A study by Schaub on the influence of the momentary emotional state on individual musical preference has raised some doubts concerning the concept of the iso-eff ect in music therapy. Proceeding from these results this study investigates how strongly momentary individual musical preferences are influenced by the degree of contentment with the prevailing mood. Subjects (most of them musically experienced) showed iso-effects (positive correlations between mood and preference scales) when content with their momentary emotional state and a compensation-effect (negative correlations between mood and preference scales) in cases of discontent. So tend to produce compensations-effects only for such aspects of mood which appear to them likely to be influenced by music.

The present paper first reviews recent developments in the study of music preference and the eff ects on preference of emotional states (stress-induced) and behaviors (aggression). The studies are analyzed within, and the hypotheses for the present research drawn from, the frameworks of the »new experimental aesthetics« (Berlyne) and the cognitive-emotional model of preference (Konecni). Unlike most previous research, the present work used composed music as the stimulus material. The subjects listened to portions of piano (Bach, Debussy, Bartok, Schönberg), orchestral (Bach, Ravel, Bartok, Schönberg), and percussion (Baker, Fink, Fink, Cage) compositions characterized by different rhythmic structures (regular, ostinato, syncopated, and complex, respectively). The subjects' preference for the pieces was studied as a function of the amount of stress experimentally induced (the subjects were either repeatedly and sternly reprimanded to work faster on a task, or neutrally treated; and either told that they failed, or that they succeeded; there was also a no-stress, no-information, control condition). As was anticipated, a strong preference for simpler rhythmic structures was observed under stress conditions. However, this general finding was strongly affected by the composing idiom and the type of instrumentation, thus showing the important interaction of musicological and psychological parameters in preference. The findings were generally analogous to the previously obtained results with computer-generated music, though not always statistically significant at the .05 level.

In this item the present results of recent research on music in the mass media are summarized and discussed in an ecological context.

The ability of man to understand language and music can be traced back through evolution to a pre-verbal system of sound discrimination. The present functional division of the hemispheres does not imply equal treatment of different kinds of stimuli, but different treatment of equal stimuli, with the categorial perception situated in the left hemisphere and sound pattern discrimination in the right. Seemingly paradoxical results from Japan prove this hypothesis and offer possible explanations of the peculiarities of Japanese music.

According to A. Paivio's Dual Coding Theory it is hypothesized that music is processed in different codes (analogous vs. propositional), which presumably depend upon the concreteness of the material involved and upon the level of musical training. Highly overlearned alphabets influence both perception and memory. Traditional music notation as an external symbolic representation is considered with regard to whether these representations are analogous or propositional and how it corresponds to music perception.

Children aged between six and ten were tested as to their ability to recognize musical phrases after an interval of two weeks. They heard musical examples sung with and without text and sang them, selves melodies with and without text. The children performed best »with text«, regardless whether the melodies were heard or sung. From nine to ten there is no further progress in memory capities for auditorily presented materials. This may correlate with other studies which prove that in the development of children the usual memory gains a greater importance than the auditive.

There are many psychological interpretations of the dramatic work of Richard Wagner. All of them neglect the every-day aspect of the feelings demonstrated in his tragedies.W otan is shown to be a father like all fathers who struggles for the love of his daughter, and this model of a relationship between a father and his favourite child is compared to another model, that of Sigmund and Anna Freud, the father and the daughter who loved her father more than herself.