Participants who have listened to happy upbeat music will remember significantly more words than those having had listened to sad depressing music.

Alternate Hypothesis

Participants who have listened to happy upbeat music will remember significantly more words than those having had listened to sad depressing music. (1 tailed)

Null Hypothesis

There will be no significant difference in the number of words remembered by participants in each condition any difference will be due to chance.

Design

This experiment was an independent measures design using the statistical test Mann Whitney U. As there were two conditions and each participant only participated in one of these conditions, this experiment was not repeated.

This was a Laboratory experiment which is good as it provides a standard procedure to be repeated in a well controlled environment.

Sample

The chosen sample method was quota sampling. In this sample five participants were chosen from each gender, aged between 16 and 17. Ten participants were tested in total forming a sample out of the population. The population chosen to carry out the ‘Man Whitney U test’ on was my local sixth form centre.

Materials

The materials used included a CD player, two CD’s, a pen and paper per participant (with only one CD per participant).

Procedure/Controls

Participants were simply allocated to conditions depending on their gender.

There were five of each gender in each condition, ten participants in a sad and depressed environment created by listening to depressing music and ten participants in a happy environment created by listening to up beat vibrant music. Each participant listened to the particular music for the length of one song, in an alone silent area. Next each participant had to memorise10 words, and wrote them down. Participants were briefed at the beginning of experiment and debriefed the end.

Controls made sure each participant was alone during the experiment, thus no environmental influences from peers. It was certified each participant had the same words to recall a standardised procedure. There was a control for gender keeping five boys and five girls in each condition.

Ethics

Ethical guidelines were followed to the maximum. Deception was breeched to a small proximity as the briefing was not totally accurate although the experiment was explained in full at the end via debriefing.

All participants; signed an informed consent form, given the right to withdraw, were protected from any physical or mental harm, were kept confidential, were briefed and debriefed.

In cognitive psychology, memory is divided into three stores: the sensory, the short-term, and the long-term. The progress of information through these stores is often referred to as The Information Processing Model. The sensory information store has unlimited capacity, and reacts to both visual and auditory information. However, the duration of information in sensory memory is extremely brief, milliseconds, and is subject to rapid decay. After entering sensory memory, a limited amount of information is transferred into short-term memory. In general, STM is characterized by a limited capacity of up to seven pieces of independent information, and in the brief duration of these items in STM, usually seconds. Additionally, decay seems the primary mechanism of memory loss in STM (Kalat, 1998). This experiment was a replication of the study by Bower on the effect of emotions on memory.

In this experiment by Bower (1978), several research participants were asked to memorise a list of words while they were in a particular emotional state. The conditions happy and sad were created by light hypnosis then memorised a list of words, after this conditions were swapped.

Bower (1978) found that participants placed in the same emotional state as they had been originally where they learned the information remembered the information better, thus human memory works in different ways from a factual objective i.e. tape recording.

This method of using two emotional conditions and testing memory was ...