Pleasantness-unpleasantness of environmental sounds and gender difference in evaluation

Abstract

The present experiment examined emotional evaluation of 40 environmental sounds which were presented to 388 college students in a lecture room. Students were required to rate pleasantness-unpleasantness, to identify the sounds, and to rate their confidence about their identifications. Analysis showed that the pleasant sounds were natural and musical sounds and that the unpleasant sounds were sounds of a belch, of a dentist's drill, and of scratching on a blackboard. It is interesting that for pleasant sounds confidence was always high, which suggested that emotional evaluation of the environmental sounds was closely related to the confidence of observers in their identifications of the sounds. Gender differences were noted on the ratings on pleasantness-unpleasantness of environmental sounds, that is, women evaluated the pleasant sounds as more pleasant than men, and men evaluated the unpleasant sounds as not so unpleasant as did women.