Grimaud and Eerola (2022) compared instrument ensembles of strings, woodwinds, and brass in a study where participants either rated the emotions they perceived or manipulated musical parameters to produce a certain emotion. They found that strings were associated with increased anger and fear, woodwinds with decreased anger and fear, and brass with decreased fear, in the cases of both emotion perception and production. For the other emotions (joy, sadness, calmness, power, surprise), however, results were less consistent between perception and production, indicating that the emotion-instrument association may also depend on context of the task.
makes an explicit connection between a music theory concept and congition