title: The efficacy of musical emotions provoked by Mozart's music for the reconciliation of cognitive dissonance.
abstract: Debates on the origin and function of music have a long history. While some scientists argue that music itself plays no adaptive role in human evolution, others suggest that music clearly has an evolutionary role, and point to music's universality. A recent hypothesis suggested that a fundamental function of music has been to help mitigating cognitive dissonance, which is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions simultaneously. It usually leads to devaluation of conflicting knowledge. Here we provide experimental confirmation of this hypothesis using a classical paradigm known to create cognitive dissonance. Results of our experiment reveal that the exposure to Mozart's music exerted a strongly positive influence upon the performance of young children and served as basis by which they were enabled to reconcile the cognitive dissonance.
authors.affiliation: Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Kanrin, Inuyama, Aichi, Japan. masataka@pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp
authors.forename: Nobuo
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Masataka
authors.forename: Leonid
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Perlovsky
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D003073:Cognitive Dissonance; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D009147:Music Therapy / Q000379:methods*