Exploring Involuntary Music Imagery: INMI and Personal Traits

Abstract

Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI), colloquially known as the "Earworm", is a psychological phenomenon where part of a song surges in an individual's mind, with a tendency of repeating itself continuously, agains't conscious will. Its internal nature leaving little of tangible or behavioral traces has resulted in an underdeveloped scientific approach. So far, INMI have been addressed from two general perspectives: by analyzing musical properties of the stimulus, or by looking at the individual or personality characteristics of the subject. This project will focus on the latter. Music itself has been observed multiple times to affect the developing individual in important ways, including (but not limited to) influencing core personality characteristics and facilitating memory making. An in-depth analysis of these relations may help to clarify to what degree music, in the context of observation of the listening habits of a given subject, is able to predict personality characteristics, such as the level of neuroticism or openness to experience, whose correlation to "Earworms" has been previously observed multiple times. In this context, an examination of the degree of influence exerted by both Neuroticism and Openness to Experience on the particular characteristics of the INMI of a particular individual will be carried out, with a minimally considerable degree of influence predicted, and, should the data be confirmed, will contribute to a deeper, and more contextualized understanding of the functioning of INMI, possibly giving rise to the consideration of new ways to approach the study of the phenomenom. In this sense, this project intends to elaborate a comprehensive state of the art of the pre-existing research on the phenomenon, as well as the methodologies used in its approach. It also aims to design and conduct a prototype experimental study exploring the phenomenon. Keywords: INMI, Earworms, Phenomenon, Personality, Listening Habits, Music, Individual, Neuroticism, Openness to Experience