Contribution of Arousal and Mood States to Mozart Listening: Audiovisual Integration Study

Several scientific evidences confirm that arousal and mood influence performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. We examined whether the Mozart effect is a consequence of between-condition differences in arousal and mood after simultaneously music and visual graphic presentation. Follow-up analyses were conducted separately for each musical excerpt, visual graphic piece, and simultaneously music and visual graphic presentation. The three posttest measures of arousal and mood were examined separately with mixed-design ANOVAs that had one within-subjects variable and one between-subjects variable. We found that effects of music attributed to differences in arousal and mood, as well as enjoyment. Participants who listened to Mozart scored significantly higher on positive mood and arousal and significantly lower on negative mood compared with their counterparts who listened to Albinoni. Enjoyable stimuli statistically induced positive affect and heightened levels of arousal, which lead to modest improvements in performance on visual graphic perception. Listeners’ use of music shows as an agent of emotional change. Our results support previous studies suggesting that the short-term effects of listening to Mozart on spatial ability are an artifact of arousal and mood. The present investigation is the first to examine directly the contribution of arousal and mood to the Mozart listening compared to seeing visual graphic condition. Changes in mood may be induced by giving participants a visual graphic, and changes in arousal occur in response to environmental events.