Validation of musical stimuli for emotion evaluation: the Musical Emotion Evaluation Test

Musical stimuli provide a valuable approach to understanding and eliciting emotions. This research aimed to evaluate the validity and reliability of a musical stimuli set, composed to elicit happiness, fear/anger, sadness, and serenity, developing a novel tool for non-verbal emotion assessment. Furthermore, a comparative analysis explored variations in assessing perceived emotions, valence, and arousal dimensions among musicians and non-musicians. A sample of 200 individuals, aged 18 to 43 years (M = 27.27; SD = 5.90), and comprising 100 musicians and 100 non-musicians, evaluated the stimuli by reporting their perceived emotions through a forced-choice identification task, and by rating valence and arousal using the Self-Assessment Manikin. Among the original 116 stimuli designed, 38 musical stimuli were selected based on item response theory and confirmatory factor analysis for developing the Musical Emotion Evaluation Test. Additionally, musicians and non-musicians performed similarly when identifying emotions and perceiving emotional valence and arousal in musical stimuli. The validation of musical stimuli to evaluate emotions contributes to increasing the reliability and validity of the assessment in the research and clinical contexts. This study also provides insights into how musical expertise influences the perception of emotions in music.