Investigating the interaction of pleasantness and arousal and the role of aesthetic emotions on episodic memory using a musical what-where-when paradigm

ABSTRACT

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 aesthetic-emotional experience of music can influence how memories are encoded in everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• music
• emotion
• aesthetic
• episodic memory
• what-where-when

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the participants who took part in the study, and their reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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.