| Music can induce people strong emotional experience, and emotion has an important impact on memory. It has been showed that people’s memory for emotional events is better than the events with less emotional information. The study used music pieces with different emotional characteristics as stimulus, to examine the influence of subject’s music memory for emotional information in music pieces.The study belongs to the category of emotional memory. The concept of emotional memory was first proposed by French psychologist Ribot in 1894, then gradually causing the attention of researchers. There is no unified definition of the concept of emotional memory, many researches used different methods and procedures. For example, some studies used two-dimensional model of emotions and research on two aspects of arousal and valence, the results are not consistent. Some studies adopted the immediate or delay recall to examine the characteristics of time on emotional memory. However, in the delay experiment, the time interval also different, many researchers use 24 hour intervals, and others use 48 hours between coding task and memory task, or even one week, two weeks, finally the results also not consistent. Based on the existing controversy, this study carried out one pre-experiment and two formal experiments to investigate the influence of emotion on musical memory, and used new variables in experiments.The purpose of pre-experiment was aimed to obtain the music fragments with different valence and arousal levels, in order to used in the following experiments. At the primary selection music materials, the researcher firstly removed some music fragments that people familiar with it, as well as in rhythm, harmony, tonality and structure very special music, such as jazz, rock, heavy metal music, polyphonic and so on, according to the music of the tension, valence, arousal, complexity and others structure factors have a preliminary rate, and selected the part of movie music from Eerola(2011) and Eschrich(2008) ’s studies and then choose some symphony, a total of 127, which intercepts some parts with the strongest emotional expression as the experimental materials. Then, the evaluation of valence, arousal and familiarity of music segments with 10-29 s from primary selection, which were rated by the music experts. According to the results of cluster analysis, and number of category center distance, from low to high in turn were selected music segments each 10 with positive valence-high arousal(V+A+, clustering category 1), negative valence-high arousal(V-A+, clustering category 2), positive valence-low arousal(V+A-, clustering category 5), negative valence-low arousal(V-A-, clustering category 4), and 20 neutral emotion(N, clustering Category 3) music pieces, a total of 60 pieces of music for the formal experiment.The purpose of the experiment 1 was to investigate the effects of emotional interference stimuli and neutral interference stimuli on the musical memory, and under the different interference stimuli groups, whether participants’ memory has different in memory for musical materials with different emotion types. In addition, through the analysis of the confidence rating, investigate the influence of accuracy of memory and the role of music implicit memory. The experiment adopted 4(Emotional characteristics: V+A+, V-A+, V+A-, V-A-) x 2(Irritation: emotional interference stimuli, neutral interference stimuli) x 2(Gender: male, female) three factors mixed design, the emotional characteristics are within subjects variables, interference stimulus and gender as between subjects factors, recognition correct rate as the index of dependent variable. The experimental process including the encoding task and recall task, using the "Old/New" model. Coding stage mainly studies the emotional experience of listening music segments, recollection phase were compared between the two groups(A, B) of recognition results, explore the influence of two interference stimulus type, and memory advantages on music fragment with different emotional features.The purpose of the experiment 2 was to investigate the different of recognition correct rate between the immediate recall task and delay recall task, and explore different time intervals for subjects’ emotional memory of music pieces. The experiment adopted 4(Emotional characteristics: V+A+, V-A+, V+A-, V-A-) x 2(Time interval: short-term interval—10min, long time interval—48h) x 2(Gender: male, female) three factors mixed design, emotional characteristic is within subjects variable, time interval and gender as between subjects factors, recognition correct rate as the index of dependent variable.Results showed that: 1) The arousal plays an important influence on the music memory of the subjects. 2) If the emotional information used as an interference stimuli, it showed that refrain effect on of music memory. 3) The recognition correct rate of the delayed recall task is significantly different from that of the immediate recall task, and the recognition performance of the immediate recall task group is better than that of the delay recall task. 4) It is necessary to further study whether there existed differences between males and females on music memory when take the emotional information as stimuli. 5) By analyzing the confidence rating, found that the difference between confidence of correct answer and wrong answer is significant, and participants often have a high degree of confidence rating of correct answer, the results showed that the memory of the music materials in the experiment is more accurate. Through the comparison of the two groups recognition correct rate and the degree of confidence rating, can be found that in experiment 1, the correct rate of participants of emotional interference stimulus group is low although, confidence rating is higher, explain that the feeling of ‘feeling of remembering’ of the musical materials is more obvious. The correct rate of neutral interference stimulation group is high, but the confidence rating is lower, indicated that maybe the musical memory of participants contain the implicit part.The shortage of this study lies in: first, because of the limitations of conditions and technology, this study only uses behavioral experiments, through the test of self-report to explore the impact of emotion on music memory. In the future, we can also provide a strong support for the study of music and emotion with the help of physiological measurement and Functional measurement of brain. Second, the quantity of music stimuli used in this study are slightl less, future studies should increase the stimuli and make the more effective assesment.The researches about influences of emotion on musical memory can deepen people’s understanding of emotion and cognition, not only in theory, but also enrich emotional psychology, cognitive psychology research results. In practice field it also have important significance. For example, we can explain the effect of music therapy center, and strengthen the use of music in clinical intervention. Future research needs to pay attention to the following points: experiment is a different experience in daily life, therefore generate emotions are not fully represent the real life emotional experience and future research design should be closer to the daily life situations, to inspect the influence of emotion in music memory more accurately. In addition, more attention should be paid to the influence of emotional memory on music education, music therapy, not only in academic theory, but also in practice to promote the development of related fields. |
