A recent study conducted by University of California Los Angeles psychologists has found that fluctuating emotions elicited by music help form separate and durable memories. Published in Nature Communications, the study used music to manipulate the emotions of volunteers performing simple tasks on a computer. The researchers discovered that the dynamics of people’s emotions molded otherwise neutral experiences into memorable events.
Lead author Mason McClay, a doctoral student in psychology at UCLA, stated, “Changes in emotion evoked by music created boundaries between episodes that made it easier for people to remember what they had seen and when they had seen it. We think this finding has great therapeutic promise for helping people with PTSD and depression.”
The study involved using music composed to elicit different emotions from participants while they imagined a narrative to accompany a series of neutral images on a computer screen. Participants then performed a distracting task before being shown pairs of images again in a random order and asked to recall which image they had seen first and how far apart in time they felt they had seen the two objects. The study concluded that a change in emotion resulting from listening to music was pushing new memories apart.
The researchers also found that the direction of the change in emotion mattered. Memory integration was best when the shift was toward more positive emotions, while a shift toward more negative emotions tended to separate and expand the mental distance between new memories. Participants surveyed the next day also showed better memory for items and moments when their emotions changed, especially if they were experiencing intense positive emotions.
The authors of the study, including corresponding author David Clewett, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA, and collaborator Matthew Sachs at Columbia University, emphasized the utility of music as an intervention technique, particularly for individuals with PTSD. Clewett stated, “We think we can deploy positive emotions, possibly using music, to help people with PTSD put that original memory in a box and reintegrate it, so that negative emotions don’t spill over into everyday life.”