Thesis title: Percezione e affetto come sistema integrato: organizzazione della configurazione affettiva attraverso musica, colore e realtà virtuale.
Musical structure modulates listeners' emotional responses in systematic ways, and color shows comparably systematic associations with affective dimensions; the correspondences between the two domains have been attributed to emotion as a common channel. Experimental designs, however, almost always run in one direction: color is chosen or judged, rarely administered in order to measure the affect it produces.
This thesis brings together three studies within a single measurement space, the Pleasure–Arousal–Dominance (PAD) dimensional model, under progressively tighter stimulus control. In Studies 1 and 2, eighty listeners responded to musical excerpts with a freely produced emotion word and a color selection; the words were projected onto the three dimensions using a normative lexicon. The excerpts were either tonal, manipulated for mode and tempo (Study 1), or drawn from John Cage's Living Room Music and lacking stable tonal organization (Study 2). Study 3 reverses the direction: thirty-six participants viewed fifteen Munsell hues administered in immersive virtual reality at constant saturation and value, with affective ratings, pupil diameter and electrodermal activity recorded concurrently.
Affective organization neither appears nor disappears with structure: it changes shape. Under tonal music the affective configuration is balanced across the three dimensions; when tonal organization is withdrawn it polarizes, with higher arousal and lower pleasure. Chromatic properties do not track affect as a block: saturation and lightness are selectively associated with the affective dimensions, whereas hue remains globally dispersed and converges only locally, around individual emotion words, more markedly when the music is less predictable. In Study 3 the administered hues modulate all three affective dimensions; the pupillary response is governed principally by luminance, with a hue contribution detectable at constant saturation and value, while electrodermal activity shows no effect at the timescale employed.
The result running through all three studies is that the structure of the stimulus does not determine whether affective organization is present, but how it is distributed. PAD is used here as a common measurement space across the three paradigms rather than as a demonstrated mechanism; within that space, color appears in two roles, as an expression of affect, and as a stimulus that modulates it.