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Music may have the ability to influence cognition through the emotion prompted by evaluated pitch expectations. Listeners form expectations of how musical sequences will sound and these pitch expectations are automatically evaluated as being satisfied or unfulfilled. Music cognition usually applies to strictly musically relevant issues. However, the present study revealed a cross-modal influence on the processing of emotionally related word targets. Five-chord progressions, which were selected from a prestudy survey that asked participants to rate the degree each chord-progression satisfied their expectations, were used as experimental sequences. These chord-progressions primed the appearance of affective word-targets, and the participant's reaction time (RT) in categorizing the targets as negative or positive was measured, along with delayed recall of the targets. Results, which were mostly supportive of previous research, suggested that the emotion prompted from satisfied pitch expectations in response to chord-progressions facilitated the crossmodal processing of emotionally positive words. Additionally, the present study compared the performance of the experimental primes to various control primes across two experiments. The control primes were designed to vary the strength of participants' pitch expectations, and the results supported the proposed influence of pitch expectations on affective priming.

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