Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories are Associated with Negative Affect in Younger and Older Adults.

BACKGROUND: Music evokes strong and persistent emotional responses. However, the mechanisms underlying the emotional effects of music, particularly in older adults, are largely unknown. One purported mechanism by which music evokes emotions is through memory - that is, music evokes personal, autobiographical memories that then lead to emotional responses. METHOD: Here, we investigated whether memory-evoking music induces stronger and longer-lasting emotional responses than non-memory-evoking music, and whether these emotional responses differ between younger and older adults. Older (N = 30) and younger adults (N =30) listened to two blocks of self-selected music (one block of memory-evoking music and one block of familiar but non-memory-evoking music). Participants reported their emotions prior to and at three timepoints post-listening. RESULTS: Older adults reported higher levels of positive affect than younger adults. For both groups, positive affect increased after listening to both memory-evoking and non-memory-evoking music. However, negative affect only increased after listening to memory-evoking music. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that both memory-evoking and non-memory-evoking music generate strong emotions in younger and older adults, but music that conjures personal memories is more likely to elicit mixed emotions. Our results have important clinical implications when designing music-based interventions for mood and affect, particularly in older adult populations.

Your ears don't change what your eyes like: People can independently report the pleasure of music and images.

Observers can make independent aesthetic judgments of at least two images presented briefly and simultaneously. However, it is unknown whether this is the case for two stimuli of different sensory modalities. Here, we investigated whether individuals can judge auditory and visual stimuli independently, and whether stimulus duration influences such judgments. Participants (N = 120, across two experiments and a replication) saw images of paintings and heard excerpts of music, presented simultaneously for 2 s (Experiment 1) or 5 s (Experiment 2). After the stimuli were presented, participants rated how much pleasure they felt from the stimulus (music, image, or combined pleasure of both, depending on which was cued) on a 9-point scale. Finally, participants completed a baseline rating block where they rated each stimulus in isolation. We used the baseline ratings to predict ratings of audiovisual presentations. Across both experiments, the root mean square errors (RMSEs) obtained from leave-one-out-cross-validation analyses showed that people's ratings of music and images were unbiased by the simultaneously presented other stimulus, and ratings of both were best described as the arithmetic mean of the ratings from the individual presentations at the end of the experiment. This pattern of results replicates previous findings on simultaneously presented images, indicating that participants can ignore the pleasure of an irrelevant stimulus regardless of the sensory modality and duration of stimulus presentation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Differences in autobiographical memories reported using text and voice during everyday life.

Autobiographical memories frequently occur during everyday life. One of the most common approaches to measuring memories in everyday life is a diary method: Participants record memories as they occur by writing down these memories in a paper diary or typing them on a smartphone. Conversely, many laboratory-based studies of autobiographical memory require participants to describe their memories out loud in a spoken manner. Here, we sought to directly compare memories recorded via typing to those spoken out loud in a smartphone diary study. Participants reported or, autobiographical memories that occurred over a period of four days either by typing (n = 43) or recording themselves orally describing memories (n = 39) using a smartphone app. Results indicated that the audio recording group reported memories more frequently and these memories contained a greater number of words, while the text group reported memories more promptly after they occurred. Additionally, the typing group reported memories that were episodically richer and contained a greater proportion of perceptual details. This work has important implications for future autobiographical memory studies in the lab, online, and using diary methods, and suggests that certain reporting modalities may be advantageous depending on the specific research focus.

Investigating the role of involuntary retrieval in music-evoked autobiographical memories.

Music is a particularly salient autobiographical memory cue. Prior work has indicated that autobiographical memories evoked by music are more episodically rich than those evoked by other sensory cues. One explanation for this effect could be that music evokes autobiographical memories in a more involuntary manner than other cues. Here, we investigated the role of involuntary retrieval in music-evoked autobiographical memories. Results indicated that, regardless of intentionality, music-evoked autobiographical memories were more episodically rich and contained more perceptual details than face-evoked memories. That is, even when directly comparing involuntary music-evoked memories to involuntary face-evoked memories, there was still a consistent difference in episodic richness between memories evoked by the two cue types. This suggests that it is not the involuntary nature of music-evoked memories alone that drives this difference, but that the difference in episodic richness between cue types seems at least partially to depend on other stimulus features.