Musical activation vs Connectionist models

Review:
The Role of Thought Suppression in the Bonding of Thought and Mood (Wenzlaff, Wegner & Klein, 1991).

In this experiment, the authors used music to induce three types of moods: positive, neutral and negative. My interest in this lies in the fact that they used music as a binder between thought and mood. According to them, music bound thought and mood together and this was demonstrated through their experiments on the rebound effect that occurs after suppression of an item is released.

Their reasoning was that music served to induce the mood states and this leads to a setting of a certain mood. However, this mood that was induced was not a singleton effect, however it occured for the entire group of participants that were present. Thus, this effect can be generalizeable among people. This is interesting because there are little effects that external contributors bring in that serve as common an effect as music. I guess this is how some other researchers have proposed that music should not be seen as another culture factor, but an item that serves as a universal language for everyone, bridging across cultural and racial barriers.

Back to mood. Past research has found that during suppression of an item, people try to think of thoughts that are associated with the mood itself and not about forgetting the item. Of course, this seems to be an obvious reaction towards trying to forget something, but the implications of this are interesting: (1) instead of bringing focus towards one specific item to forget, people jump from one thought to another within the mood state to forget (they can't stop with one thought!) and; (2) items are binded the suppressed mood, thus the mood serves a "memory store" for that item.

As you might have noticed, the two implications are dependent, however they serve to two different things. The first implication talks about supression strategies. Imagine this situation: You're trying to forget about your ex from a relationship you just broke up from. What do you do? According to implication 1, you would try to think about other things. However, if you are still within that mood (bereavement) you are very likely to think about items associated with it. What do you think when you're in bereavement? I would think it be items that do not bring much cheer to you. Thus, it would make sense that a person would remain sad throughout trying to suppress the thoughts of his/her ex. This is just one strategy that one uses during suppression. How about other strategies that you might have used? For example, trying to divert your attention by doing something else that requires all your attention. I think, that you would find that you would forget the thoughts easier because all your attention is used and you are just focusing on one item. So, for that instance you would be able to suppress the thoughts easier.

The second implication, is that the item that you were trying to suppress would be bound to the mood that you tried to suppress it in, and then would appear later on when you went back into that mood. This is supported by past research that has been done on suppression and mood. So, while you are still within, or when the mood of bereavement pops up again, you will be most likely to think about the suppressed item again. This is where the relation of the connectionist models come into play. As i proposed earlier, the items tried to suppressed within the mood might be binded within the mood as if the mood were a sort of "memory store". More recent connectionist models require priming of thoughts to activate the whole stream of thoughts within that pathway. Perhaps once activated, the mood of bereavement is primed and thus the pathway leads towards the suppressed item that was stored within the mood itself.

If this is true, there would seem to be a better way of trying to forget something. As stated above, the point is not to divert attention elsewhere or lament on the past, but it is instead to change your mood. I know this is hard and takes a very large amount of strength, and perhaps support from external cues as well, but according to these implications there may be some truth in it. Instead of staying in your bereavement state, you'll have to get over it and start looking on the bright side of things.

I just feel that there is one more point lacking on how to forget things: How long does the item actually stay in active maintenance inside our memory? Basically, how long will it take for us to move on and for that memory not to affect us anymore (in the case of bereavement)?

Though, i won't explore on the last matter much because my aim is to investigate how music effects our mood states. I'm looking for a few areas in music to investigate this relationship between music and mood: (1) genre; (2) loudness; (3) lyrics. I believe that there might be other factors in music that effect our moods, though i'm listing out these three main themes at first.

Rach: I'm not exploring what music people like, but the how music effects people in terms of cognition :P