Young adults are fond of their parents' music, too

Music has an uncanny way of bringing us back to a specific point in time, and each generation seems to have its own opinions about which tunes will live on as classics. New research suggests that today's young adults are fond of and have an emotional connection to the music that was popular when their parents were their age in the 1980s. "Music transmitted from generation to generation shapes autobiographical memories, preferences and emotional responses, a phenomenon we call cascading 'reminiscence bumps,'" says lead researcher Carol Lynne Krumhansl, professor of psychology at Cornell. "These new findings point to the impact of music in childhood and likely reflect the prevalence of music in the home environment." The study, published Sept. 4 online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveals that while songs that were popular in our early 20s seem to have the greatest lasting emotional impact, music that was popular during our parents' younger days also evokes vivid memories. To explore the connection between autobiographical memories and musical memories, Krumhansl and Justin Zupnick '12 asked 62 college-age participants to listen to two top Billboard hits per year from 1955 to 2009. The researchers wanted to see which periods of music were most memorable for the participants, which songs conjured up the strongest feelings, and which ones made the participants happy, sad, energized or nostalgic.