The Effect of Musically Perceived Pleasantness and Unpleasantness on Cognitive Functioning of Patients with Depression: An Experimental Approach

Research with Indian classical raga on clinical depression has identified a host of emotional factors that guides the harmonious interaction between feeling tone and cognition. Such a harmony between cognition and music which leads to subjectively pleasant and unpleasant mood can extract maximum possible cognitive output in human beings. To test this hypothesis, 36 female subjects with clinically diagnosed depression were taken, of which 16 preadolescent subjects were between the age 7-12 years and the rest 20 subjects was the adolescent group age ranging between 13-15 years. There were three conditions of this research study, A) a control condition where no IV (classical music) was presented; B) experimental condition 1, where pleasantness inducing classical music was presented, C) experimental condition 2, where unpleasantness inducing classical music was presented. Subjects’ mood was estimated before and after the administration of the IV and also their cognitive faculties- attention, perception, learning-memorization and problem solving with different renowned tests and scales. Result was that all the faculties showed improvement due to the effect of independent variable except for the faculty of perception. It was also to be noted that the pre-adolescent group showed better performance in the experimental condition where a musical piece (dhun) with pleasant tone was presented and the adolescent group showed better performance in the experimental condition where less pleasant or mournful musical piece (dhun) was presented.