Nawaz, Safiyyah and Omigie, Diana. 2023. Investigating the interaction of pleasantness and arousal and the role of aesthetic emotions on episodic memory using a musical what-where-when paradigm. Cognition and Emotion, 37(2), pp. 320-328. ISSN 0269-9931 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Recent evidence suggests that the presence of music experienced as pleasant positively influences episodic memory (EM) encoding. However, it is unclear whether this impact of pleasant music holds regardless of how arousing the music is, and what influence, if any, music-induced aesthetic emotions have. Furthermore, most music EM studies have used verbal or facial memory tasks limiting the generalisability of these findings to everyday EMs with spatiotemporal richness. The current study used an online what-where-when paradigm to assess music’s influence on EM encoding in a rich spatiotemporal environment. 105 participants carried out the what-where-when task in the presence of either silence or one of four musical stimuli falling into the four corners of the 2-D circumplex emotion model. We observed an interaction effect between the pleasantness and arousingness of music stimuli, whereby for pleasant stimuli, the low arousing excerpt was associated with better recall performance compared to the high arousing excerpt. We also observed that, across all excerpts, experience of negative aesthetic emotions was associated with compromised recall performance. Together, our results confirm the deleterious influence arousing stimuli can have on memory and support the notion that the aesthetic-emotional experience of music can influence how memories are encoded in everyday life.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2023.2185206
Data Access Statement:	Data availability statement: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors, S. Nawaz and D. Omigie, upon reasonable request.
Keywords:	music; emotion; aesthetic; episodic memory; what-where-when
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Psychology
Dates:	Date Event 22 January 2023 Accepted 20 March 2023 Published Online 2023 Published
Item ID:	33194
Date Deposited:	24 Feb 2023 12:17
Last Modified:	25 Apr 2023 13:58
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33194

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