Browsing by Author "O’Shea, Mia"

Objectives. This study sought to investigate factors related to the elicitation of music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) in healthy aging to improve overall understanding of the phenomenon and to enhance the selection of optimal musical stimuli to be used for the neurological rehabilitation and care of elderly individuals. The characteristic contents of MEAMs of healthy older individuals were also explored. Methods. 113 healthy senior subjects (aged 60 – 86 years) listened to 70 preselected song excerpts and rated each on a 5-point Likert scale in five domains: valence, emotional intensity, arousal, familiarity and autobiographical salience. Correlational and linear mixed model analyses were conducted to discover the relationship between the rated variables. Eighty-one participants additionally chose to verbally describe their MEAMs in further detail. These submitted inserts (n = 2790) were manually categorized and labelled into non-mutually exclusive groups and sub-groups. Results and conclusions. The analyses revealed that all rating variables had statistically significant positive relationships with one another. Valence, emotional intensity, arousal and familiarity all had significant positive effects on the dependent variable autobiographical salience. Thus, in order to maximally evoke MEAMs in healthy elderly individuals, the chosen musical stimuli should be regarded by the listener as being pleasant, emotionally intense, physiologically arousing and familiar. The contents of elderly individuals’ MEAMs often involved music-related activity, such as singing, dancing or listening to music. They also frequently contained details of specific people or locations. Lastly, they often weren’t very temporally specific and memories from adolescence were more common than other life periods.