Re: Music, emotion, memory of passages and content analysis (LSA)

["Abbs, Brandon,Ph.D." <BABBS@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel,

Latent semantic analysis looks at the co-occurrence of words in large text
databases and determines semantic similarity between whole documents and words
based on these co-occurrences (or context).  Your stimulus set is not going to
be large enough to run LSA on, but there are databases of words that have been
found to be similar based on the analysis of such data sets and you can look up
words there. WordNet, http://wordnet.princeton.edu/, is one such database, but
again it's more of a text-based thesaurus than a validation that "happy" is a
positive emotion.

I think you want to use a standardized database that gives normative ratings for
words (i.e., how people perceive these words) not an analysis based on
co-occurrence.  I think that human ratings would be considered a more valid
validation for your study's words.  One such database is:

Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J. (1999). Affective norms for English
words [CD-ROM]. Gainesville: University of Florida, NIMH Center
for the Study of Emotion and Attention.

If you can't get this database, a paper that utilizes it is here (you should
look at this anyway for other lexical variables that you'll want to control):
http://web.mit.edu/bnl/pdf/Kensinger_Corkin_MC03.pdf and Dr. Kensinger might
share her word list with you.

Others on the music side will have to chime in as to whether any ratings exist
for music, but you'll want to control the same variables there too (music
familiarity, frequency of different musical elements, etc.), although I'm not
sure how often emotional music studies consider these potential confounds
because I'm not as familiar with that area.

Good Luck,
Brandon

--------------------------------
Brandon Abbs, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Harvard Medical School
Brigham and Women's Hospital
1620 Tremont Street, BC-3-34 DWH
Boston, MA 02120
Phone: 617-525-8641
Fax: 617-525-7900
E-Mail: babbs@xxxxxxxxxxxx
--------------------------------
-----Original Message-----
From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception
[mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Daniel Ladwig
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2009 3:33 AM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AUDITORY] Music, emotion, memory of passages and content analysis
(LSA)

Hello, I have an psychology honors research project which as never been done or
published before. None that I can find anyway.

People have always done studies proving that happy and sad music can effect
emotion and memory in different ways. They have the people look at a list of
word lists and try to memorize them. They say, if a person is listening to happy
music, they will recall the happy words more than the sad words. It would just
be the oppsite for people who listen to sad music. 
This study has been done a lot and it pretty straight forward that those
different emotions would influence the memory of words that portray them. The
other thing, is that people have a easier time guessing the words and having
better accuracy. A word list is not very significant because it does not deal
with real life events and has little variation. 

I would like to take the study up a notch. I would still have the people listen
to happy and sad music. Other than using word lists, I would give them a
paragraph passage to read.The passage would contain words that would trigger
certain ideas or feelingss that would be considered happy or sad emotions. 
For example, "Johnny went with his friend Jennifer to the ice cream store.
Chocolate was Johnnys favorite flavor. While Johhny was walking on the sidewalk
licking his ice cream at the same time, he tripped over a rock and the ice cream
fell to the ground. Jennifer agreed to buy Johnny another ice cream because she
cares for him a lot." 
That was just an example, but it would be very harder for students to remember
certain words without being effected by the emotion of words and influence by
the type of music in the background. 
I mainly want to find out if students can recall happy words while listening to
happy music and also students who recall sad words within passages while
listening to sad music. Mainly want to see how accurret they can be and if music
does effect their emotions and memory.

One other thing I want to add, I want to use CONTENT ANALYSIS to analysis what
were the keywords that often showed up in the passage and how close related they
were when it comes to certain emotion cues. 
But the thing is, I don't know much content analysis or (LSA), so if everybody
know a lot about it or knows any good sites where I can find some good
interactive content analysis programs that can analyze passages let me know.

Please let me know what think about the project and share any advice about
content analysis or (LSA). 

Thank you and I hope to hear some suggestions.

~D Ladwig
	



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