Mehl, K., Reschke-Hernandez, A.E., Hanson, J., Linhardt, L., Frame, J., Dew, M., Kickbusch, E., Johnson, C., Bai, E. and Belfi, A.M. (2025) ‘Music-evoked autobiographical memories are associated with negative affect in younger and older adults’, Experimental Aging Research, 51(1), pp. 1–18. doi:10.1080/0361073X.2024.2302785.

Mehl and colleagues challenge the assumption that autobiographically meaningful music is primarily a vehicle of positive emotion. Thirty younger and thirty older adults listened to self-selected music in two conditions: memory-evoking music and familiar music that did not evoke autobiographical memories. Affect was measured before listening and at three subsequent time points. Positive affect increased after both kinds of music, but negative affect increased only after memory-evoking music, indicating that autobiographical musical cues are especially capable of producing mixed emotional states. The experiment’s critical operation is the use of familiar non-memory-evoking music as a control, allowing autobiographical content to be distinguished from familiarity itself. The paper therefore supplies an empirical mechanism for understanding why personally significant music cannot be equated with pleasurable or desirable listening. Its wider importance lies at the intersection of affect, ageing, memory and music-based intervention: a cue’s mnemonic potency can carry emotional costs as well as benefits, making autobiographical salience an ambivalent rather than uniformly rewarding property.

Loui, P. and Wessel, D. (2008) ‘Learning and liking an artificial musical system: Effects of set size and repeated exposure’, Musicae Scientiae, 12(2), pp. 207–230.

Loui and Wessel demonstrate that learning a musical grammar and developing a preference for its exemplars are dissociable consequences of exposure. Participants encountered melodies generated from a finite-state grammar in the unfamiliar Bohlen–Pierce system. In Experiment 1, fifteen melodies repeated twenty-seven times each produced recognition and generalisation to new grammatical melodies without differentiated preference. In Experiment 2, ten melodies repeated forty times each generated stronger recognition and greater liking for familiar items but unsuccessful grammatical generalisation. The iconic result is therefore distributional: exposure to a broader set supports abstraction of structural regularities, whereas denser repetition of fewer items favours item-specific recognition and preference. Their experimental operation replaces “amount of exposure” with the architecture of exposure—set size, repetition density and variability. The work bridges statistical learning and aesthetics by showing that becoming able to inhabit an unfamiliar musical system and becoming attached to particular objects within it are related but independent processes, undermining any universal repetition-to-liking threshold.

Hennessy, S., Janata, P., Ginsberg, T., Kaplan, J. and Habibi, A. (2025) ‘Music-Evoked Nostalgia Activates Default Mode and Reward Networks Across the Lifespan’, Human Brain Mapping, 46, e70181. doi:10.1002/hbm.70181.

Hennessy and colleagues experimentally separate nostalgia from familiarity, a distinction often blurred in research on personally meaningful music. Fifty-seven younger and older adults listened during fMRI to three individually constructed categories: personalised nostalgic music, familiar non-nostalgic music and unfamiliar non-nostalgic music, with stimuli matched for musical features through a machine-learning-based procedure. Nostalgic music produced stronger activity than both control conditions across default-mode, salience, reward, medial-temporal and supplementary-motor regions, together with increased connectivity between self-referential and affect-related areas. Older adults showed stronger BOLD responses in nostalgia-related regions, while the predictors of neural response differed by age. The study’s key conceptual operation is to demonstrate that nostalgia cannot be reduced to recognition or familiarity; it constitutes a self-relevant affective-memory configuration. By combining personalised stimulus construction with acoustic matching, the paper bridges autobiographical memory, affective neuroscience and lifespan research, offering a rigorous model for isolating biographical charge from mere musical familiarity.

Hanson, J., Frame, J., Bai, E., Mehl, K., Jakubowski, K. and Belfi, A.M. (2025) ‘Popular music and movies as autobiographical memory cues’, Memory & Cognition, 54, pp. 515–531. doi:10.3758/s13421-025-01765-2.

Hanson and colleagues compare popular music and movies as culturally distributed autobiographical cues while simultaneously constructing a normed stimulus resource. In a sample of 248 participants, music excerpts or movie clips were rated for familiarity, autobiographical salience, emotional valence and arousal. Both media contained stimuli capable of cueing memories across a wide age range, but music produced a significantly more pronounced reminiscence bump, indicating a particularly strong relation between music encountered during formative life periods and later autobiographical retrieval. The study’s methodological contribution is to move beyond idiosyncratic self-selected stimuli toward normed popular-media cues while preserving age-related variation. Its conceptual force lies in separating familiarity from autobiographical salience: culturally recognisable objects do not automatically possess equivalent mnemonic power. The comparison with cinema places music within a wider ecology of mediated memory and suggests that different cultural forms organise temporal attachment differently, opening a bridge between cognitive memory research, media studies and the cultural construction of life-course memory.

Ford, J.H., Rubin, D.C. and Giovanello, K.S. (2016) ‘The effects of song familiarity and age on phenomenological characteristics and neural recruitment during autobiographical memory retrieval’, Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 26(3), pp. 199–210. doi:10.1037/pmu0000152.

Ford, Rubin and Giovanello examine familiarity not as a terminal state of recognition but as a variable shaping the quality of autobiographical retrieval. In an event-related fMRI study, younger and older participants retrieved memories in response to age-specific popular musical clips and rated song familiarity, temporal specificity and emotional valence. Greater familiarity was associated across participants with increased dorsomedial prefrontal activity, more temporally specific memories and greater positivity. Age modified the pattern: familiarity was more closely associated with enhanced memory detail in younger adults and with affective positivity in older adults. The study’s theoretical contribution is to connect subjective familiarity with the phenomenology and neural organisation of autobiographical remembering. Its methodological strength lies in combining cue ratings, memory characteristics and neuroimaging rather than treating retrieval as a binary outcome. The wider bridge joins music cognition to lifespan memory research, showing that the autobiographical effectiveness of a cue depends simultaneously on personal relevance and the changing architecture of remembering across age.

Castro, M., L’héritier, F., Plailly, J., Saive, A.-L., Corneyllie, A., Tillmann, B. and Perrin, F. (2020) ‘Personal familiarity of music and its cerebral effect on subsequent speech processing’, Scientific Reports, 10, 14854. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-71855-5.

Castro and colleagues make a decisive distinction between general familiarity and personal familiarity. A popular song may be culturally recognisable, whereas personally familiar music is grounded in direct experience and can be attached to people, places, objects and specific spatiotemporal-emotional contexts. Using fMRI with composers, the study compares participants’ own compositions, favourite music by others and unfamiliar music, followed by personally familiar and unfamiliar names. Music carrying autobiographical content recruits a fronto-parietal network including dorsolateral prefrontal, supramarginal/angular and precuneus regions; favourite music engages reward and emotion networks, while self-composed music more strongly recruits self-referential and visuomotor processes. The methodological operation is unusually precise because familiarity, autobiographical relevance and self-reference are experimentally differentiated rather than merged. The study bridges neuroscience and autobiographical-memory theory by demonstrating that apparently equivalent states of “knowing” music can have different cerebral architectures depending on how the musical object entered the listener’s life.

Belfi, A.M., Bai, E., Stroud, A., Twohy, R. and Beadle, J.N. (2022) ‘Investigating the role of involuntary retrieval in music-evoked autobiographical memories’, Consciousness and Cognition, 100, 103305. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2022.103305.

Belfi and colleagues test whether the unusual episodic richness of music-evoked autobiographical memories can be explained simply by their tendency to arise involuntarily. By comparing memories elicited by musical and face cues while distinguishing voluntary from involuntary retrieval, the study separates cue type from retrieval intentionality. Music-evoked memories remained more episodically rich and contained more perceptual detail than face-evoked memories even when involuntary memories were compared directly across cue types. Involuntary retrieval itself increased internal detail, but it did not eliminate the music effect. The conceptual result is important because spontaneity and musical specificity cannot be collapsed into a single mechanism. Music appears to contribute something beyond effortless access, plausibly through its temporal, perceptual, emotional and contextual organisation. Methodologically, the paper exemplifies controlled decomposition of a seemingly unitary phenomenon into independent dimensions. It bridges music cognition with episodic-memory research by showing that retrieval mode and sensory cue jointly shape the phenomenology of autobiographical remembering.

Belfi, A.M. and Jakubowski, K. (2021) ‘Music and Autobiographical Memory’, Music & Science, 4. doi:10.1177/20592043211047123.

Belfi and Jakubowski define music-evoked autobiographical memory as a distinct interdisciplinary problem connecting memory, emotion, identity and ageing. Their editorial synthesis establishes that music can evoke vivid, emotionally intense and personally meaningful memories across experimental and everyday contexts, healthy and clinical populations, and quantitative, qualitative and theoretical methodologies. Rather than treating musical memory as simple recognition, they foreground the autobiographical event: a cue retrieves episodes embedded in a life history. The text maps four major axes—youth, ageing and reminiscence bumps; special populations; identity, relationships and emotions; and musical qualities—while positioning music against other sensory cues. Its conceptual operation is therefore field-forming: it shifts inquiry from whether music triggers memory to what kinds of memories emerge, for whom, under which conditions and with what phenomenological qualities. The broader bridge is toward autobiographical-memory research in which sensory media become active retrieval infrastructures connecting perception, self-continuity and temporally distributed experience.

Anglada-Tort, M., Masters, N., Steffens, J., North, A. and Müllensiefen, D. (2023) ‘The Behavioural Economics of Music: Systematic review and future directions’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(5), pp. 1177–1194. doi:10.1177/17470218221113761.

Anglada-Tort and colleagues recast musical behaviour as decision-making rather than preference considered in isolation. Using a PRISMA-guided systematic review, they move from 338 identified records to 32 included studies and organise the field into four behavioural-economic domains: heuristics and biases, social decision-making, behavioural time preferences and dual-process theory. The theoretical contribution is to show that musical choices are structured by cognitive shortcuts, social information, temporal valuation and shifts between intuitive and deliberative processing. Music listening, performance and consumption consequently appear as situated decisions rather than transparent expressions of taste. Particularly useful is the demonstration that familiarity and expertise can alter the balance between automatic and controlled judgement. The proposed Behavioural Economics of Music programme opens a bridge between music cognition and behavioural economics, providing a framework for studying how platforms, recommendations, repeated exposure, social signals and temporal routines participate in the construction of musical value.

Ordinary social life depends on environments that make encounter possible without requiring encounter to be formally organised. The crucial condition is neither spectacle nor institutional grandeur but repeatable accessibility: places that can be entered, understood, used and revisited with limited negotiation. A tavern, café, library, market or pavement becomes socially consequential when its material arrangement and habitual use lower the threshold for presence among others. Social capacity is therefore spatial before it is programmatic. It emerges through doors that remain open, counters that support brief occupation, tables that tolerate duration, familiar routines, affordable transactions, recognisable temporal rhythms and a degree of behavioural looseness. Such spaces do not simply host social relations after those relations have been formed elsewhere. They participate in producing them by stabilising situations in which proximity, repetition and recognition can accumulate.

This capacity is epistemically difficult because it often appears trivial while it is functioning. Infrastructure, as Latham and Layton insist, is frequently transparent in use and becomes visible through interruption, closure or unequal access. Uría’s historical tavern reveals the same structure from another direction: its social importance was obscured by moral categories that framed drinking, gaming and informal gathering as disorder. The ordinary setting becomes legible only when analysis separates what authorities said the space represented from what people repeatedly did there. This is a methodological lesson of wider scope. Informal public life is easily missed when research privileges formal organisations, declared functions or exceptional events. Repetition, weak ties and unplanned coexistence require attention to practices whose significance lies precisely in their routine character.

Latham, A. and Layton, J. (2022) ‘Social infrastructure: why it matters and how urban geographers might study it’, Urban Geography, 43(5), pp. 659–668. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.2003609.

Latham and Layton refine social infrastructure by distinguishing several meanings that had begun to travel under the same term: people as infrastructure, the social relations surrounding hard infrastructures, infrastructures of social care, and the public or quasi-public places that support social connection. The paper’s iconic move is conceptual disaggregation. Rather than treating social infrastructure as an intuitively positive label for any socially useful place, it asks what kind of infrastructural work is actually being described. Its theoretical contribution lies in returning infrastructure to capacity: infrastructures facilitate, support, service and sustain activity, but they do so through different material, institutional and political arrangements. Methodologically, the text urges urban researchers to specify the infrastructural object, its users, its relations of access and its mode of support instead of relying on broad metaphor. This creates a bridge to critical urban geography, where infrastructure is simultaneously material provision, unevenly distributed capacity and political form. The concept becomes strongest when its empirical register is made explicit.

Latham, A. and Layton, J. (2019) ‘Social infrastructure and the public life of cities: Studying urban sociality and public spaces’, Geography Compass, 13, e12444. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12444.

Latham and Layton develop social infrastructure as a research framework for recognising the public dimensions of spaces that are routinely overlooked because their primary function appears mundane. Libraries, laundrettes, cafés, playgrounds, swimming pools, pavements and schools matter not only for what they formally provide but for the social capacities their material and institutional arrangements make possible. The article’s central contribution is to connect infrastructure, publicness, encounter and provision within one analytic language. Its methodological operation is infrastructural rather than typological: the question is not whether a place is officially public, but how its design, accessibility, routines, conventions and maintenance support repeated forms of co-presence, trust and connection. Drawing on Star, Klinenberg and traditions of public-space research, infrastructure becomes relational, embedded and often visible most clearly when it breaks down. This produces a precise bridge between urban geography and microsociology: collective life is sustained by ordinary settings whose social effects are distributed through repeated use rather than spectacular civic form.

Uría, J. (2003) ‘La taberna. Un espacio multifuncional de sociabilidad popular en la Restauración española’, Hispania, 63(214), pp. 571–604.

Uría reconstructs the Spanish tavern as a dense institution of popular sociability rather than the degraded moral environment imagined by hygienists, employers and reformers. Its iconic idea is multifunctionality: the tavern gathered conversation, political meetings, card games, songs, dances and everyday association within a setting whose informality made it difficult to reduce to formal organisational categories. The theoretical contribution lies in shifting attention from registered associations toward spontaneous, weakly formalised social relations, showing that popular life cannot be understood solely through institutions with explicit membership or statutes. Methodologically, Uría works historically through moral discourse, regulation and social documentation while reading against the grain of elite descriptions that cast tavern life as vice, disorder or alienation. The result is a model of informal publicness in which sociability is simultaneously voluntary, embodied and politically contested. The work bridges social history with urban sociology by demonstrating how ordinary commercial interiors can become crucial infrastructures of collective life.

Marquart, H. and Schicketanz, J. (2022) ‘Experiences of safe and healthy walking and cycling in urban areas: The benefits of mobile methods for citizen-adapted urban planning’, Transportation Research Procedia, 60, pp. 290–297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trpro.2021.12.038

Marquart and Schicketanz demonstrate that mobility environments are best understood while movement is occurring rather than reconstructed retrospectively from static interviews. Their Berlin and Leipzig studies use go-alongs and ride-alongs with commuters and schoolchildren to capture ad hoc perceptions of safety, noise, pollution, vulnerability and route choice. The iconic methodological claim is that in-situ mobility reveals situational behaviour that conventional interview settings easily flatten. Participants encounter the street as a changing field of traffic, bodily exposure, memory and decision, and the researcher gains access to how prior experience is activated by immediate spatial cues. The work also stresses complementarity: mobile interviews become stronger when combined with participatory mapping, smartphone tools and group walks. The theoretical contribution is therefore modest but precise: walking and cycling are not merely transport modes but experiential interfaces through which urban environments become perceptible and evaluable. The paper bridges transport planning, health geography and qualitative mobile methods by translating situated experience into planning knowledge.

Zell-Ziegler, C., Thema, J. and Dünzen, K. (2024) ‘Using impact chains for a feasibility assessment of sufficiency policies in the mobility sector’, ECEEE Summer Study Proceedings, pp. 751–760.

Zell-Ziegler, Thema and Dünzen operationalise sufficiency by translating it into causal policy chains rather than treating it as a general ethical preference. The paper adopts the IPCC definition of sufficiency as measures and daily practices that avoid demand for energy, materials, land and water while delivering wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Its distinctive methodological contribution is the impact-chain framework, which traces the path from policy stimulus to behavioural, infrastructural and environmental effects while identifying supporting factors, barriers and risks. Seventy-four passenger-transport policies are examined across multiple strategies, including trip reduction, active mobility and modal shift. The analysis is valuable because it refuses to equate a low-demand intention with successful implementation: feasibility depends on administrative flexibility, public transport provision, distributional effects and political acceptance. The paper thus connects sufficiency research to policy design and implementation studies. More broadly, it turns “less” from a moral slogan into an analysable institutional mechanism whose consequences can be compared, qualified and tested.