An experiment was conducted to determine if a sad mood induction procedure using music and self-imagery would produce sad speech in... Show moreAn experiment was conducted to determine if a sad mood induction procedure using music and self-imagery would produce sad speech in adolescents. The participants were asked to rate their perceived positive and negative affect and they were recorded. reading speech materials. Results indicate that although participants perceived a change in mood from neutral to sad, none of the baseline acoustic correlates of sad speech were identified in their recordings. These results suggest that either participants were not induced into a sad mood by this procedure or that the method of self-reporting is an inadequate assessment for this age group, signaling that more effective ways to measure mood for adolescents should be investigated. Additionally, since most studies on sad speech use actors, the results may indicate that acted speech provides significantly different correlates from emotionally-induced speech. Finally, a similarly valenced mood may have been induced instead of sadness (e.g. "calmness") which possesses different acoustic correlates from sad speech. Whilst the findings suggest that there is need for further research on these issues, this experiment demonstrates that mood inducement procedures (MIPs), primarily used in the field of psychology, can be applied in other domains. For example, MIPs conducted in online environments could provide useful insights into how mood affects users' online behaviors. Show less
