Music’s entanglement with memory and emotion
Imagine you’re driving in your car at night and that one song comes on that reminds you of your high school days or those beach trips or that one friend. This powerful, reminiscent experience is the widely known phenomenon of nostalgia. Nostalgia reveals a unique ability of music to tap into our passions, emotions, feelings, and memory. Almost everyone has experienced those strong emotions that music can induce as well as the powerful memories that music draws up, but how are we to judge this function of music? And what is the power of this special faculty of music? In order to answer these questions, let’s take a look at two phenomena that encapsulate music’s special powers: nostalgia and music-evoked autobiographical memories.
The range of opinions on nostalgia is as diverse as the people that experience it. Many used to believe nostalgia to be a sort of illness or weakness to the point that nostalgic music was even banned during the Civil War to avoid discouraging the soldiers. Certainly as with many emotions, there is an opportunity for nostalgia to overwhelm us into a negative affective state or to be exploited by others (e.g. in advertising). More recently, however, many studies have found that music-evoked nostalgia can actually be beneficial to our emotional and cognitive health. Additionally, nostalgia provides a window into the unique relationship between music and memory, a connection which may have possible benefits for patients with dementia.
In neurotypical adults, music-evoked nostalgia has been shown to have a wide array of benefits. According to a recent review article from Psychology of Music, the good effects of nostalgia fall into three main categories: the social domain, the self-oriented domain, and the existential domain. In the self oriented domain, various studies observed that nostalgia induced greater self-esteem, a sense of youthfulness, and increased optimism and inspiration. In the existential and social domains, nostalgia has the ability to increase feelings of social connectedness, cause a greater understanding of meaning in life, and stir up a sense of self-continuity. These direct benefits of nostalgia can also have positive side effects. Nostalgic music is often sought by those in a negative mood as a sort of emotional regulation, allowing them to take advantage of the benefits such that their mood or emotional state may be improved. The results of this article indicate that music that invokes nostalgia is at the very least potentially beneficial to those who listen to it.
One study from the U.K. observed nostalgia during the pandemic, which generally caused negative moods and feelings of loneliness and isolation. In order to study the prevalence and effect of music-evoked nostalgia during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gibbs & Egermann developed a survey to evaluate how much people listened to nostalgic music, what their motivation was, and how the music affected their mood and emotional regulation. They found that people who were using nostalgia as a way to deal with the challenge of the pandemic had a mild correlation with higher well being. They did not find the same correlation for those who were using nostalgic music as a way to avoid their problems or as a way to develop themselves and their sense of self. Though the correlation may indicate that those who would use nostalgic music to confront their problems had a higher level of well being to begin with, this result may also indicate that the mindset with which nostalgia is approached determines the effects. Moreover, some evidence suggests that nostalgia may exacerbate negative thinking in those with clinical depression, which would support the theory that the attitude used to approach nostalgia may determine the outcome. Overall, this study did not dispute the results of Sedikides et al.’s review on the benefits on music-evoked nostalgia and built upon it the importance of approach.
In addition to psychoemotional benefits, music-evoked nostalgia or even music alone can bring to mind autobiographical memories. Music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) have unique characteristics among memories; they are generally associated with positive emotions (including nostalgia), are recalled quickly and with minimal effort, are generally social in character, and are stimulated more often by familiar music than unfamiliar music (Kaiser and Berntsen, 2022). Another unique aspect of MEAMs is that they are generally preserved in patients with dementia. Although not at the level of neurotypical individuals, MEAMs have been shown to improve the recall of autobiographical memories, including semantic autobiographical memories, and have a relative advantage over picture-evoked autobiographical memories. MEAMs demonstrate the ability of music to override cognitive deficits and provide valuable benefits for people with dementia. Moreover, MEAMs exemplify the uniqueness of the connection between music and memory, with emotion playing a factor as well.
These two phenomena, MEAMs and nostalgia, exhibit two intertwined perspectives on the special relationship between music, emotion, and memory. On the one hand, MEAMs reveal how music and emotion can stir up memories, and how music is particular in its ability to cause automatic retrieval of generally positive, social memories. On the other hand, nostalgia is an example of how familiar music can stir up strong emotion. Nostalgia additionally revealed that music does not have complete control over emotions, but the music in addition to the state of the individual can causes memories and emotions that can be beneficial.
Clearly some quality of music allows it to uniquely tap into the brain’s control of emotion and memory. In his Mini-review article in the Journal of Biology, Dr. Lutz Jäncke attributes this special connection to music’s ability to cause emotion and arousal, which then in turn affects memory. He proposes that “ this memory-enhancing effect of emotions and arousal can be explained as a strengthening of the associations between the memories due to strong emotions.” Although this explanation seems to account for much of the phenomena, it leaves out the memory’s effects on emotion as seen in the findings that familiar music is more effective in inducing MEAMs (Kaiser and Berntsen, 2022) and that there is an association between familiar music and intensity of nostalgia (Sedikides et al., 2021).
Kaiser and Berntsen present a different model for the connection between memory, music, and emotion as seen in their MEAM model diagram above. Their model proposes of variety of factors that influence the evoked memories caused by music. Moving beyond emotionally strengthened associations, Kaiser and Berntsen take into account the effect of reducing anxiety, the change in emotions caused by music, as well what they term “reminiscence,” which describes the experience of music associated with one’s identity. This model builds on Jäncke’s by taking into account not only associations between emotion and memory, but also properties of the music itself and the other ways music can affect the mind and body. Though this model does not give and exhaustive explanation of the mechanism, it demonstrates how music mediates a special linkage of emotion and memory, such that music taps into both emotion and memory which then mutually affect each other.
Despite the lack of a complete explanation of this phenomena, the lived experience of music’s entanglement with memory and emotion is influential and seemingly positive. The evidence suggests the nostalgia and MEAMs both have benefits to those undergoing the experience. Furthermore, the model proposed by Kaiser and Berntsen seems to suggest that these benefits may go further than previously known due to the variety of factors that music influences. Therefore, until findings suggests otherwise, we can surmise that this relationship carries great influence and potentially great benefits.
References
Gibbs, H., & Egermann, H. (2021). Music-evoked nostalgia and wellbeing during the United Kingdom COVID-19 pandemic: Content, subjective effects, and function. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.647891
Jäncke, L. (2008, August 8). Music, memory and Emotion . BioMed Central. Retrieved March 10, 2023, from https://jbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/jbiol82
Kaiser, A. P., & Berntsen, D. (2022). The cognitive characteristics of music‐evoked autobiographical memories: Evidence from a systematic review of clinical investigations. WIREs Cognitive Science, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1627
Sedikides, C., Leunissen, J., & Wildschut, T. (2021). The psychological benefits of music-evoked nostalgia. Psychology of Music, 50(6), 2044–2062. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356211064641
