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Music that evokes an emotional response may influence the specificity of memory recall, new research suggests.

Investigators found that participants who were shown a series of images of everyday items before listening to music were more likely to remember only general details of the photos if they experienced a more emotional response to the music, while those who had a moderate emotional response were more likely to recall specific details.

“Most people think that emotional things are better remembered, but they actually aren’t. It’s just parts of the memory that are affected, not the whole memory,” co-investigator Stephanie L. Leal, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology & Physiology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), told Medscape Medical News. “One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to music and memory.”

Interestingly, familiarity with a song was not associated with either general or detailed memory.

“We played the same songs for everybody, but importantly, everyone responded differently. So I think personalization and taking individual preferences into account is going to be important for interventions,” said Leal, who is also director of the Neuroscience of Memory, Mood, and Aging Laboratory at UCLA.

The findings were published online on July 23 in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Memory Complexities

As previously reported by Medscape Medical News, previous research has shown that both music appreciation and participations are tied to improvement in executive function and memory.

For this study, researchers wanted to dive into the complexities of memory, including the possible connection between music and differing aspects of memory.

“We tend to remember more of the gist of something emotional that happened and not as much of the details. So we wanted to see if music could boost certain parts of memory but not all of the parts,” she said.

Many previous music studies have included older individuals, especially those with dementia. For this project, investigators chose instead to assess a younger population because they wanted to use their data as a “baseline” before moving on to further research in groups that are older and/or have impaired conditions such as depression or Alzheimer’s disease, Leal said.

“We wanted to see what happens in healthy people first and then apply it to other populations,” she said.

The study included 130 healthy undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 35 years from Rice University, Houston.

During the initial phase of memory formation — called the “encoding” phase — each participant was shown 128 images of common household objects and asked to choose whether the object should be considered as an indoor or outdoor item.

Participants then donned headphones and listened to 10 minutes of classical music pieces, ambient soundscapes, or silence while they filled out questionnaires about their medical history.

After the music ended, participants spent about 20 minutes filling out additional questionnaires, including a rating of the music or sounds they heard on the basis of emotional arousal, positive or negative reaction, or familiarity.

They then viewed a set of 192 images that included some they hadn’t seen before (foils) and others that were identical (targets) or similar (lures) to the photos viewed earlier. Participants were asked to classify an image as old or new, allowing the researchers to measure target recognition — a measure of general memory — or lure discrimination — a measure of detailed memory.

Big-Picture Recall

General recall of the images was greater among those who experienced either low or high emotional response to music than among those who experienced moderate changes in emotional arousal (P for both < .001).

More detailed memories were reported by those who reported only a moderate emotional response to music than those who reported a low or high emotional response (P for both < .001).

There were no significant associations between memory of the images and song familiarity or whether a song was happy or sad.

“Overall, music modulated both general and detailed memory, but individual differences in emotional response were crucial — participants listened to the same music yet responded differently,” the investigators wrote.

“These findings suggest that music interventions may not uniformly enhance memory, emphasizing the need for personalized approaches in treating memory and mood impairments,” they added.

The research suggests that a high emotional response may cloud details more than a moderate response.

“Yes, the idea is that if something is very emotionally arousing, maybe we don’t want to remember the details associated with it. Maybe we just want to remember that general feeling or the bigger impact of that event, whether it’s positive or negative,” Leal said. “Maybe we just want to take the ‘big picture’ from that.”

Early Days

Commenting on the findings for Medscape Medical News, Daniel L. Bowling, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford School of Medicine, Palo Alto, California, noted that the study “follows the general trend” of research that breaks down large concepts, such as memory, into specific features.

Bowling, who is also director of the Music and Brain Health Lab at Stanford, was not involved with the current study.

“This showed different levels of responses to music that were differentially related to varying types of memory that you might want to target,” Bowling said.

For example, if a clinician’s purpose is cognitive training, with more of an emphasis on details, “you might want more moderate levels of [emotional] arousal. But if you want more big-picture stuff, which could be critical when asking people about their life, then higher levels of arousal may be better,” he added.

He noted that because the researchers used almost a “pretreatment,” with music used before the recall task, it would be interesting to know if using such a pretreatment before taking a test could possibly improve performance.

There are interventions, some of which Bowling is involved with, that are looking at supporting arousal and attention during studying. 

A controlled study comparing these things and looking systematically into effects on different types of memory would be helpful, “but we’re really at the beginning of figuring all of this stuff out,” he said.

Although the current study has some limitations and needs to be replicated, “any kind of talk toward systematic effects of different musical parameters or emotional modeling starts to help us bring this into the scientific-medical realm. And that’s a real strength here,” Bowling concluded.

The investigators reported having no relevant financial relationships. Bowling reported consulting for and owning stock in Spiritune, an app that develops playlists for different purposes, including improved workflow.