Affective priming through Indian ragas: influence on perception of ambiguous visual stimuli and creativity

Indian ragas have captivated a sustained scholarly interest over the past few years owing to their capacity to evoke emotional, therapeutic and physiological benefits. A conspicuous research gap persists: ragas have seldom been examined as an affective prime; their unconscious influence on subsequent perception, behavior, and creativity remains unexplored and antecedent research into music and creativity has predominantly been confined to background music only. This research endeavored to ascertain whether ragas of two contrasting emotional valences of happiness and sadness unconsciously influence the emotional expression and perception congruent with the primed affective tone, while also bolstering divergent thinking. Participants ( n = 90) were randomly assigned to an experimental ( n = 45) or a control cohort ( n = 45). The experimental cohort underwent a counterbalanced, within-subjects exposure to Raga Kedar (positively valenced) and Raga Charukeshi (negatively valenced), whereas the control group enabled a between-subjects contrast. As measured by the Emotional Word Selection Task to describe the ambiguous images, the findings elucidated a striking congruence between the lexical choice and the affective tone, where Raga Kedar primed more positive word choices and Raga Charukeshi primed more negative word choices, in contrast to the control cohort, which evinced an affective neutrality. This provides stark evidence for top-down processing of perception. The creativity indexed by performance on the Alternative Uses Task and the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking – Figural demonstrated an augmentation of creative output not only from the priming effect of positive music, though exerting a more pronounced effect, but also from negative music, and the control cohort showcased lower creativity scores compared to the experimental conditions, which highlights the plausibility of a dual-pathway model of creativity due to the priming effect of both positive and negative music in facilitating creativity.