Development and validation of the first adaptive test of emotion perception in music

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MacGregor, Chloe; Ruth, Nicolas and Müllensiefen, Daniel. 2023. Development and validation of the first adaptive test of emotion perception in music. Cognition and Emotion, 37(2), pp. 284-302. ISSN 0269-9931 [Article]

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Official URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699...

Abstract or Description

The Musical Emotion Discrimination Task (MEDT) is a short, non-adaptive test of the ability to discriminate emotions in music. Test-takers hear two performances of the same melody, both played by the same performer but each trying to communicate a different basic emotion, and are asked to determine which one is “happier”, for example. The goal of the current study was to construct a new version of the MEDT using a larger set of shorter, more diverse music clips and an adaptive framework to expand the ability range for which the test can deliver measurements. The first study analysed responses from a large sample of participants (N = 624) to determine how musical features contributed to item difficulty, which resulted in a quantitative model of musical emotion discrimination ability rooted in Item Response Theory (IRT). This model informed the construction of the adaptive MEDT. A second study contributed preliminary evidence for the validity and reliability of the adaptive MEDT, and demonstrated that the new version of the test is suitable for a wider range of abilities. This paper therefore presents the first adaptive musical emotion discrimination test, a new resource for investigating emotion processing which is freely available for research use.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2022.2162003