Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The current study examines the interaction between predisposed mood, perceptual processing, and induced mood using music. We conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to identify stimuli at global or local (G/L) perceptual levels with four different background music conditions, which had different valence and arousal ratings. We used BMIS to assess current mood and PHQ-9 and GAD-7 to assess depression and anxiety, and divided the participants into two groups: distress and no distress (encompassing both disorders). We found a main effect of background music on mood. However, the distress group showed an overall low mood. Further, we observed an overarching effect of predisposed mood, encompassing depression and anxiety, on individuals' transient mood experience and perceptual task performance. Individuals in the non-distress group showed a larger global-precedence effect. The results are discussed in light of emotional reactivity theories and the theory of positive emotion.