Mood Induction through emotional prosody modification — Experiments of students reading a folk story scenario

In the two-factor theory of emotion, an emotion is caused not only by body responses, but also by our interpretations of body responses. We assume that an emotion can be caused even by a false recognition of physiological reactions. In our previous research, when a person´s voice was combined with cheerful sounds, he/she became cheerful. Therefore, we developed a system to modify the prosodies of utterances to examine whether subjects would inaccurately recognize their past emotions when hearing past utterances modified via these prosodies (which showed negative or positive emotions). The results of the two-way ANOVA showed that mood-related items, such as “tender,” “anxious,” and “undisturbed,” exhibited significant differences depending on the factor of the converted method. This result suggests that modifying emotional prosodies can induce different emotions.