Music Exposure and Tangram Help-Hurt Task (THHT)

In order to ensure that participants did not become aware of the hypotheses being tested, the study was described as investigating two different constructs: problem solving skills and the relationship between music and information processing style. The state aggression of the participant after being exposed to one of the songs was measured using the THHT (Appendix A; Saleem, Anderson, & Barlett, 2015), which consists of two parts. Participants first completed 11 tangram puzzles and they were told their performance on these puzzles was being timed. Once they completed the puzzles, participants were told they were then moving on to the second unrelated portion of the study. This portion entailed privately listening to a song on the provided MP3 player with headphones. After participants listened to the song to which they had been randomly assigned, the experimenter told the participants that the experimenter had forgotten to give them one of the forms from the first portion of the study, and asked them to fill it out. This “forgotten” form instructed participants to pick 11 tangram puzzles from a selection of 30 puzzles (10 easy, 10 of medium difficulty, and 10 hard) that they were told another participant would have to attempt to complete in under 10 20 minutes to try to receive a prize. This particular puzzle-selection task is intended to measure aggression through a scoring system that codes easy puzzles as +1, medium puzzles as 0, and hard puzzles as -1 (Saleem, Anderson, & Barlett, 2015). The participant’s score is then calculated by summing the 11 puzzles the participant chose for the other participant to complete, which results in a score ranging from -10 to +10. The lower the score, the more aggressive the participant was being by selecting more hard puzzles for a future participant to work on. Using this measure allowed for the analysis lyricswoow of levels of state aggression in each of the experimental conditions. Saleem, Anderson, and Barlett (2015) demonstrated that the THHT is a well-supported and validated as a measure of aggression.

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