The Effects of Music-Induced Emotion on Memory

Emotion can play a highly influential role when it comes to enhancing memory. Research has shown that emotional valence and emotional arousal are two key aspects of emotion responsible for facilitating this (APA, 2013). However, various studies have found contradicting results when it comes to which type of valence (positive or negative) and which level of arousal (high or low) have the greatest memory enhancing effects. Similarly, the majority of previous research has specifically investigated this emotion-memory relationship in terms of memory for emotional content. The present study aims to address this gap by separating emotion from the to-be-learned stimuli, instead investigating how one’s emotional state while encoding neutral information, impacts memory for that information later on. After inducing specific emotional states via exposure to affectively-rated music, subjects were exposed to a video reel composed of various neutral clips of random scenes. Memory was then measured based on performance within a subsequently presented “yes”/ “no\u27\u27 recognition task. Characterizing “conditions\u27\u27 based on the four arousal-valence quadrants of Russell’s circumplex model of emotion (1980): high arousal-positive valence, high arousal-negative valence, low arousal-positive valence, low arousal-negative valence, I predicted that, compared to the other groups, the subjects in the high arousal-negative valence condition would perform best on the memory task. Results did not support this hypothesis, yielding no significant differences in memory performance between the four conditions. The limitations of this study design are considered and suggestions are made for future research