Music-evoked emotions affect memory for emotional pictures

Music is widely known for its ability to induce emotions. However, to investigate music-evoked emotions, most studies rely on self-report questionnaires, which are vulnerable to bias. In the present study, we explored mood-congruency effects on memory as an indirect, nonverbal method to examine the experience of musical emotions. Participants listened to 15 music excerpts chosen to induce different emotions; after each excerpt, they were required to look at four different pictures, that could be either congruent with the emotion conveyed by the preceding music excerpt, incongruent, or neutral. After the presentation of the stimuli, participants completed a recognition task, including new pictures, already seen emotionally congruent pictures, and already seen emotionally incongruent pictures. Based on previous findings about mood-congruency effects, we hypothesized that if individuals had felt an emotion, this would facilitate memorization of emotionally congruent pictures. Results supported this prediction, as accuracy in the recognition task was higher for the emotionally congruent pictures than for the emotionally incongruent ones. This effect suggests that music-evoked emotions have an influence on subsequent cognitive processing of emotional stimuli, a result relevant for application in different psychology fields. Moreover, mood-congruency tasks may represent a source of evidence for the presence of music-evoked emotions.