The detection of emotions is fundamental in many areas related to health and well-being. This paper presents the identification of the level of arousal in older people by monitoring their electrodermal activity (EDA) through a commercial device. The objective was to recognize arousal changes to create future therapies that help them to improve their mood, contributing to reduce possible situations of depression and anxiety. To this end, some elderly people in the region of Murcia were exposed to listening to various musical genres (flamenco, Spanish folklore, Cuban genre and rock/jazz) that they heard in their youth. Using methods based on the process of deconvolution of the EDA signal, two different studies were carried out. The first, of a purely statistical nature, was based on the search for statistically significant differences for a series of temporal, morphological, statistical and frequency features of the processed signals. It was found that Flamenco and Spanish Folklore presented the highest number of statistically significant parameters. In the second study, a wide range of classifiers was used to analyze the possible correlations between the detection of the EDA-based arousal level compared to the participants’ responses to the level of arousal subjectively felt. In this case, it was obtained that the best classifiers are support vector machines, with 87% accuracy for flamenco and 83.1% for Spanish Folklore, followed by K-nearest neighbors with 81.4% and 81.5% for Flamenco and Spanish Folklore again. These results reinforce the notion of familiarity with a musical genre on emotional induction.

This paper studies the relationship between exposure to traditional musical styles and memories retrieved by Spanish ageing adults living close to the region of Murcia. The objective is to discover alterations in brain activity when memories are generated from listening to rhythms that the participants heard during their youth. Brain region activation is observed after the acquisition, processing and analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) signals. For this, an experiment is designed, where first each participant responds to the positive and negative affect scales (PANAS) questionnaire to determine his/her affective state. Then, he/she listens to eight ad-hoc composed music pieces of varied styles (twist, swing, fandango, petenera, bolero, habanera, pasodoble and jota murciana). After listening to each composition, the participant is asked if memories have been recalled during the performance, which enables the interaction person–music style into classes “MEMORY-EVOKED” and “NO-MEMORY-EVOKED”. Lastly, after the eight music pieces, the PANAS questionnaire is given again to determine the new emotional state after being exposed to the musical styles. From this experiment, three different studies are introduced. A first within-subject study looks for significant differences in the activation of brain regions between “MEMORY-EVOKED” and “NO-MEMORY-EVOKED” classes by analyzing the EEG recordings corresponding to each complete musical piece lasting 60 s. The second within-subject study decomposes the EEG records of each musical piece into four 15 s segments, and repeats the approach. Finally, a between-subjects study determines if there are significant differences between all “MEMORY-EVOKED” and “NO-MEMORY-EVOKED” segments. The promising results, although preliminary, show that there are significant differences in terms of “MEMORY-EVOKED”/“NO-MEMORY-EVOKED” classes in the prefrontal cortex for alpha, beta, theta and gamma frequency bands by using the spectral power method.