By Douglas LaBier December 4, 2018

We’ve all had experiences like this: Hearing a song or piece of music that stirs up a range of emotions. A new study shows how very strong, positive emotions can be triggered by music; and also by pictures. The study, from the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, and summarized here, examined how memories are able to influence our emotional responses induced by music and images. The researchers enlisted volunteers who brought music The volunteers who participated in this study brought music and images to the experiment which evoked pleasure based on their own personal memories, as well as other pieces of music and pictures that operated similarly but the pleasure was not related to memories but just to the way the music sounds or the picture looks.

Researchers reported that he most fascinating insight that the study yielded concerned the contribution of memory, which led to strong emotional reactions in the case of music and pictures, including positive and negative emotions. These results were particularly strong for social and positive emotions such as tenderness and joy but the important boosting of the emotional experiences by personal memories was also apparent in the case of sad emotions for both music and pictures. Music typically did not really induce strong sad emotions, whereas pictures were able to trigger such negative emotional experiences.

For a summary of the study and how it was conducted, click here. It was published in the journal Nature.

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