Emotions, Music, and Acetaminophen
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Date
2021-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Music is a complex combination of auditory notes that is made to elicit emotions from the listener. Indeed, when listening to pieces of music, people often like or dislike them as well as feel emotions from them. A recent study (Warrenburg, Huron, & Way, in preparation) has shown that the drug acetaminophen can alter the psychological impact of music, lowering negative as well as positive evaluations of music. To understand more about the psychological effects of acetaminophen in response to music, three investigations were undertaken. First, new analyses were performed on data from the aforementioned study of acetaminophen and music in order to identify potential psychological processes that could explain the blunted positivity and negativity ratings while taking acetaminophen. In that study, participants listened to a short clip of music, rated the positivity or negativity of it, the emotional arousal of it, the perceived familiarity of it, as well as emotions evoked by the clip of music. The new analyses conducted for this thesis revealed that acetaminophen lowered familiarity ratings of pieces of music. Second, mediation analyses were performed to probe the mechanism by which familiarity is related to acetaminophen's effects on reducing evaluations. Two possible theoretical models were identified. The mere exposure and processing fluency model suggests that familiarity mediates the relationship between acetaminophen and reduced evaluations in response to music clips. The warm glow model suggests that acetaminophen lowers evaluations, and that this lowering of evaluations leads to less perceived familiarity. The results of the mediation analyses supported both possible models. To study this effect further, we proposed a third investigation in order to probe more deeply into the familiarity component of processing, in order to understand more about how acetaminophen influences processing of auditory stimuli. This new study will test the mere exposure and processing fluency model of familiarity. This will be achieved by using a similar procedure, but participants will be asked to rate the familiarity of stimuli on a more precise scale and asked if they are able to name the piece of music they hear. This allows us to draw connections between the depth of familiarity and the effects of acetaminophen on familiarity. We hypothesize that 1) acetaminophen will reduce familiarity, which will, in turn, lead to evaluation blunting, and 2) familiarity will also moderate the relationship between acetaminophen and evaluation blunting, such that the blunting is strongest for moderately familiar music clips. These findings will provide further novel insights into how acetaminophen is altering affective experience.
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Keywords
acetaminophen, social psychology, familiarity, music, processing