Subject: Re: Music, emotion, memory of passages and content analysis (LSA) From: "Abbs, Brandon,Ph.D." <BABBS@xxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:30:07 -0500 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>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@xxxxxxxx -------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Daniel Ladwig Sent: Friday, February 27, 2009 3:33 AM To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxx 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 The information in this e-mail is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. If you believe this e-mail was sent to you in error and the e-mail contains patient information, please contact the Partners Compliance HelpLine at http://www.partners.org/complianceline . If the e-mail was sent to you in error but does not contain patient information, please contact the sender and properly dispose of the e-mail.