Emotional Music and Memory Modulation

Project Overview

This research explores the fascinating question of whether music can alter not just our current emotional state, but also our memory of past events. While extensive research has demonstrated music's ability to evoke emotions and trigger autobiographical memories, our study investigates the reverse relationship: can emotionally charged music reshape how we remember neutral experiences?

Building on reconsolidation theory—which suggests memories become malleable during retrieval—we hypothesized that emotional music played during memory recall might introduce new emotional elements into those memories, effectively "coloring" neutral memories with the emotional tone of the music.

Background & Motivation

This project emerged from a serendipitous interdisciplinary collaboration. During an MRI physics class, I met Sophia Mehdizadeh, a music engineering student with interests in neuroimaging. Coming from complementary backgrounds—my neuroscience expertise paired with her music knowledge—we recognized an opportunity to investigate questions at the intersection of memory, emotion, and music.

The foundation of this research lies in a critical observation about conditions like PTSD and depression: these disorders involve not just present emotional states, but also how past experiences are remembered and reconstructed. While we cannot change past events, what if we could influence how these memories are emotionally processed and stored?

Music, with its powerful ability to elicit emotions and connect with memory systems, seemed like the perfect experimental tool. After several iterations of experimental design and pilot studies, we received grant support from the Center for Advanced Brain Imaging at Georgia Tech/GSU to conduct a comprehensive fMRI investigation.

Implications

This research has important implications for multiple domains:

Therapeutic Applications: Our findings suggest potential for using music to modulate the emotional content of problematic memories in conditions like PTSD and depression

Memory Reconstruction: The study provides evidence that memories aren't static recordings but rather reconstructions that can be influenced by contextual factors like music

Media Psychology: The findings help explain why music is so effective in film and other media at shaping the emotional interpretation of scenes

Publications

Ren, Y., Kaltsouni Mehdizadeh, S., Leslie, G., & Brown, T. (2023). Affective Music During Episodic Memory Recollection Modulates Subsequent False Emotional Memory Traces: An fMRI Study. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. <Link to Read>

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a seed grant from the Georgia State University/Georgia Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Brain Imaging. We thank all participants and staff who made this research possible.

This project represents a true interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscience and music cognition, demonstrating how cross-field partnerships can generate novel research questions and methodologies.