Discovering Statistics

Music Valence and Gender Influence Word Recall Task

A person's state of arousal can determine how well their memory functions. This phenomenon is readily apparent when persons experiencing a traumatic event find it difficult to ever escape these memories, memories that can recur unbidden in people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Recent research examining the influence of relaxing music found a similar effect, such that relaxing music impairs memory coding and consolidation. Towards the goal expanding on these results, an experiment was conducted that tested the influence of classical (relaxing), rock (stimulating), and no music on word recall performance, but stratified by gender. The results indicated that overall, classical music significantly impaired recall performance when compared to subjects listening to rock music or no music, but rock music provided no benefit. What is novel about these findings is that significant differences in memory performance were found between genders....
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