The role of visual imagery in the musical elicitation of emotions

Music is one of the most pleasurable and treasured activities enjoyed by humans across the lifespan. Music is often highly emotional, and it can sometimes induce visual imagery, or “seeing with the mind’s eye”. This thesis examined the relation between music-evoked imagery and emotional responses to music. Following an overview of the thesis, a detailed review of investigations into visual mental imagery and visual imagery responses to music is provided followed by a second review of theoretical and empirical issues surrounding emotional responses to music. These reviews are followed by two empirical manuscripts. The first manuscript describes a questionnaire study (Experiment 1; N = 53) in which participants responded to questions about their emotional and visual imagery experiences while listening to two stylistically contrasting pieces of music. Forty-seven percent of participants who reported experiencing visual imagery during the listening task reported feeling an emotion prior to imagery, whereas only 18.5% experienced imagery prior to feeling an emotion. The second empirical manuscript describes three response-time studies that investigated the temporal dynamics of emotional experience and visual imagery in response to music. In Experiment 2, participants (N = 49) listened to 30 stimuli in 3 counterbalanced conditions, and completed a key-press as soon as they 1) perceived the emotional connotation of the music; 2) felt an emotion; and 3) experienced a visual image. Results indicated that participants first perceived the emotional connotation, and then tended to report feeling emotional prior to any experience of visual imagery. Experiment 3 (N = 36) employed a similar response-time paradigm to investigate the effect of stimulus familiarity on the timing of emotional responses and visual imagery experiences. Imagery emerged more quickly for familiar music than for unfamiliar music, and emotional responses again tended to occur prior to imagery. Experiment 4 (N = 49) examined the effect of processing fluency on the timing of emotional responses and visual imagery experiences. Stimuli rated low in fluency elicited visual imagery more rapidly than those rated high in fluency, suggesting that imagery may partly function to help listeners make sense of complex input. Taken together, the findings from this thesis shed new light on the common experience of music-evoked visual imagery, and suggest that emotional states, familiarity, and properties of musical structure all combine to promote an experience of visual imagery.