Can a Good Mood Help You Learn? Investigating the Effect of Mood Induced Through Music on Visual Memory
Theories of mood and its effect on cognitive processing and memory have suggested numerous viewpoints. Contrary evidence suggests positive mood can increase one’s ability to process and encode information whereas others suggest a heightened negative mood or increased anxiety can actually be beneficial to learning and memory. Most of these experiments have relied upon the use of lexical stimuli as their test stimuli. Here we have used a visual memory task and classical music to induce a sad, happy or neutral mood and to see if this influences performance on a visual memory task. Participants’ performance did not differ significantly between conditions on the memory task. This is attributed to the desired mood state not being appropriately induced. Most participants reported a moderate mood and few were in the desired sad or happy affective states. Further work needs a more effective method of suing music to induce mood. We do believe this research has further application in the learning disability environment and future work is warranted in assessing the effect of happy mood on learning visual cues. If a relationship can be found than this could have connotations for people with learning disabilities being educated using programs such as Makaton.
During the making of this group project i worked with a number of other students at UCL on my Research Methods MSc to bring the work to fruition. In order to work effectively together we used a group wiki to share ideas and upload work we had done on the project. It can be found here
Robin Ward 