The dynamics of emotions influenced by music transform neutral experiences into memorable events.
- Dynamic emotional states shape the episodic structure of memory.
- In the study, the emotional changes caused by the music made it easier for participants to remember what they saw and when they saw it.
- According to the authors, this discovery holds therapeutic promise for helping people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Human beings’ emotions fluctuate over time. However, it is not clear how these changing emotional states influence the organization of episodic memory, which allows us to locate ourselves in time and space and to project ourselves into the future. So, scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles (United States) decided to examine how the dynamics of emotions help us form distinct and lasting memories. To do this, they carried out a study, the results of which were published in the journal Nature Communications.
Manipulate participants’ emotions with music
As part of the work, the researchers used musical pieces to manipulate the volunteers’ emotions. In detail, the team hired composers to create music specifically designed to evoke happy, anxious, sad or calm feelings. Participants listened to it while imagining a narrative to accompany a series of neutral images on a computer screen, such as a slice of watermelon, a wallet, or a soccer ball. They also used a computer mouse to track moment-to-moment changes in their feelings using a new tool developed to track emotional responses to music. Then, after completing a distracting task, the volunteers were again asked to see pairs of images in random order. For each pair, they were asked which image they saw first, then how far apart in time they felt they saw the two objects.
Emotions: “intense moments may be remembered as having lasted longer”
According to the results, episodic memory was organized around emotional states. The authors found that pairs of objects seen immediately by adults before and after a change in emotional state, whether of high intensity, had intervals further apart in time than images not covering a change. emotional. Another observation: the volunteers also had a poorer memory for the order of the elements seen during emotional changes compared to the elements they had viewed while they were in a more stable emotional state. These effects suggest that a change in emotion resulting from listening to music precluded new memories.
“This tells us that intense moments of emotional change and suspense, like the musical phrases from Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ might be remembered as having lasted longer. Musicians and composers who combine emotional events to tell a story perhaps imbue our memories with a rich temporal structure and a longer notion of time”, said Mason McClay, author of the work, in a statement.
Post-traumatic stress: music can help patients feel positive emotions
The volunteers were interviewed the next day to assess their long-term memory. They better remembered items and times when their emotions changed, especially if they were experiencing intense positive emotions. This suggests that feeling more positive and energetic can merge different elements of an experience in memory. “We believe we can deploy positive emotions, possibly using music, to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder put an original memory in a box and reintegrate it, so that negative emotions don’t reverberate not in daily life”, concluded David Clewett, co-author of the study.
