Emotional besetzte Musik als Werkzeug der Erinnerung: Eine empirische musikpsychologische Studie

Autobiographical memories for songs can either consist of episodic memories with perceptual and emotional features, or of rather factual knowledge about the artist or the song, also known as semantic memories. To date, the roles of personality, as well as social, emotional and motivational (e.g., interest and skill level) factors in developing positive and negative episodic memories for songs remain to be explored. In this study young adults' positive and negative music-evoked autobiographical memories were analyzed in regard to their semantic and episodic contents. Further, the study also examined the influence of participants' social and emotional intelligence, their personality, music preferences and musical expertise on their memories. Finally, participants' educational level, age and gender were controlled for. 135 adults (69 females) between 18 and 34 years participated in the study. Subjects were asked to describe all the positive and negative memories elicited by music. Memory descriptions were analyzed concerning their semantic and episodic contents. Further, psychological tests and questionnaires were applied to assess the aforementioned psychological and socio-economic correlates of memory for music. The results showed a fairly equal amount of episodic and semantic contents in participants' memory narratives. Overall, regardless of their valence, individuals who scored high in neuroticism and preferred rock music produced more episodic memories, while higher emotional intelligence scores were found to be related to more negative, episodic memories and higher social intelligence scores were found to be related to more positive, episodic memories. In this study no relationship between gender and musical expertise on memories for songs emerged. These results suggest that autobiographical music-evoked memories do not exist in a vacuum, but are influenced by psychological and motivational factors.