55
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      The efficacy of musical emotions provoked by Mozart's music for the reconciliation of cognitive dissonance

      research-article
      a , 1 , 2
      Scientific Reports
      Nature Publishing Group

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Debates on the origin and function of music have a long history. While some scientists argue that music itself plays no adaptive role in human evolution, others suggest that music clearly has an evolutionary role, and point to music's universality. A recent hypothesis suggested that a fundamental function of music has been to help mitigating cognitive dissonance, which is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions simultaneously. It usually leads to devaluation of conflicting knowledge. Here we provide experimental confirmation of this hypothesis using a classical paradigm known to create cognitive dissonance. Results of our experiment reveal that the exposure to Mozart's music exerted a strongly positive influence upon the performance of young children and served as basis by which they were enabled to reconcile the cognitive dissonance.

          Related collections

          Most cited references5

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Music and spatial task performance.

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Musical emotions: functions, origins, evolution.

            Theories of music origins and the role of musical emotions in the mind are reviewed. Most existing theories contradict each other, and cannot explain mechanisms or roles of musical emotions in workings of the mind, nor evolutionary reasons for music origins. Music seems to be an enigma. Nevertheless, a synthesis of cognitive science and mathematical models of the mind has been proposed describing a fundamental role of music in the functioning and evolution of the mind, consciousness, and cultures. The review considers ancient theories of music as well as contemporary theories advanced by leading authors in this field. It addresses one hypothesis that promises to unify the field and proposes a theory of musical origin based on a fundamental role of music in cognition and evolution of consciousness and culture. We consider a split in the vocalizations of proto-humans into two types: one less emotional and more concretely-semantic, evolving into language, and the other preserving emotional connections along with semantic ambiguity, evolving into music. The proposed hypothesis departs from other theories in considering specific mechanisms of the mind-brain, which required the evolution of music parallel with the evolution of cultures and languages. Arguments are reviewed that the evolution of language toward becoming the semantically powerful tool of today required emancipation from emotional encumbrances. The opposite, no less powerful mechanisms required a compensatory evolution of music toward more differentiated and refined emotionality. The need for refined music in the process of cultural evolution is grounded in fundamental mechanisms of the mind. This is why today's human mind and cultures cannot exist without today's music. The reviewed hypothesis gives a basis for future analysis of why different evolutionary paths of languages were paralleled by different evolutionary paths of music. Approaches toward experimental verification of this hypothesis in psychological and neuroimaging research are reviewed.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              The origins of language and the evolution of music: A comparative perspective.

              According to Darwin [Darwin, CR. The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray; 1871], the human musical faculty 'must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed'. Music is a human cultural universal that serves no obvious adaptive purpose, making its evolution a puzzle for evolutionary biologists. This review examines Darwin's hypothesis of similarities between language and music indicating a shared evolutionary history. In particular, the fact that both are human universals, have phrase structure, and entail learning and cultural transmission, suggests that any theory of the evolution of language will have implications for the evolution of music, and vice versa. The argument starts by describing variable predispositional musical capabilities and the ontogeny of prosodic communication in human infants and young children, presenting comparative data regarding communication systems commonly present in living nonhuman primate species. Like language, the human music faculty is based on a suite of abilities, some of which are shared with other primates and some of which appear to be uniquely human. Each of these subcomponents may have a different evolutionary history, and should be discussed separately. After briefly considering possible functions of human music for language acquisition, the review ends by discussing the phylogenetic history of music. It concludes that many strands of evidence support Darwin's hypothesis of an intermediate stage of human evolutionary history, characterized by a communication system that resembled music more closely than language, but was identical to neither. This pre-linguistic system, which could probably referred to as "prosodic protolanguage", provided a precursor for both modern language and music.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group
                2045-2322
                25 September 2012
                2012
                : 2
                : 694
                Affiliations
                [1 ]simplePrimate Research Institute, Kyoto University , Kanrin, Inuyama, Aichi, Japan
                [2 ]simpleAthinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard University , Charlestown, MA, USA and Air Force Research Laboratory, Dayton, OH, USA
                Author notes
                Article
                srep00694
                10.1038/srep00694
                3457076
                23012648
                7b1585f0-02f6-4973-924c-9310141e5c58
                Copyright © 2012, Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareALike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

                History
                : 18 May 2012
                : 20 August 2012
                Categories
                Article

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article