Multiple Regression Modeling of the Emotional Content of Film and Music

Our research seeks to model the effect of music on the perceived emotional content of film media. We used participants’ ratings of the emotional content of film-alone, music-alone, and film-music pairings for a collection of emotionally neutral film clips and emotionally provocative music segments. Mapping the results onto a three-dimensional emotion space, we observed a strong relationship between the ratings of the film- and music-alone clips, and those of the film-music pairs. Previously, we modeled the ratings in each dimension independently. We now develop models, using stepwise regression, to describe the film-music ratings using quadratic terms, and based on all dimensions simultaneously. We demonstrate that while linear-terms are sufficient for single emotion dimension models, regression models that consider multiple emotion dimensions yield better results.