Liao Zijun (U1430141J)

Marylyn Tan (U1431145L)

Nicole Kwek Xin Yi (U1430235A)
Siti Nur Atiqah Bte Abdul Hadi (U1430435E)
Yeow Shu Hua Joey (U1430779B)

Sadness and the student: The relationship between emotional affect and academic
performance in school.
Can listening to sad music help one become a better student? In recent years, numerous studies
have confirmed the connection between memory and emotion. In particular, the concept of
mood-dependent memory (also known as MDM, which describes improved memory retrieval
under conditions where individuals experience the same mood as when encoding occurs) has
been of great research interest (Beck & McBee, 1995). To induce a particular mood condition,
researchers have used various stimuli, such as visual and auditory materials, and participants
self-referential statements.
Understanding the link between emotion and memory has its applications in various sectors of
society. In the education sector, a more thorough understanding of the retention of information
could lead to more effective studying habits for students. Similarly, in marketing, the choice of
background music could affect the efficacy of advertisements and campaigns. Advancements in
the field of mood and memory may also prove to benefit the medical field with regard to
memory-related disorders and treatments such as music therapy. Based on these observations, we
conducted a study among 40 undergraduates at the Nanyang Technological University in
Singapore to find out if positive or negative affect influences long term memory.
For the purposes of our research, emotionally-differentiated (happy and sad) versions of the
same piece of music were played while participants were presented with a list of neutral-affect
words to memorise. They were then asked to recall as many of the words as possible within a set
time frame. The ability to memorise and recall information is crucial to the academic context, as
the Singaporean education system requires students to retain and reproduce vast amounts of
information to demonstrate subject competence. We hypothesize that there will be a significant
difference in memory retrieval when encoding takes place under different affect conditions.
Through this study, we found that students perform better in recall tasks when exposed to sad
music compared to happy music. The findings for this research contribute to existing literature
on academic performance and affect, specifically within an educational culture that emphasises
rote-learning methods.
I. LITERATURE REVIEW
Memory is affected by variables that may influence the quality and amount of information
encoded (Naveh-Benjamin, Craik, Perretta, & Tonev, 2000). Memory studies, especially relating
to the encoding and retrieval of information, are of interest to fields such as education and
clinical psychology. From these studies, ones psychological state and mood seem to be the
major influencing factors on memory, but exactly how and what kind of information they affect
has been contentious (Forgas, 2001).
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Several works examining the mood-dependence effect on memory have described higher
retrieval ability when participants moods during both retrieval and encoding match (Eich, 1995;
Forgas, 2001; Coan & Allen, 2007), hence demonstrating the fundamental link between memory
and affect. Memory has been shown to not only be dependent on affect but also the level of ones
mood at both encoding and retrieval stages (Robinson & Rollings, 2011). The type of mood at
the point of encoding has also been found to affect memory, with a positive mood showing a
more pronounced effect on memories than a negative mood (Forgas & Bower, 1987).
Additionally, ones susceptibility to mood-dependent memory in the process of retrieval is also
reliant on whether the mood is generated by internal psychological reasons or external stimuli
(Eich, Macaulay, & Ryan, 1994). Mood-dependency may also be explained through the
associative network theory, where similar moods act as a linking cue to connect individual
memories (Bower, 1981). This view of mood-dependency, however, is debatable; it has been
found that emotions impair recall in certain studies, especially when the difficulty of the tasks
increase (Ellis, Seibert & Varner, 1995). In addition, experiments structured around simple list
memorisation where specific moods were induced in participants have displayed almost equal
instances of them being statistically significant and statistically not (Forgas, 2001). Although a
strong positive association between mood and memory has been demonstrated, current research
findings lack consensus about what effects different moods have on memory recall.
Methodologically, most studies used visual stimuli such as words and faces to induce different
moods. In studies utilising pictures, there was an absence of positively-valenced stimuli as all
arousing pictures were restricted to being negatively-valenced. Positively-valenced pictures of an
equal arousal level tended to be sexual in nature, which potentially confounded the data due to
gender-specific differences (Levens & Phelps, 2008). Studies utilising audio stimuli were found
to be more reliable in producing results that concluded a relation between mood and memory
(Beck & McBee, 1995; Balch & Lewis, 1996; Ellis, Seibert & Varner, 1995). In Balch and
Lewis (1996) study, however, only a change in the tempo of music was associated with better
retrieval, with other aspects of musicality showing no effect on memory, which differed from
previous findings on mood-dependent memory.
In addition, few studies on mood and memory are specific to the Singapore context. We posit
that the findings of this paper may be of import to research on the East Asian education system,
given the exam-centric culture of many Asian societies, as well as to culture-specific learning
styles and curricula structures. This paper thus chooses to focus on mood-dependent memory and
may have implications for students who listen to music while studying, especially those within
educational systems that incorporate significant amounts of rote memorisation.
II. METHODOLOGY
Materials
First, a list of words was created with measures taken to the best of our ability to ensure that they
were neutral. Words with common associations such as knife (could be thought of as negative)
were removed. Words with multiple word classes such as chair (both a noun and a verb) were
also eliminated from the list. To aid in the recollection process, the selected words were
monosyllabic and restricted to three to six letters. The chosen words had no apparent link to one
another.

Next, a sound clip from the instrumental piece, Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel, was chosen to
induce mood. One version of the sound clip was in the major key while the other was in the
minor key to induce a positive and negative mood respectively. Traditionally, music in the major
key is associated with uplifting, happy expression, while minor-key melodies are usually passive
and melancholy (Henver, 1935). Thus, there are clear emotional implications for using a
major/minor-keyed piece of music. Canon in D was chosen for its qualities of easy listening
and perceived familiarity within the classical genre; participants would thus be less likely to
display strong reactions to the piece. Also, instrumental music was chosen over music with
lyrics, so that the vocals would not interfere with the words the participants had to read.
A mathematics test (Task 2, Appendix B) consisting of three primary school-level questions
(Primary 3 to 4) acted as a distraction task for participants during their rest period. This test
requires only basic level mathematical skills that any tertiary level student would be expected to
possess. The rest period of 2 minutes was given between the end of Task 1 (reading the neutralaffect words) and the beginning of Task 3 (word recall). The rest period was essential to reduce
the likelihood of any primacy or recency effect occurring during Task 3. Hence, the mathematics
test was implemented during the rest period to prevent participants from consciously recalling
the neutral-words before it was time to retrieve them.
A pilot test was conducted on eight NTU students prior to the actual experiment to assess the
feasibility and operationalisation of the experiment and we found no major flaws in our design
experiment. Our research was conducted in the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in
Singapore to allow us easy access to our population sample of undergraduates. We focused on
undergraduates because this group of students have had longer periods of classroom-based
learning methods that require rote memorisation and recall. Our population sample consists of 40
students, 20 of whom were males and 20 of whom were females. This differentiation between
samples is based on the link between gender and differing performance on memory tasks (Canli,
Desmond, Zhao & Gabrieli, 2002). For each gender, 10 were assigned to the happy mood
condition while the other 10 were assigned to the sad mood condition.
Process
1. The participants were briefed and asked to sign a consent form (Appendix A).
2. They were then given a pair of earphones and the assigned sound clip was played. Fifteen
seconds into the clip, participants were given a piece of paper containing 21 neutral
words (Appendix D) and were instructed to read them until the music stopped two
minutes later.
3. After two minutes, both the earphones and the piece of paper were collected from the
participants.
4. They were then presented with three mathematics problem sums to solve (Appendix B).
After two minutes, the participants were told to stop regardless of whether the problem
sums were solved.
5. Their answers were collected after which they were presented with a numbered list (1 21).
6. The participants were then given two minutes to fill in as many words as they could recall
from the 21 neutral words they read earlier.
7. After two minutes, the list was collected.
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8. The participants were then debriefed on the actual aim of the experiment (Appendix A)
and dismissed.
III. FINDINGS/DISCUSSION
Memory and mood difference
Figure 1 shows the average number of words recalled when happy and sad moods were
induced through the two music samples. A two sample t-test was conducted to compare the
number of words recalled by participants who were exposed to sad music with the participants
(GRP 1) who were exposed to happy music (GRP 2). As shown in Fig 1. there was a
significant difference in the number of words recalled when participants were exposed to the
negative mood condition, scoring on average 10.95 words (SD = 3.20) as opposed to an average
of 8.60 words (SD = 3.59) among participants who were exposed to positive mood condition.
The calculated probability level p is less than the significant alpha level (p<0.05) which shows
that our hypothesis is statistically significant.
These results suggest that the sad mood is positively related to retrieval performance. This
finding echoes other studies where negative emotion resulted in enhanced memory (Kern,
Libkuman & Otani, 2002). The effect of negative mood on memory has been further linked by
other research to the vividness of memories (Christianson & Loftus, 1991). Furthermore,
neuroscientific studies have found that music with sad or dissonant sounds are more likely to
stimulate the left neural hemisphere (Salimpoor et al., 2011), which have been identified as vital
to semantic working memory (Gabrieli, Poldrack & Desmond, 1998). This site-specific
neurological basis may further explain the differences in retrieval between the two groups of
participants.
In addition, previous research demonstrates that participants involved in ongoing tasks while in a
positive mood are more susceptible to being distracted by stimuli that are irrelevant to the task
(Rowe, Hirsh & Anderson, 2006; Biss & Hasher, 2011). This may also account for the lowered
performance of participants in the positive mood condition as decreased attention to the task at
hand may have been detrimental to the quality and amount of information they were able to
encode. As such, mood has been proven to have an influence on ones ability to recall items from
long term memory.

Figure 1. Average number of words recalled in relation to emotion induced

Memory and gender

Observable differences between the two genders were also found with regard to the test scores.
Figure 2 compares the average number of words recalled by males and females. The results
indicate that male participants recalled an average of 10.60 words in the sad condition group
while female participants recalled an average of 11.30 words. Similarly, male participants
recalled an average of 7.10 words when the happy mood was induced while female
participants recalled 10.10 words. However, the statistical difference between the average
number of words male participants (M=8.85, SD=3.31) and female participants (M=10.70,
SD=3.64) recalled was non-significant; p=0.09 which is more than the confidence level of 0.05.
In general, female participants were found to recall more words than male participants under
both mood conditions. This suggests that females are generally able to encode more items in
their long term memory than males, particularly linguistic items. As mentioned above, this is
reinforced by studies that show that females outperform males on episodic memory tasks (Burton
et al., 2004) such as categorizable and random word recall (Dixon et al., 2004; Herlitz, Nilsson,
& Backman, 1997), and story recall (Dixon et al., 2004; Fritsch, Larsen, & Smyth, 2007). As the
performances of the two genders in episodic memory tasks parallel that of long term memory
retrieval tasks, it is highly likely that with a larger sample size for this study, there will be a
statistically significant difference between the performance of males and females in long term
memory retrieval tasks as well.

Figure 2. Average number of words recalled in relation to gender & emotion induced
Limitations and implications for future research
Due to the subjective nature of mood, it was difficult to ascertain whether participants were
experiencing the sad or happy moods that were supposed to be experiencing at the time of the
experiment. This was because other factors, such as fatigue and stress, prior to the experiment
could have influenced their moods. It is difficult to control for such changeable factors,
especially without access to specialised psychological tools for emotional evaluation.

In addition, this research paper could have been further developed to explore interacting effects
between ethnicity and memory recall. The structure of certain languages may be better primed
for rote memorisation, which may then point to a relationship between language acquisition and
memory performance. In particular, due to the multi-ethnic composition of the Singaporean
population, this may be an avenue of interest for further research.
It was also mentioned above that emotion has been found to impair recall as task difficulty
increases. However, due to time constraints, our participants were only exposed to simple tasks
within the parameters of this experiment. It may be beneficial for additional studies to explore
the effects of emotion and task difficulty in a local cultural context.
IV. CONCLUSION
This study was conducted with the intention of finding out if long term memory is affected by
happy and sad moods. Based our findings, we conclude that the sad mood was more
effective for memory retrieval and thus, for optimal retention of information, sad music in the
major key could be played to enhance rote memorisation. In addition, females were found to
have better retrieval abilities compared to males, which shows how gender is an important
variable in recall performance.
The parameters of our research focuses on methods of inducing mood through auditory stimuli.
For the Singapore context, our research may provide a useful platform to consider other factors
that may enhance or influence memory which would be useful to pedagogy and classroom
management. For example, how does an instructor create mood-environments to enhance
learning for their students? Our research shows that sad music in the minor key aids in memory
recall, but what other forms of mood stimuli can be used within classrooms? Recognizing the
link between stress levels and high academic expectations within Singapores education system,
our research will benefit various stakeholders in the education sector such as learning
institutions, students, instructors, parents and state agencies in developing conducive learning
environments in schools.

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APPENDICES
Appendix A - Brief and Debrief for Experiment

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Appendix B - Mathematics Distraction Task

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Appendix C Verbal Instructions for Participants

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Appendix D Word List for Memorisation Task

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