[month] [year]

Manas Manoj Kabre

Manas Manoj Kabre supervised by Dr. Priyanka Srivastava received his Master of Science – Dual Degree  in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). Here’s a summary of his research work on Predisposed mood and affective state in perceptual level judgement:

Persistent sadness, emotional dysregulation, and loss of pleasure are the key characteristics of depression. It is one of the most commonly reported mental disorders and is a significant contributor to the global burden of disease. However, examining depression is still challenging, especially for individuals at risk for depression. The current thesis attempts to contribute to this area by examining the impact of depression risk on specific aspects of affective experience and perceptual level processing, focusing on global/local biases in individuals vulnerable to depression. More specifically we are interested in understanding whether vulnerability to depression alters the global/local perceptual processing when experiencing mood congruent versus incongruent music. It was hypothesized that individuals with high compared to low risk of depression would favour local processing and show reduced global precedence effect as depression is associated with the narrow scope of attentional processing. The effect was expected to be more pronounced in negative versus positive affective states because of the mood congruency, further strengthening the narrower scope of attention processing. We address this question by performing 2 studies. We created Navon’s compound stimuli to analyse global/local perceptual processing, and Kessler-10 (in Study 1) and PHQ-9(Study-2) and GAD-7(Study2) to examine depression risks. In Study 1, we used  Vastfjall’s paper, which had a small dataset of ¨ music pieces and the corresponding mood they intend to induce, and in study 2, we used the soundtrack dataset to select music tracks of varying valence and arousal for stimulating particular affective state while performing the perceptual level judgement task. In the first study, which was conducted online, participants’ task was to identify the letter “H” or “O” presented either at the global or local (G/L) perceptual level, using Navon’s method. These stimuli were presented with background music eliciting either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral mood. Each of these categories had 3 music tracks assigned to them, which were randomly assigned to a given participant. Participants were randomly assigned 1 of the 9 tracks (of lyrical music), which belonged to one of the categories, i.e., pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. Participants were asked to play the assigned track in the background while performing the G/L task. After completing the perceptual level judgement task, participants were asked to fill out the Kessler 10 and Brief Mood Introspection Scale (BMIS) to assess their predisposed and current emotional states respectively. In the second study, which was conducted in a controlled lab setting, participants perform the same perceptual level judgement task but with four non-lyrical music pieces varying at the valence and arousal levels. In this study, participants were also asked to report their mood after every audio-condition, i.e., high and low arousing and valence conditions, by employing BMIS. Participants were also asked to report their feeling towards the music piece after every audio. Study 1 failed to demonstrate the impact of music on immediate mood manipulation. However, study 2 showed a significant impact of background music on immediate mood, indicating successful mood manipulation. The difference in mood manipulation could be a result of consistency in the music pieces presented to every participant and or enabling the control constant, in which the music was played as soon as the instruction was over and task started. Unlike the first experiment, the music play was automated in the second experiment. Despite reporting a change in immediate mood, individuals with high risks of depression reported consistently lower mood levels than individuals with low risk of depression. The experience of lower mood levels aligns with previous findings, suggesting a negative impact of depression on immediate mood experience. The overarching effect of predisposed mood, encompassing depression or anxiety, on individuals’ transient mood experience and perceptual task performance indicates the pervasive nature of depression. Unlike previous studies, individuals with depression showed faster reaction time for both global and local stimuli in both studies, 1 2, but with reduced accuracy in the second experiment, indicating a speed-accuracy trade-off. Despite faster reaction time, individuals with a high risk of depression showed reduced global precedence than their counterparts with a low risk of depression. The findings are discussed in light of theoretical models of depression.

 September 2024