Studying The Effect Of Music Style On The Construal Level Using Functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy

Music is the product of human culture,and serves as a medium for people to express emotion and convey information.Due to its different elements,music is presented with different melodies and rhythms,and subsequently different music style.Different music styles have distinct effects on emotion and cognitive activities of people.The construal level denotes the different abstract levels of the representation of objects.The construal level as a useful indicator has been widely used to measure people's cognitive activities.Meanwhile,the neurophysiological changes in the prefrontal cortex(PFC)are associated with human cognitive activities.Hence,this study investigated the influence of music style on cognitive activities by measuring the construal level and PFC activation.In this study,two music styles(i.e.,a piece of soothing music and a piece of uplifting music)were presented to each subject.A behavioral experiment was used to measure the construal level of the participants,while the PFC activation level was measured by a functional near-infrared spectroscopy(f NIRS).The results showed that compared with uplifting music,soothing music improved the construal level of the participants.Furthermore,the prefrontal cortex activities were higher in uplifting music than those in soothing music.These findings suggeted that different styles of music have different effects on the construal level and the activation level in the PFC,indicating that the styles of music could impact people's cognitive activation.The possible reason may be attributed to the fact that different styles of music evoke different emotions,which influence the cognitive activities of the individual.Human emotions may impact different motivation intensity in their cognitive activitites.According to the motivational dimensional model of emotion,the differences of construal level and prefrontal cortex activities may be caused by the difference of emotions' motivation intensity.Different emotions with different motivition intensity would broaden or narrow cognitive processing,and then possibly influence the constural level of the individual.