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Hello to all to whom certain,
I'm a undergraduate psychology student who is applying to do a honor project thesis in the next coming year.
I'm interested in music, emotion, and memory. If different music types of emotions (happy and sad) effect peoples memory on recalling certain ideas and words in passages.
My problem is that I'm having trouble finding the correct method to measure this information. None of my professors really know either. I've tried to study (LSA) Latent Semantic Analysis for a while but it's way too to confusing for me to understand.
I am wondering if their are any other methods that would be useful for this study and easier to understand? If anyone has any good advice and methods ideas please let me know! My time is short right now, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your time and there is more information about my study at the bottom.
Thank you again,
~Dan Ladwig
People have always done studies proving that happy and sad
music can effect emotion and memory. They have the people look at a list of
word lists and memorize them. We 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 opposite
for people who listen to sad music.
This study has been done a number of times. The evidence shows different
emotions effect the memory of the music they portray. People also have an
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 contains very 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, they would be given
different paragraph passage s to read.
The passages would contain words that would trigger certain ideas or feelings
that are usually be considered happy or sad emotions.
For example, "Johnny went with his friend Jennifer to the ice cream store. Chocolate was Johnny’s favorite flavor. While Johnny was walking on the sidewalk
licking his ice cream, 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 much harder for students to remember
certain words without being effected by the emotion that the words portray and
influenced 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 students who recall sad words within passages while listening
to sad music. Mainly want to see how accurate
they can be and if music really does effect peoples emotions and memory while
listening to music.
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