Do lyrics of a song influence perceived emotions?

A great deal of scientific research has proven music and emotions to be inseparable. However, few studies have looked into the aspects of music that causes these emotions. In this study it has been hypothesized that the lyrics of a song can change the degree to which an emotion matches a song. A within group experiment was set up to examine this hypotheses. The participants to this study were all students from Tilburg University. All of whom were aged between 18 and 30. First, students were asked to indicate on a 7 point Likert scale to what extent three different melodies of a song matched two different emotions. These emotions were opposing emotions, based on the Thayer model. The songs were in Dutch, and were expected to be fairly unknown to the general public. Next, the lyrics were added to the same songs and the students were once again asked to indicate to what extent the songs matched the same two emotions.  The results showed that 3 out of 6 emotions significantly differed in their applicability to a song, when lyrics were added to the melody. In other words, when a lyric was added to some melodies, emotions would match a song better or worse. These results indicate that there is no certainty on the influence of lyrics to the applicability of an emotion to a song. A limitation to this study is that one of the songs turned out to be quite well-known among the participants. Therefore, it can be assumed that the participants knew the lyrics to this song. As a result, they might have been incapable to match the two emotions to the melody alone. This could explain why average results of the emotion matching hardly differed for this song.