A Study About Lyrics of Emotions, MEF University

This report was written by me and two of my classmates (Zeynep Aydın & Hilal Dursuner) for Experimental Psychology class during my psychology degree. Please note that this study is not published in a scientific bulletin.

Music has an important impact in our lives and it is a way of expression. Since individuals have exposed to the music in all kinds, in every points of their lives so it creates some effects on individuals as well. This article focuses on the effects of the lyrics of a song on recalling. Independent variable was the type of the song which was negative/positive; second independent variable was gender lastly the third independent variable was mood of the participants such as positive, negative or neutral. We hypothesized that songs that are carried negative emotions are more likely to remember. The second hypothesis was females are more likely to remember more lyrics. The third hypothesis was individuals who were in a positive mood will be more likely to remember more lyrics. There were ninety participants which were participated voluntarily. Results confirmed our first hypothesis, indicating that participants who were exposed to an emotionally negative song remembered more lyrics. The results showed there was neither a significant effect of the gender nor the mood of the participants. Since music is with us since the day individuals born, researchers should focus more on it’s affects on the individuals life, mind set and their behaviors’.

Music has been playing a huge role in human life. Everyone has built some connections with music or expressed themselves with music, which makes music an expression of thoughts and emotions. There are different types and styles that music comes with, which again shows the individual differences and different choices of people on music. We exposed to different types of music in our everyday life, most of the individuals choose to have music in every moment of their lives. Basically, we can conclude that music has been a big part of our living. It is important to think about the factors that can affect the way individuals think and shape their behaviors since we always come face to face with music it is impossible not to think about its consequences and influences on people.

The relationship between music and memory is inevitable. Every individual has a song that has stuck in their mind and they know every melody and lyric that one particular song has. It has been shown that the listeners tend to like music that they remember and to remember the music that they like (Stalinski & Schellenberg, 2013). Respectively, there is an association between liking the song and remembering the lyrics. When music combines the instrumentals and the lyrics together it has strengths the emotion that has expressed behind the song.

If we divide the song types in a very basic way, like basic emotions, we can divide them as happy and sad songs. Without considering any kinds of liking towards the song, it can be said that the type of music individuals listen can shape their mindset, their way of thinking and their current mood state. Even a little exposure to happy or sad songs can affect individuals; according to the music that they have been exposed to can change the way they interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad (Logeswaran & Bhattacharya, 2009).

Dividing the song types again with effects of lyrics as non-violent and violent, it can show us how individuals’ behaviors can change. Studies have been shown that people who exposed to song with violent lyrics can show more hostile behaviors than the people who exposed to a song with non-violent lyrics (Anderson, Carnagey, & Eubanks, 2003) so it is not possible to deny the fact that song and lyrics can shape the way individuals behave in a particular way.

With considering the effect of lyrics as well, we can conclude that it leads to better recall of the song. A study done by Peynircioğlu and colleagues showed that when participants try to remember a specific song with categories and cues as melody, title, and lyrics, lyrics helped participants more than the other elements of the songs (Peynircioğlu, Rabinovitz, & Thompson, 2007). In conclusion, the lyrics of the song can lead better and more accurate recall of the song which again shows that there is an association exists between the song lyrics and the memory.

Combining the importance of lyrics and the importance of the emotion that the songs carried, it can be said there is a relationship between the song type and lyrics on the memory and its effects on the humans. The effects of the lyrics for sad songs is important and the lyrics are the key to defining the sadness in the music, when individuals try to understand the emotion behind a particular song; instrumentals are cues to define happiness in music, while the lyrics are the cues to define sadness in music (Brattico, Alluri, Bogert, Jacobsen, Vartiainen, Nieminen, & Tervaniemi, 2011).

Also, it has been found that negative emotions and negative information has more impact on individuals than good ones (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001). Based on this knowledge from the previous studies, the present study firstly predicted that the song that has negative emotions would lead a better recall, than the song that has positive emotions.

Hypothesis 1: When the song has a negative and sad vibe behind it with the instrumentals and the lyrics the participants will recall more words and will remember them accurately.

The differences between genders on memory have been studied for years from different aspects, from the norms and social stereotypes that have been created by the social and cultural effects it is possible to claim that there can be differences on memory types varying according to the gender and social beliefs that individuals hold. Studies indicated that woman is outstripping in verbal episodic memory tasks such as remembering words when men are outstripping in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information which known as visuospatial processing (Herlitz & Rehnman, 2008). The sex differences in memory can be proven by other studies as well the research adds to the literature that gender differences in memory recall suggest that gender is an important variable (Fuentes & Desrocher, 2013). Most of the results focuses on woman having a better memory than man results showed that females whether children and adults did better on the verbal memory tasks than males (Loftus, Banaji, Schooler, & Foster, 1987).

Hypothesis 2: Females will be more likely to remember more words of song lyrics in an accurate way than males.

Moreover, the mood of individuals can affect their memory. It can be two ways around it has been proven that recalling things accurately can lead a positive mood as a sign of satisfaction (Houle, & Philippe, 2017) and from the other way around empirical favored the mood-state-dependent hypothesis (Mecklenbräuker, & Hager, 1984). Emotions can affect individuals’ ability to remember information, experiments suggested that the mood state at the time individuals perceive and process the information can positively affect the memory especially the encoding of the information (MacKay, Shafto, Taylor, Marian, Abrams, & Dyer, 2004). Individuals’ memory can vary according to the mood they have at a particular moment. Because the mood of the people can affect the way their brain works and it can affect their memory. Considering previous studies our third hypothesis was that the individuals who were in a positive mood were more likely to remember more items and remember items more accurately. The present study predicted that there will be a relationship between the mood of the participants and their performance on the memory for recalling the lyrics of a specific type of song, and the positive mood would lead a better focus and attention which can lead a better score on the recalling task as an outcome.

Hypothesis3: Positive mood leads participants to better recall.

Method

Participants

This experiment includes ninety participants (fifty-four of them are females and thirty-six of them are males). The mean of their ages was 21.53 with the range from 18 to 45. Participants were generally university students (eighty-four university students) but also there were 4 high school graduates and 2 doctorate graduates. The native language of all participants was Turkish. Participants were voluntarily asked to participate.

Design

In this experiment, 3x2x2 between-subjects ANOVA was conducted to examine effects of mood with three conditions (negative, positive and neither positive nor negative), gender with two conditions (male and female) and song types with two conditions (emotionally negative or emotionally positive) as independent variables on number of remembered lyrics of song as dependent variable. Because the experiment was between-participant design, every person participates for only one time. Furthermore, participants’ knowledge about the song that they listened to was controlled. As for manipulation checking, participants’ rating of the emotionality of the song was questioned. Moreover, participants asked to rate their general enjoyment of listening to music for controlling any kind of effect of individual differences.

Materials

There were 2 songs which are both in Turkish. Songs were divided into two conditions which were emotionally positive and emotionally negative. The emotionally negative song was ‘Yalnızlığımı hissettiğim zaman’ by Lale Belkıs and recorded in 1974, and the emotionally positive song was ‘Aşk Alfabesi’ by Yeliz and recorded in 1974 (in Appendix A you can see whole lyrics that participants exposed). Both of the songs fixed in terms of how many items they have but varied in terms of how many seconds they last. Because of when we fixed time, there was a huge difference between word amounts; we fixed them on ten words. Gender of the singer was fixed in gender as female. The record time of both songs was fixed as well to minimalize the chance of participants’ older exposures about these songs. Every participant had listened to the song with using headphones.

PANAS scale rating. Participants’ current mood was measured with using already existing PANAS scale with the Turkish version. The scale includes twenty different mood adjective with 1 to 5 scales (1 = totally disagree and 5 = totally agree) for each of them. Participants asked to fill up the scale according to their current mood.

Manipulation check rating. Participants were asked to rate the emotionality of the song that they listened to. The positivity of the song was asked for participants who on emotionally positive song condition and the negativity of the song was asked for participants who on emotionally negative song condition with using the same scale which was 1 to 5 rating scale (1= very negative and 5= very positive).

Enjoyment for listening to music rating. Participants were asked to rate their general enjoyment about listening to music with using a 1 to 5 rating scale (1=very dislike and 5=very like). Ratings showed that all participants like to listen to music and this result leads us to be sure that there was no effect of general enjoyment about music listening on remembering.

Procedure

First of all, participants should sign to consent form to attending the experiment. Participants who were signed the consent form started to filling PANAS mood test according to their current mood. After that, there was a distraction test, it was given to the participant. The distraction task was a simple puzzle about finding a word by using roads and letters. After finishing the distraction test, they listen to the song which was determined. Half of the participants asked to listen to the emotionally positive song and the other half-listen to the emotionally negative song. Then recall test given to the participants who are listened to the song and participants wrote which lyrics that they remembered. Demographic information was given after the recall test with the manipulation check and the rating scales for if they listened to this song before and how much they enjoy listening to music. After all, is finished, experimenters gave debriefing to participants.

Results

Our first hypothesis was emotionally negative songs leads to better lyric recall than emotionally positive songs. Our second hypothesis was females remember better song lyrics compared to males. The third hypothesis is the mood of participants affects their lyric remembering.

Descriptive statistics for all conditions showed that the highest average in all conditions was females with neither positive nor negative mood in negative song condition (M=10.00, SD=.) with only one participant and the lowest one was females with neither positive nor negative mood in positive song condition (M=2.00, SD=.) with only one participant. According to only descriptive statistics of conditions, we can state that negative songs remembered more for both males and females compared to positive songs. However, mean differences between females and male were close for both negative and positive songs (see Table 1 for means, standard deviations and number of participants for each condition).

A 3x2x2 between-subject ANOVA was carried out to understand effects of independent variables such as mood (negative, positive, or neither positive nor negative), gender (female or male), and types of songs (emotionally positive or emotionally negative) on remembering the lyrics of songs as the dependent variable. The main effect of mood was not significant but close to being significant, F(2,80)=2.389, MSE=5.277, p=.098, indicating that there was no overall difference in lyric recall performance between different mood conditions. Because of the experiment does not have an equal amount of participants in each mood conditions, this can be the reason we failed to find a significant main effect. The main effect of gender was not significant as well, F(1,80)=1.314, MSE=5.277, p=.255. Thus, there was no overall difference between males and females in lyrics were remembered. However, the main effect of song type was significant, F(1,80)=11.061, MSE=5.277, p=.001, indicating that lyrics of the emotionally negative song remembered more (M=8.31, SD=2.210) than lyrics of the emotionally positive song (M=6.69, SD=2.390) as we hypothesized.

The two-way interaction between song type and gender was not significant, F(1,80)=.066, MSE=5.277, p=.798, indicating that there was no overall difference between females and males lyric recall performance according to different song type conditions. The two-way interaction between song type and mood of participants was not significant, F(2,80)=2.067, MSE=5.277, p=.133, indicating that there was no overall difference between participants in different mood conditions on the performance of remembering lyrics of songs according to different song type conditions. The two-way interaction between gender and mood of participants was not significant as well, F(2,80)=1.114, MSE=5.277, p=.333, showing that there was no overall difference between males and females on recall performance for lyrics in different mood conditions. Also, the three-way interaction between the mood of the participants, types of songs, and gender of participants was not significant too, F(0,80)=., MSE=5.277, p=., indicating that there was no overall change on recall performance between males and females with different mood states according to different song type conditions.

A one-way ANOVA was carried out for manipulation check which measures the effect of song types as an independent variable on participants’ rating for emotionality (negativity or positivity) of the song that they listened as the dependent variable. The effect of song type on participants’ rating was significant, F(1,88)=17.556, p<.001, indicating that people rate negative song less positive (M=2.98, SD=.931) than they rate positive song (M=3.82, SD=.972) which shows our manipulation worked properly.

In summary, the results showed that there was only one significant effect on lyric recall performances of participants which is the type of song. It stated that as we hypothesized people more likely to remember emotionally negative songs’ lyrics rather than emotionally positive songs’ lyrics. Furthermore, the mood of participants could significantly affect remembering performances if we divide participants equally due to different mood conditions.

Discussion

Our first hypothesis was supported by our results which states that emotionally negative songs lead to better scores on remembering the lyrics. Thus, emotionally negative songs lead to better recall in terms of lyrics compared to positive ones. Similar to previous studies sad songs’ lyrics stayed at participants’ memories as more and these findings support that sad lyric has a clear effect on memory and it can be caused by some old memories. We can say that people can be impressed more with negative songs and it can be explained in many ways as we see in previous explanations in different studies. There can be some evolutionary perspectives about negative things but we did not clearly focus on the reasons for it in this experiment.

Our second hypothesis was not supported by our results which is says that females remember more lyrics compared to males. Our results indicate that there was no general difference according to the gender on remembering the performance. It can be said like both males and females get similar scores, so both get influenced similarly with different types of songs. It should also be known that songs were not including any words that can affect gender differences or potential gender stereotypes. There was no clear word that can be sad only to one sex but not the other. However, still, song types did not lead to any sex difference. Our third hypothesis also was not supported by the results which to say that participants with positive mood will remember more lyrics. Our results showed that there was no effect on participants’ mood on their task performance. That can be caused by not having an equal or similar amount of people in each mood condition or we can say that it can be a negative effect of distraction task. When people find out a solution for a problem they feel better and we gave the mood task before the distraction task. However, the distraction task was useful for us to be aware of mood task did not affect participants’ understanding and listening to the song. Now, we know that people get affected by the song they listened but actually, it is not about they filled a mood test. So, people may feel more similar after they solve the distraction task. Manipulation check showed that participants rate emotionally negative song less positive and more negative whereas they rate emotionally positive song more positive. It indicates that our songs affected participants in the way that we want.

Limitations of this study, it could have more equal participants in each mood conditions but because of we did not manipulate moods earlier and just give the mood test before distraction test, the number of participants varies so much in different mood conditions. Also, the distraction task can be changed and there can be different potential tasks rather than a puzzle. In another hand, there can be another mood task after the recall test rather than and it would let to see if there was a significant effect of song and lyrics in participants’ mood. In potential future experiments, the self-reference effect can be also measured which is the effect of persons personal memories on their remembering. When a person connects new information with a self-concept or experiment, they are more likely to remember this information easily and accurately. So, if a person makes a connection with lyrics and their personal experiences they might remember lyrics better. There might be an effect of the self-reference effect on participants’ scores on our findings. These issues can be figured out in future studies.

References

Anderson, C.A., Carnagey, N.L., & Eubanks, J. (2003). Exposure to violet media: The effects of the songs with violent lyrics on aggressive thoughts and feelings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,84,960–971. DOI: 10.1037/0022–3514.84.5.960

Baumeister, R.F, Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K.D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology,5,323–370. DOI: 10.1037//1089–2680.5.4.323

Brattico, E., Alluri, V., Bogert, B., Jocabsen, T., Vartiainen, N., Nieminen, S., Tervaniemi, M. (2011) A Functional MRI Study of Happy and Sad Emotions in Music with and without Lyrics. Frontiers in Psychology,2, 308 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00308

Fuentes, A., Desrocher, M. (2013). The effects of gender on the retrieval of episodic and semantic components of autobiographical memory. Memory,21,619–32. DOI:10.1080/09658211.2012.744423.

Houle, I., Philippe, F.L. (2017). Need satisfaction in episodic memories impacts mood at retrieval and well-being over time. Personality and Individual Differences,105,194–199.

Loftus, E. F., Banaji, M.R., Schooler, J.W., & Foster, R. (1987). Who remembers what? Gender differences in memory. Michigan Quarterly Review,26,64–85

Logeswaran, N., Bhattacharya, J. (2009) Crossmodal transfer of emotion by music. Neuroscience Letters,455, 129–133. DOI:10.1016/j.neulet.2009.03.044

MacKay, D.G., Shafto, M., Taylor, J.K., Marian, D.E., Abrams, L., & Dyer, J.R. (2004). Relations between emotion, memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop, lexical decision, and immediate memory tasks. Memory and Cognition,32,474–488.

Mecklenbräuker, S., Hager, W. (1984). Effects of mood on memory: Experimental tests of a mood-state-dependent retrieval hypothesis and of a mood-congruity hypothesis. Psychological Research,46,355–376. DOI:10.1007/BF00309069

Peynircioglu, Z., Rabinovitz, B., & Thompson, J. (2007). Memory and metamemory for songs: the relative effectiveness of titles, lyrics, and melodies as cues for each other Psychology of Music, 36, 47–61 DOI: 10.1177/0305735607079722

Stalinski, S. M. & Schellenberg, E.G. (2013). Listeners Remember Music They Like. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39, 700–716. DOI:10.1037,a0029671

APPENDIX A

Lyrics for emotionally negative song:

‘Yalnızlığımı hissettiğim zaman
Seni düşünüyorum
Meğer ne çok sevmişim seni
Meğer ne çok sevmişim’

Lyrics for emotionally positive song:

‘Elden ele dolaşır yüzyıllardan beri
Değişmeden bir tek kelimesi
Kim yazmış, kim çizmiş, kim basmış belli değil
Hecelenir bu aşk alfabesi’