only high number. The song for Disgust 2 ‘Shallow Be Thy Game’  by ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers’ was unknown to every respondent. This was also the song you heard when playing the audio file, so know you know which emotion it belongs to J 

Conclusion

Finally, the conclusion. We had a H₀ and H₁ hypothesis for every emotion. When there were significant differences between both conditions (lyrics and lyrics with music), the hypothesis was rejected. This was not the case for Anger and Disgust. We found that the emotions ‘anger’ and ‘disgust’ were labeled by the respondents as respectively anger and disgust, for both lyrics and lyrics with music. This means we found that there were significant differences in the assigned emotions between the two conditions of either emotion.

All songs

Perhaps you would like to know which songs we used? Well, here they are:

Lets Have A Party by Backstreet Boys
Something Kinda Funny by Spice Girls
Mudshovel by Staind
Missing You by Steve Perry
I Hate Everything About You by Three Days Grace
Here Comes The Rain Again by Eurythmics
Maybe I'm Amazed by Paul McCartney
Shallow Be Thy Game by Red Hot Chili Peppers
Circle Of Fear by HIM
Amazed by Vanessa Hudgens
Gives You Hell by The All-American Rejects
Boris The Spider by The Who

Note that the respondents did not see the title of the song, nor the artists!

Thus, now you a know a bit more about the perception of emotion in lyrics and in lyrics with music. Please comment on my post to let me know what you think, what you expected and which emotion you thought the audio file belonged to.