When do Christmas songs pop into your mind?: Testing a long-term
priming hypothesis
Lia Kvavilashvili and Susan H. Anthony, University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom
INTRODUCTION
What are musical mind-pops?
Musical mind-pops refer to melodies and songs that spontaneously come to mind
without any attempt to recall them, and often surprise us with their irrelevance to the
current situation (e.g., when a student starts humming American National Anthem while
sitting in an exam). They form a part of a broader phenomenon of Involuntary Semantic
Memories or mind-pops, which are isolated fragments of our semantic knowledge (e.g., a
word or someone’s name, a visual image of something or a song/melody) that come to
mind unexpectedly, often without obvious triggers (Kvavilashvili & Mandler, 2004).
Musical mind-pops and repetitive “earworms”
Although mind-pops are predominantly one-off occurrences, occasionally they can come
to mind repeatedly, and may be difficult to get rid of. Recurring melodies and songs have
recently been studied under a variety of names such as “earworms”, “stuck song
syndrome” (Beaman & Williams, 2010; Williamson et al., 2012) and involuntary musical
imagery (INMI) (Liikkanen, 2012). However, the focus of the present investigation is on
ordinary one-off involuntary musical mind-pops.
Why do we have mind-pops? – Long-term priming hypothesis
Initial diary studies by Kvavilashvili and Mandler (2004) have shown that on almost 50%
of recorded cases participants reported that they had encountered the content of their
mind-pop in the recent past (i.e., minutes, hours, days and weeks ago). This finding gave
rise to the long-term priming hypothesis which states that stimuli (words, objects, places,
music, etc.) encountered in everyday life subconsciously activate corresponding and
related representations for relatively long periods of time and, if later, some accidental
cues further re-activate a particular, already active, representation it may result in
conscious experience of the mind-pop.
AIMS AND HYPOTHESIS OF THE STUDY
The aim was to test the long-term priming hypothesis by asking participants to record their
musical mind-pops over 7-day periods before Christmas (early November), during Christmas
(15-22 December) and after Christmas (early February). Given that participants would be
exposed to Christmas related music in December, it was predicted that participants would
record significantly more Christmas songs in December than in November or February.
DIARY METHOD
Participants – Seventeen volunteers (5 males and 12 females), with a mean age of 28.12
(SD = 12.30, range 19-50 years) took part. The majority (80%) of participants were students
whilst the others worked full time. The data of two participants were excluded as they did not
complete the diary in all three periods.
Procedure – Participants recorded their musical mind-pops in an A5 size paper diaries on
three different time periods:
Period 1 (pre Christmas) - 31 October to 6 November 2011
Period 2 (Christmas) – 15 December to 21 December 2011
Period 3 (post Christmas) – 13 February to 19 February 2012
Every time participants experienced a musical mind-pop they filled in a questionnaire
presented on a diary page. This involved describing the content of the mind pop, activities at
the time, and triggers. Long-term priming was examined by asking if the contents of the mindpop had been encountered recently and if so when and where. To assess the frequency of
repetitive musical mind-pops or earworms, participants were asked to tick boxes in the diary
if they had experienced the same mind pop more than once on the same day.
TABLE 1 – Descriptive Statistics for Musical MindPops Recorded in Periods 1, 2 and 3
TABLE 2 – Percentage (Frequency) of Xmas and NonXmas Mind-Pops Reported as Being Encountered/not
Encountered Recently
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
November December February
Total number of
mind-pops
133
132
121
Mean number of
mind-pops
(SD)
8.87
8.74
8.07
(4.75)
(4.64)
(5.69)
Total number of
Xmas mind-pops
0
28
1
Mean proportion of
Xmas mind-pops
(SD)
0.00
21.87
0.48
(0.00)
(16.95)
(1.79)
RESULTS - Main findings
Encountered
Not
(primed)
Encountered
Non-Xmas
mind-pops
32%
Xmas
mind-pops
Total
Total
68% (241)
100% (355)
82% (22)
18% (5)
100% (27)
36% (136)
64% (247)
100% (382)
(114)
CONCLUSIONS
1. Results 3 and 4 support the hypothesis by showing that chance encounters
On average, 15 participants recorded about 8 musical mind-pops in each
of the three 1-week periods, hence, the main effect of time period was
not significant (F<1) (see Table 1).
with familiar musical stimuli enhance the activation levels of their
representations which can last for several hours and days and subsequently
result in conscious experience of relevant pieces of music (i.e., musical mindpops).
2. Ordinary musical mind-pops or repetitive ‘earworms”?
2. These findings replicate and extend the results of Coane and Balota (2009),
1. Frequency of recorded musical mind-pops
In all three time-periods, the majority of the musical mind-pops (59%) did
not repeat (i.e., were recorded only once). Only 11% of mind-pops were
additionally recorded on the same day for three or more times, with a
maximum repetition of 10 times in one case. This is in line with previous
questionnaire (Liikkanen, 2012) and diary (Beaman & Williams, 2010)
studies which reported, on average, only one repetitive ‘earworm’ per
week.
3. Long-term priming of Christmas musical mind-pops (I)
Table 1 (lower panel) shows that 21.87% of all recorded mind-pops in
December were Christmas songs/melodies (n=28), while no Christmas
songs were recorded in November and only one recorded in February. The
difference between the mean proportions of recorded Christmas mindpops was significant (Friedman’s c 2 (2, 15) = 21.41, p < .0001), providing
support for the long-term priming hypothesis.
4. Long-term priming of Christmas musical mind-pops (II)
Further evidence for priming comes from the data in Table 2, which show
that while 82% of Christmas songs recorded in December were reported
to have been encountered recently (i.e., were primed), only 32% of non
Christmas musical mind-pops were reported to be primed by recent
encounter.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Tanya Gasperl for technical assistance and the following researchers for
their input in data collection, transcription and data entry: Samantha Wraight, Francesca
Spong, Adila Hssain, Danielle James, Jane Tai, Chin Nian Tan, and Jashiccah Arasilango.
Poster presented at the 53rd Annual Meeting of Psychonomic
Society, 16 November, 2012, Minneapolis, Minnesota, US.
Email: L.Kvavilashvili@herts.ac.uk
who showed that reaction times to Christmas related words (e.g., reindeer,
nutcracker) were faster during the Christmas period than during other seasons
(e.g., in summer), due to increased everyday exposure to Christmas related
words at this time of the year. In fact, the present study was inspired by the
results of Coane and Balota (2009).
3. Taken together, results have important implications for research on priming
and implicit memory by demonstrating the effects of long term priming in
everyday life with musical stimuli.
References
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Coane, J. H. & Balota, D. A. (2009). Priming the holiday spirit: Persistent
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Liikkanen, L. A. (2012). Musical activities predispose to involuntary musical
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