Psychology 105
Homework assignment 1: the Mozart Effect

The "Mozart Effect" refers to a research finding that classical music enhances intellectual performance. At the bottom of this page is a description of a study that found such an effect (provided by Houghton Mifflin, your textbook publisher).

Your Assignment:

Find some other source of information about the Mozart Effect and write a one-page summary of what you find. We will discuss your findings together in class. Here are some guidelines:

· Your "source" can be anything you like: a journal article like the one described below, a magazine or newspaper article, a book, a web page, an advertisement, etc. The only restriction is that you must accurately list the source of the information.

· Your one-page summary should be as follows:

1. Reference. List the source of the information. Look under "resources for students" on my home page (http://condor.depaul.edu/~dallbrit) if you need examples of how references are formatted in psychology.

2. Summary. In one paragraph, summarize the claim being made or the research finding reported, and any evidence that is offered to support it.

3. Evaluation. In one paragraph, give me your evaluation of the information you found. Do you believe the claim that is being made, and why or why not? What kinds of things do you consider when you critically evaluate information like this?

Supplement 1.1 RESEARCH FOCUS: Listening to Music While Studying

Many students enjoy listening to music while they study, despite the commonly offered advice to “find a quiet place to study.” Such advice stems from the assumption that mental abilities are impaired by the presence of distracting music, to which the listener may partially attend. Despite such intuitions, the extent to which music does or does not affect mental abilities has been relatively unexplored by controlled experimental research.

Rauscher and colleagues (1993) decided to explicitly test the effects of music on specific mental abilities. They assembled randomly assigned groups of thirty-six college students each. One group heard ten minutes of classical music (Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 488), another group heard a ten-minute relaxation tape (giving instructions and suggestions to reduce anxiety and lower blood pressure), and a third group sat in silence for ten minutes. Then, all subjects completed a part of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test intended to measure spatial reasoning and abstract thinking. The results were that subjects in the music group had statistically significant higher test scores than subjects in the other two groups, whose scores did not significantly differ from each other. This effect lasted for up to fifteen minutes, after which test responses in all three groups were not significantly different from each other. More general factors such as physiological arousal were similar in all three groups since measured pulse rates before and after each listening condition were the same in all three groups.

Reference and Resource

Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, K. N. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature, 365, 611.