Browsing by Author "Salakka, Ilja"

Objectives Socioemotional health benefits of music have been recognized for a long time. Especially the ability of music to evoke emotions has led researchers to pay attention to relationships between emotions and specific properties of music. Emotional intensity is also known to be linked to more efficient consolidation and recall of autobiographical memories. Music and autobiographical memories are known to be largely processed by the same neural system, especially in the medial prefrontal cortex. However, the relationship between musical properties and music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAM) has not been studied before. The first research question of this study was that can some acoustic (musical) features explain the autobiographical salience of the song. The second research question was to determine if that relationship is mediated by subjective emotions evoked by the song, especially the intensity of evoked emotions. Methods Participants (n =113, 86 females) were healthy older adults aged between 60 and 86 years (M = 70.72, SD = 5.39). Participants listened 70 song excerpts during the experiment and rated them on valence, arousal, emotional intensity, familiarity, and autobiographical memories evoked by the song. The musical features of the songs were extracted using music information retrieval (MIR) software, followed by principal component analysis. The relationship between musical features and listeners' ratings was assessed using regression analyses. Main results and conclusions Lower pulse strength, brightenss, and fluctuation in low-middle frequencies were the best predictors of higher autobiographical salience, familiarity and emotional responses evoked by the songs. The intensity of emotions and, to lesser extent, pleasantness had a mediative effect on the relationship between musical features and autobiographical salience. These results add to the still scarce knowledge about MEAMs in the context of specific musical features.