Mozart effect, cognitive dissonance, and the pleasure of music

Abstract

We explore a possibility that the 'Mozart effect' points to a fundamental cognitive function of music. Would such an effect of music be due to the hedonicity, a fundamental dimension of mental experience? The present paper explores a recent hypothesis that music helps to tolerate cognitive dissonances and thus enabled accumulation of knowledge and human cultural evolution. We studied whether the influence of music is related to its hedonicity and whether pleasant or unpleasant music would influence scholarly test performance and cognitive dissonance. Specific hypotheses evaluated in this study are that during a test students experience contradictory cognitions that cause cognitive dissonances. If some music helps to tolerate cognitive dissonances, then first, this music should increase the duration during which participants can tolerate stressful conditions while evaluating test choices. Second, this should result in improved performance. These hypotheses are tentatively confirmed in the reported experiments as the agreeable music was correlated with longer duration of tests under stressful conditions and better performance above that under indifferent or unpleasant music. It follows that music likely performs a fundamental cognitive function explaining the origin and evolution of musical ability that have been considered a mystery.

Effects of different "relaxing" music styles on the autonomic nervous system

“…[4] It has even been proposed that music may make people smarter! [5] The term "Mozart effect" has been coined to refl ect the proposed pleiotropic effect of music, which have not been entirely demonstrated.…”

Mystery in experimental psychology, how to measure aesthetic emotions?

“…Musical emotions have been predicted to help overcoming emotional contradictions of cognitive dissonances among elements of knowledge and accumulate contradictory knowledge (Perlovsky, 2010, 2012a,b, 2014). These predictions have been experimentally confirmed (Masataka and Perlovsky, 2012, 2013; Perlovsky et al, 2013; Perlovsky, 2014). …”

“…Existence of these specific emotions has been experimentally demonstrated and their cognitive functions have been analyzed (Perlovsky et al, 2010, 2013; Masataka and Perlovsky, 2012, 2013; Perlovsky, 2014). Musical emotions, an ability to be affected by sounds, the reason for evolutionary emergence of this ability were called “the greatest mystery” by Darwin (1871).…”

Instrumentalizing Cognitive Dissonance Emotions

“…Steps to demonstrating this experimentally have been made in (Masataka et al, 2012a(Masataka et al, , 2012b. It has been demonstrated that music helps resolve CD emotions of discomfort, so that contradictions in knowledge can be tolerated (Masataka et al, 2012a(Masataka et al, , 2012bPerlovsky, Cabanac et al, 2012). This made possible accumulation of knowledge and evolution of cultures.…”

“…This study followed a classical psychologic method that explored mental experience in interviews where participants answered printed questionnaires Balasko & Cabanac, 1998;Cabanac et al, 1997Cabanac et al, , 2002Cabanac & Bonniot-Cabanac, 2007;Ramirez et al, 2005Ramirez et al, , 2009Perlovsky, Bonniot-Cabanac et al, 2012). Thirty four anonymous participants (who were referred to by numbers only), 17 men (age 12 -70) and 17 women (age 16 -72) were presented two questionnaires each containing ten items.…”