Music evokes vivid autobiographical memories

Belfi, Amy M.; Karlan, Brett; Tranel, Daniel

doi:10.1080/09658211.2015.1061012

Cited by 123 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 57 publications

(72 reference statements)

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“…The older participants judged their personal memories to be as specific as the younger participants, but it should be noted that there are general shifts from episodic to semantic details in autobiographical memories with aging (Levine et al, 2002). Overall, these results are consistent with the frequency, durability, strength and rich content of autobiographical memories associated with music (e.g., Gabrielsson, 2001, 2011; Janata et al, 2007; Belfi et al, 2015). …”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Listening Niches across a Century of Popular Music

Krumhansl

2017

Front. Psychol.

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This article investigates the contexts, or “listening niches”, in which people hear popular music. The study spanned a century of popular music, divided into 10 decades, with participants born between 1940 and 1999. It asks about whether they know and like the music in each decade, and their emotional reactions. It also asks whether the music is associated with personal memories and, if so, with whom they were listening, or whether they were listening alone. Finally, it asks what styles of music they were listening to, and the music media they were listening with, in different periods of their lives. The results show a regular progression through the life span of listening with different individuals (from parents to children) and with different media (from records to streaming services). A number of effects found in previous studies were replicated, but the study also showed differences across the birth cohorts. Overall, there was a song specific age effect with preferences for music of late adolescence and early adulthood; however, this effect was stronger for the older participants. In general, music of the 1940s, 1960s, and 1980s was preferred, particularly among younger participants. Music of these decades also produced the strongest emotional responses, and the most frequent and specific personal memories. When growing up, the participants tended to listen to the older music on the older media, but rapidly shifted to the new music technologies in their late teens and early 20s. Younger listeners are currently listening less to music alone than older listeners, suggesting an important role of socially sharing music, but they also report feeling sadder when listening to music. Finally, the oldest listeners had the broadest taste, liking music that they had been exposed to during their lifetimes in different listening niches.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Listening Niches across a Century of Popular Music

Krumhansl

2017

Front. Psychol.

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“…Further inconsistencies were noted, depending on the overall aims of the studies in question. For example, one study focused exclusively on the external event subcategory, whereas eight studies reported only the semantic Healthy adults (8) Aizpurua and Koutstaal (2010), Ally et al (2013), Barnier et al (2014), Belfi, Karlan, and Tranel (2016), Campbell, Nadel, Duke, andRyan (2011), Palombo, Alain, Soderlund, Khuu, and, Rudoy, Weintraub, and Paller (2009), and Sheldon and Chu (2017) Healthy ageing (4) Aizpurua and Koutstaal (2015), Ford, Rubin, and Giovanello (2014) (2008) Other (parietal lesions) (1) Berryhill, Phuong, Picasso, Cabeza, and Olson (2007) Paediatric (2) (2015), Nadel, Campbell, and Ryan (2007), and Rabin and Rosenbaum (2012) Healthy ageing (1) Baron and Bluck (2009) Medial temporal lobe lesions/epilepsy (1) Hornberger et al (2010) Neurodegeneration (5) subcategory. Within the latter eight studies, further variability was evident in that some studies focused only on semantic details and did not report total external details, whereas others adopted a modified scoring system wherein all details were classified as either episodic or semantic.…”

Section: Part 1 -Review Of Existing Abm Studies Using the Ai Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

External details revisited – A new taxonomy for coding ‘non‐episodic’ content during autobiographical memory retrieval

Strikwerda‐Brown

Mothakunnel

Hodges

et al. 2018

Journal of Neuropsychology

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Autobiographical memory (ABM) is typically held to comprise episodic and semantic elements, with the vast majority of studies to date focusing on profiles of episodic details in health and disease. In this context, 'non-episodic' elements are often considered to reflect semantic processing or are discounted from analyses entirely. Mounting evidence suggests that rather than reflecting one unitary entity, semantic autobiographical information may contain discrete subcomponents, which vary in their relative degree of semantic or episodic content. This study aimed to (1) review the existing literature to formally characterize the variability in analysis of 'non-episodic' content (i.e., external details) on the Autobiographical Interview and (2) use these findings to create a theoretically grounded framework for coding external details. Our review exposed discrepancies in the reporting and interpretation of external details across studies, reinforcing the need for a new, consistent approach. We validated our new external details scoring protocol (the 'NExt' taxonomy) in patients with Alzheimer's disease (n = 18) and semantic dementia (n = 13), and 20 healthy older Control participants and compared profiles of the NExt subcategories across groups and time periods. Our results revealed increased sensitivity of the NExt taxonomy in discriminating between ABM profiles of patient groups, when compared to traditionally used internal and external detail metrics. Further, remote and recent autobiographical memories displayed distinct compositions of the NExt detail types. This study is the first to provide a fine-grained and comprehensive taxonomy to parse external details into intuitive subcategories and to validate this protocol in neurodegenerative disorders.

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“…In this area of research, a few studies have looked at the influence of the emotional characteristics of a cue on autobiographical memory in clinical samples (e.g., depression) and these studies are often limited to comparing the ability to access autobiographical memories in response to positive and negative cues (Dalgleish et al, 2007;Williams & Broadbent, 1986), making these investigations not well suited to examine the effect of emotional arousal. An effective method to systematically examine the effect of a cue's emotional valence and arousal on remembering is to use musical stimuli (Belfi, Karlan, & Tranel, 2016;Janata, 2009;Janata, Tomic, & Rakowski, 2007). Using musical cues, Schulkind and Woldorf (2005) examined the differential impacts of the valence and arousal levels of retrieval cues on the emotional content of recalled autobiographical memories.…”

Section: Emotional Retrieval Factors and Autobiographical Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, we assessed the relationship between cue and memory valence and arousal by collecting measures of event valence and arousal and relating this to the valence and arousal of the memory cue (Schulkind & Woldorf, 2005). Finally, we examined the quality of the memories by collecting ratings of memory content and experience that are known to vary with music-induced remembering (Belfi et al, 2016;Krumhansl & Zupnick, 2013). With respect to this final issue, we were specifically interested in examining how the emotional characteristics of the cue (valence, arousal) related to the experience of remembering, particularly how memory vividness related to aspects of the remembered event (i.e., the content of the memory) following on findings from Ford et al (2012) that indicates emotion enhances the richness (vividness) of remembering (see also Ochsner, 2000).…”

Section: Overview Of the Current Study And Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

More than a feeling: Emotional cues impact the access and experience of autobiographical memories

Sheldon

Donahue

2017

Mem Cogn

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Remembering is impacted by several factors of retrieval, including the emotional content of a memory cue. Here we tested how musical retrieval cues that differed on two dimensions of emotion-valence (positive and negative) and arousal (high and low)-impacted the following aspects of autobiographical memory recall: the response time to access a past personal event, the experience of remembering (ratings of memory vividness), the emotional content of a cued memory (ratings of event arousal and valence), and the type of event recalled (ratings of event energy, socialness, and uniqueness). We further explored how cue presentation affected autobiographical memory retrieval by administering cues of similar arousal and valence levels in a blocked fashion to one half of the tested participants, and randomly to the other half. We report three main findings. First, memories were accessed most quickly in response to musical cues that were highly arousing and positive in emotion. Second, we observed a relation between a cue and the elicited memory's emotional valence but not arousal; however, both the cue valence and arousal related to the nature of the recalled event. Specifically, high cue arousal led to lower memory vividness and uniqueness ratings, but cues with both high arousal and positive valence were associated with memories rated as more social and energetic. Finally, cue presentation impacted both how quickly and specifically memories were accessed and how cue valence affected the memory vividness ratings. The implications of these findings for views of how emotion directs the access to memories and the experience of remembering are discussed.

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Music evokes vivid autobiographical memories

Cited by 123 publications

References 57 publications

Listening Niches across a Century of Popular Music

Listening Niches across a Century of Popular Music

External details revisited – A new taxonomy for coding ‘non‐episodic’ content during autobiographical memory retrieval

More than a feeling: Emotional cues impact the access and experience of autobiographical memories

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