Review Reports - Emotional Congruence in Childhood: The Influence of Music and Color on Cognitive Processing

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Congratulations on doing such a great job. The writing of the article has some weaknesses. I have a few suggestions which can be seen in the attached file.

For more information, please see the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank you for the time and effort you have invested in reviewing our manuscript titled "Emotional Congruence in Childhood: The Influence of Music and Color on Cognitive Processing." We are grateful for your constructive feedback, which has helped us significantly improve the quality and clarity of our paper.

We have carefully addressed all the comments provided. For ease of review, all modifications made to the original text have been highlighted in bright yellow within the revised manuscript.

Please find below our point-by-point response to the specific comments.

Abstract and Introduction
Page 1: The abstract of the article is not structured.

Response: Thank you for this helpful comment. We have revised the abstract to improve its structure and clarity. It now explicitly reflects the study's background, objectives, methodological approach (Studies 1 and 2), key results, and main conclusions.
Revision: The abstract now states: "The present research investigates the influence of emotional congruence on selective attention [...] In Study 1, classical music excerpts were used to induce pleasant or unpleasant emotional states [...] In Study 2, this musical induction was combined with emotionally valenced color cues [...] Overall, these findings suggest that perceptual emotional cues [...] exert a stronger influence than transient affective states."

Page 2: The introduction and the method of execution are not well separated.

Response: We have revised the manuscript to clarify the distinction between these sections. The Introduction is now focused exclusively on theoretical background and hypotheses. Methodological justifications and procedural details have been relocated to the Method sections of Studies 1 and 2.
Revision: Clear transitions were added at the end of the Introduction and at the opening of both Studies 1 and 2 to improve organization.

Methodology and Participant Reporting
Page 3: Acronyms are not defined and it is not clear what they represent.

Response: All acronyms referring to the French educational system (e.g., CE1, CM2) have been removed and replaced with standard international terms (e.g., "second-graders," "fifth-graders") to ensure clarity for an international readership.

Page 4: It is better to present the implementation method for all sub-studies one after the other and then explain the findings.

Response: While we have maintained a sequential presentation (Study 1 followed by Study 2) because the results of Study 1 were a prerequisite for Study 2, we have improved the separation between method and findings as requested.

Page 4: Why does the number of children in each grade differ in different reports? For example, in one section, the fourth grade is reported as 15, and in another, it is 16.

Response: We apologize for any confusion. The sample sizes differ slightly because two separate groups were formed to ensure that the joy induction condition did not interfere with the sadness induction condition. For the joy induction, the sample consisted of 16 preschoolers, 16 second-graders, 15 fourth-graders, and 15 fifth-graders. For the sadness induction, the sample consisted of 16 preschoolers, 16 second-graders, 16 fourth-graders, and 16 fifth-graders.

III. Presentation of Findings

Page 4: The results should be presented in tables.

Response: We have followed this recommendation by adding Table 2 in Section 3.5.2. This table provides a detailed summary of the mean performance and standard deviations for each emotional condition, allowing for a clearer comparison of congruence effects.

Page 5: The findings are not fully presented in the table. More details are needed.

Response: Table 1 has been significantly expanded. It now includes full descriptive statistics (Means and Standard Deviations) for both Valence and Arousal at Time 1 and Time 2 for every school level and both induction conditions (Joy and Sadness).

Discussion and References
Page 8: This part is very short and should be improved.

Response: The Discussion has been substantially expanded. We have included deeper interpretations regarding developmental effects, the interaction (or lack thereof) between color and music, and the acquisition of emotional competencies (e.g., Bellinghausen, 2012). We also address the "positivity bias" (Monnier & Syssau, 2017) and the developmental trajectory of selective attention.

Page 9: First part of this paragraph is not a conclusion but a restatement of the findings.

Response: We have rewritten the Conclusion to move beyond a simple restatement. It now emphasizes the broader implications of our work, such as the importance of the temporal availability of emotional inducers and the need for careful methodological control in developmental emotion-cognition research.

Page 10: The references are very old. Use new studies to compare your results.

Response: We have updated the literature review and discussion with recent research (e.g., Zelazo et al., 2024; Macdonald et al., 2014; Habibi & Damasio, 2014) to better situate our findings within the current scientific landscape.

We believe that these extensive revisions have addressed all the concerns raised and have significantly strengthened the manuscript. We look forward to your decision.

Sincerely,

The Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Each section of the paper especially method needs major revisions detailed below.

Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. The study addressed an important and topic in developmental psychology. The dual-induction paradigm and the large developmental age range suggested the potential for a meaningful contribution to the literature on emotion and cognition interactions. However, several conceptual, methodological, and analytic issues limited the strength and interpretability of the findings and warranted major revision. I presented my feedback for each section of the paper.

Introduction

The introduction provided an overview of selective attention, emotional processing and theoretical models relevant to emotion–attention interactions. The authors situated study within both adult and developmental literatures and articulated a clear motivation for examining emotional congruence effects in children. The rationale for using music and color as affective inducers was generally well supported by prior research. The manuscript would have been strengthened by addressing the following issues:

introduction appeared to be an annotated literature review rather than a synthesized theoretical argument.
The emotional congruence model (Bower, 1981) was not integrated into earlier sections of the literature review.
Contradictory findings in the child emotion–attention literature were described but not critically reconciled to justify specific hypotheses.
The distinction between emotional valence, arousal and perceptual salience was blurred conceptually particularly in relation to color.
Hypotheses were numerous yet not clearly mapped onto the two-study design. Developmental hypotheses were asserted but not explicitly grounded in a coherent developmental framework (e.g., executive function or emotion regulation models).
The rationale for expecting symmetry between positive and negative emotional congruence effects in children was not justified.
Prior work by the authors was referenced but not clearly distinguished from independent replications or extensions.

Methods

The methods section was detailed. The two-study design was logically structured with Study 1 serving as a validation step for the emotional induction used in Study 2. Ethical considerations were clearly addressed. The manuscript would have been strengthened by substantial revisions in the following areas:

No a priori power analysis was reported for either study, despite multiple ANOVAs and interaction tests.
Sample sizes across school levels appeared uneven, yet the implications of this imbalance were not addressed.
Recruitment procedures were not described at all.
Socioeconomic status, language background and cognitive ability of participants were not reported.
Exclusion criteria differed across Study 1 and Study 2 (e.g., ADHD only excluded in Study 2) without justification.
Emotional induction was inferred primarily from self-report measures with no behavioral or physiological validation.
The reliance on SAM/EEVAI-E for preschoolers raised concerns about developmental validity despite brief justification.
Floor and ceiling effects in self-reports (acknowledged post hoc) were not addressed proactively in the design.
The temporal gap between musical induction and task performance was not experimentally controlled or systematically manipulated.
No manipulation check was conducted immediately before the attentional task in Study 2 to confirm persistence of the induced emotion.
Color functioned simultaneously as an emotional cue and a perceptual feature of the task, confounding emotional congruence with visual salience.
No neutral color condition was included to disentangle emotional valence from perceptual facilitation.
The cancellation task primarily indexed processing speed and visual scanning, yet was interpreted broadly as selective attention.
Error rates were extremely low, suggesting potential ceiling effects or insufficient task difficulty.
The same task duration was used across all age groups without justification for developmental appropriateness.
Familiarity with cats or prior exposure to similar cancellation tasks was not assessed.
Classroom clustering effects (children nested within schools) were not statistically controlled.
Random assignment to conditions was mentioned but not described in sufficient detail.
It was unclear whether experimenters were blinded to condition assignments.
Multiple ANOVAs were conducted without correction for familywise error.
Effect size interpretation was inconsistent with limited discussion of practical significance.
Study 1 and Study 2 differed in sample characteristics and exclusion criteria limiting the internal coherence of the two-study design.
The justification for reusing the same induction parameters across studies despite marginal effects in preschoolers was insufficient.

Results: The results were reported in a generally clear and systematic manner. Developmental effects on task performance were robust and consistently supported across analyses. Effect sizes were reported for most primary outcomes. The manuscript would have been strengthened by the following improvements:

Results occasionally reiterated methodological details rather than focusing on interpretation of findings.
Non-significant findings, particularly regarding emotional congruence, were reported but not sufficiently contextualized.
Marginal effects (e.g., music × color interactions) were discussed without adequate caution.
The extremely low error rates raised concerns about the sensitivity of the dependent measure.

Discussion

The discussion connected the findings to prior literature on color effects, emotional induction and developmental changes in attention. The authors acknowledged absence of a robust emotional congruence effect and offered plausible interpretations. Developmental trends were discussed in relation to attentional strategies and emotional regulation. The manuscript would have been strengthened by addressing the following issues:

Interpretations occasionally exceeded the strength of the empirical evidence particularly regarding emotional mechanisms.
The conclusion that color exerted a stronger emotional influence than music was not fully disentangled from perceptual explanations.
The discussion did not fully reconcile the findings with the initial theoretical framing based on associative network models.
Practical or educational implications were suggested but not clearly derived from the data

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for your insightful and constructive feedback on our manuscript. Your comments have been instrumental in strengthening the conceptual clarity, methodological rigor, and theoretical depth of our work.

In response to your suggestions, we have thoroughly restructured the introduction, expanded our methodological justifications, and refined our statistical reporting. We provide a detailed point-by-point response to each of your comments below.

For ease of review, all modifications made to the original text have been highlighted in blue.

I. Introduction
Synthesis vs. Annotated Literature Review	We have significantly revised the Introduction to transition from a sequential description of studies to a synthesized theoretical argument. Instead of presenting individual studies in isolation, we have grouped them to highlight the core theoretical tension between emotional interference and facilitation. We removed specific methodological details of previous research to focus on our primary framework of emotional congruence.
Integration of Bower’s (1981) Model	We have now integrated the theoretical foundations of Bower’s (1981) associative network model into the earlier sections of the Introduction. Specifically, the model is used as a theoretical bridge to explain why emotional effects on attention can shift from interference to facilitation.
Reconciliation of Contradictory Findings	We argue that previous discrepancies stem from a lack of consideration for the interaction between internal emotional states and task-related cues. By applying Bower’s framework, we propose that congruence acts as a "cognitive lubricant" that reduces the effort needed to process information.
Distinction of Valence, Arousal, and Salience	We explicitly distinguish between bottom-up perceptual salience and top-down emotional valence. To address the potential confound of salience, we highlight that luminance and contrast were controlled using the Munsell system and that our previous work showed no performance differences between these specific colors in a neutral state.
Hypothesis Grounding and Design Mapping	We restructured the final section of the Introduction to clearly map our hypotheses onto the two-step design. Furthermore, we have grounded our developmental hypotheses in executive function models, specifically Diamond (2013), to reflect the maturation of cognitive control and processing speed.
Symmetry vs. Positivity Bias	While basing our primary hypothesis on the symmetry predicted by Bower (1981), we have added a discussion of the developmental positivity bias. We acknowledge that the facilitation effect might be more pronounced in the joy/yellow condition due to children's early maturation of approach-related affect systems.
II. Methods
Power Analysis		We have performed post hoc power analyses for Study 2 using G*Power 3.1. The analyses confirm that our study achieved a statistical power (1-β) exceeding .99 for the main effects of school level and background color, and .88 for the effect of experimental conditions.
Recruitment and Participants		We have added a dedicated section (Section 2.2) describing the recruitment process and administrative authorizations. We also addressed the absence of individual SES/IQ data by noting that our diverse recruitment ensures a representative sample and that the studied sensory-affective processes are generally robust to socioeconomic variations.
Exclusion Criteria (ADHD)		The decision to apply ADHD exclusion criteria only in Study 2 aligns with DSM-5 guidelines, noting that a reliable diagnosis is challenging to establish in children under six years of age. Excluding diagnosed ADHD in Study 2 was essential for reflecting typical developmental patterns of selective attention.
Self-Report Validation (SAM/EEVAI-E)		We chose self-reports as they directly capture the conscious subjective experience of emotion central to Bower's model. For preschoolers, we clarified our individual administration protocol, which included a guided practice trial to verify comprehension.
Temporal Gap and Induction Persistence		The 45-second task duration is well within the window of stability for mood induction effects (Westermann et al., 1996). Stopping the music before the task was a proactive choice to manage cognitive load and prevent auditory-visual interference.
Neutral Color Condition and Salience		We relied on previous baseline findings showing that yellow and gray backgrounds do not yield different performance levels in a neutral emotional state. The gray condition served as a control for the yellow condition, and vice versa, within the congruence paradigm.
Classroom Clustering and Randomization		Risk of cluster bias was minimized by our within-classroom randomization. Participants were assigned to conditions through a stratified random assignment procedure balancing gender and age.

III. Results
Interpretation in Results Section	We have revised the Results section for both studies to eliminate redundant methodological justifications and preliminary interpretations. We focused on presenting statistical outputs (F-stats, p-values, and effect sizes) and their direct descriptive meaning.
Contextualization of Null Findings	We revised the Results to provide clearer context for non-significant findings, specifying that the lack of interaction between conditions and school level indicates a stable pattern of emotional influence across age groups.
Caution with Marginal Effects	The interaction between music and color is now explicitly described as a "non-significant trend" in the Results section. We explicitly state it must be interpreted with extreme caution as a preliminary observation.
Correction for Multiple Comparisons	We have specified that Bonferroni corrections were applied to all multiple comparisons and post-hoc analyses. We systematically report partial eta-squared () as a measure of effect size.

IV. Discussion
Evidence-Based Interpretation	We have revised the Discussion to ensure all interpretations are strictly grounded in our empirical findings, relying on effect sizes to qualify the strength of our results. We integrated developmental frameworks (e.g., Rueda et al., 2005) to provide a robust theoretical basis.
Color vs. Music Influence	We addressed the distinction between valence and salience, citing our previous validation study. We also discuss how the continuous presence of color during the task explains its relative strength compared to the prior musical induction.
Theoretical Reconciliation	We re-structured the Discussion to better align with Bower’s (1981) model, arguing that observed effects extend the model to children while acknowledging that the network is subject to developmental maturation.
Derivation of Practical Implications	We revised Section 4.2 to ensure practical conclusions are logically derived from data. We frame emotional congruence as a "cognitive lubricant" because the gain in attentional efficiency occurred without a corresponding increase in error rates.

We believe these revisions address all the concerns raised and have resulted in a significantly improved manuscript. We look forward to your further assessment.

Sincerely,

The Authors

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for revising the manuscript. I don`t have any additional comment.

Author Response

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for the thoughtful and constructive feedback provided on our manuscript. We appreciate the time and effort invested in reviewing our work. The comments were extremely helpful in clarifying our theoretical framework and strengthening the methodological and statistical rigor of the study.

Reviewer 2 Report

Please see below for minor revisions.

I thank authors for their careful revision of the manuscript. Revised version reflects substantial improvement in many areas. The developmental framing is stronger, the dual-induction rationale is clearer and discussion now better aligns conclusions with the empirical evidence. Moreover, authors explicitly acknowledged and contextualized several methodological limitations raised in the initial review. Remaining issues are minor and largely related to additional clarification. I recommend the following minor revisions prior to acceptance:

Clarify more explicitly how emotional congruence framework (Bower, 1981) guided hypothesis generation particularly with respect to developmental expectations.
Provide a clearer mapping between the stated hypotheses and the two-study design (Study 1 vs. Study 2).
Specify more precisely the temporal interval between emotional induction and task execution in Study 2.
Clarify whether experimenters were blinded to condition assignments during task administration.
Briefly qualify the interpretation of the cancellation task as a measure of selective attention given its reliance on visual scanning speed and the observed ceiling-level accuracy.
Ensure consistency in statistical reporting, that is make sure to include degrees of freedom and exact p-values where appropriate.
Clarify whether the gray background was intended to be emotionally neutral or sadness-congruent.
Address minor typographical, formatting, and layout issues throughout the manuscript.

Author Response

We have addressed all the concerns raised and have revised the manuscript accordingly. Specifically, we have clarified the role of the emotional congruence framework (Bower, 1981), detailed our procedural timing, and standardized our statistical reporting according to APA 7th edition guidelines. We believe these revisions have significantly improved the quality and clarity of our paper.

Please find below a point-by-point response to the reviewers' comments. All changes in the manuscript have been highlighted in neon blue.

1. Theoretical Framework & Hypothesis Generation

Reviewer Comment: Clarify how the emotional congruence framework (Bower, 1981) guided hypothesis generation, particularly regarding developmental expectations.

Modification: We have expanded the Introduction to explicitly link Bower’s associative network model with developmental maturation. We now argue that emotional congruence acts as an "affective scaffolding" that may reduce the cognitive load for younger children whose inhibitory control is still developing. This addition justifies why we expect congruence to be particularly beneficial in early childhood.

2. Study Design Mapping

Reviewer Comment: Provide a clearer mapping between the stated hypotheses and the two-study design.

Modification: The end of the Introduction has been restructured. We now explicitly present Study 1 as the essential validation of the "emotional nodes" (categorical perception of music and color) and Study 2 as the functional test of the interaction between these nodes and executive functions (selective attention).

3. Procedural Timing (Study 2)

Reviewer Comment: Specify more precisely the temporal interval between emotional induction and task execution.

Modification: In Section 3.5 (Procedure), we added precise timing details. We specify that the self-assessment (EEVAI-E) lasted approximately 20 seconds, followed by a transition of less than 5 seconds before the task began. This ensures that the total interval remained under 25 seconds, maintaining the potency of the induction.

4. Experimenter Blinding

Reviewer Comment: Clarify whether experimenters were blinded to condition assignments.

Modification: We have clarified that while a complete double-blind was impossible due to the visible nature of the colored backgrounds, experimenters were blinded to the specific interaction hypotheses. Furthermore, we have added that the final scoring of the data was conducted by a researcher blinded to the participants' musical induction conditions to eliminate expectancy bias.

5. Task Interpretation (Selective Attention vs. Speed)

Reviewer Comment: Qualify the interpretation of the cancellation task given the reliance on visual scanning speed and ceiling-level accuracy.

Modification: In the Limitations section, we have added a paragraph acknowledging that the very low error rates suggest the task primarily measured processing speed and scanning efficiency rather than complex inhibitory control. We now qualify our results as an effect of emotion on the "mobilization" of attentional resources.

6. Statistical Reporting

Reviewer Comment: Ensure consistency in statistical reporting (degrees of freedom, exact p-values).

Modification: We have conducted a complete review of the Results sections for both Study 1 and Study 2. All statistics now follow APA 7th edition standards:
- Degrees of freedom are correctly reported for all -tests and ANOVAs (e.g., ).
- Exact -values are provided (e.g., ) instead of thresholds, except for .
- Effect sizes () are systematically included for all primary analyses.

7. Status of the Gray Background

Reviewer Comment: Clarify whether the gray background was intended to be emotionally neutral or sadness-congruent.

Modification: We have explicitly stated in the Discussion of Study 1 and the Methods of Study 2 that gray was nota neutral control but a sadness-congruent stimulus. This is supported by the empirical results of Study 1, where children consistently associated gray with negative valence.

8. Formatting and Layout

Reviewer Comment: Address minor typographical, formatting, and layout issues.

Modification: A thorough proofreading was performed to correct typos, ensure consistent italics for statistical symbols (), and fix layout alignment throughout the manuscript.