Affect regulation skills with music

Last week I presented a paper at the conference for Music Development and Learning at Roehampton University. This conference was organized by Roehampton University and SEMPRE. For this conference I also wrote a paper for the proceedings titled: "Affect regulation skills with music: Insight and changes over time". You will find the abstract of this paper below.
If you like a copy of the paper (pdf) then let me know.

ABSTRACT
This paper describes a diary study followed by interviews in which it was explored how people use music for affect regulation. For this paper specifically, the data concerning the development, change, and learning of affect regulation skills are discussed. Two types of development are identified: First, lifelong development through experience with the working and outcomes of music, and second, the development of skills and especially insight of skills through participation in the study itself. The latter shows that after participants had the opportunity to think about the topic, the study caused them to reflect on their day-to-day affect regulation and they gained insight in their affect regulation behaviour. This indicates that the study itself can be a useful tool to gain knowledge. By means of this tool, one could improve one’s own affect regulation skills. The study incorporated a wide range of age, 18-64, and age-related effects will be reported.

Podcast on Hear here

After posting the little articles about music psychology (see previous post), the website Hear here from royal philharmonic orchestra and classic FM also posted a podcast in which Alex Lamont (at 6'25'') and I (at 8' 36'') are explaining a little about music and its influence on our moods. My piece was cut a little unfortunate, but basically what I am saying here is that people do not always want to be happy as the hedonistic theories claim we do, but they turn out to make themselves relaxed with listening to music. Something I also agree as to be a form of happiness, but a form of happiness that contains less arousal, and is therefore less tiresome to be in.
Especially in comparison with the perfect English accents of the host, my accent sticks out horribly, my apologies for that :-). Even more reason to compliment the host on his lovely pronunciation of my name.
Go to "this month", "podcasts" no. 10. to hear the complete podcast.

Sad-in a nice way!

Every month, the website "hear here" has a special music related theme. This month they focus on music psychology and mostly music in everyday life. Most contributions come from the music psychology group from Keele University of which I am part. Check out the site for Augusts "Listen and Discuss" called: "An outburst of the soul" and find besides the wonderful pieces of Alex, Alinka, and Andreas, mine on mood regulation.
My piece is about mood regulation with music and points out a new approach to mood regulation. I distinguise broad strategies like distraction and relaxation from tactics (or tools), like listening to music, and excersizing. I claim that the tactics like music listening can help the broader strategies, and I point out how widely used and how varied the outcome of music listening can be. If you lost it by now, check out the piece. The piece is called: Sad-in a nice way!

Nature article

Nature Magazine has recently published a series of essays about science and music. In total 9 essays were produced by leading figures in the field of music. The final essay was written by my supervisor John Sloboda. The article argues why it is impossible to study the influence of music on human beings in lab situations, and John argues why the best way to study the influence of music on thoughts and feelings is through diary studies, or experience sampling methods, followed by interviews. John also explains that we generally put too much trust in the effect of music on our life. We often refer to music as being a magic pill, while in fact music can help us to alter our mood and emotion to a certain extend, but exspecially in extreme situations, this can be hard to do.

This essay of John hints to my study in several ways which I will not point out here. I guess you will just all have to wait for my publications about my study to see. What I can say is that I am very thankfull to John to provide a reference in such a respectable place to back up the things I am doing.

On the nature site you can also find a podcast with John Sloboda about this topic.

beat parrot

Henkjan Honing is my former teacher and one of the few Music psychologists in the Netherlands. He appears often in the media, and also manages a blogger page. It was when I was looking for new media appearances of him on youtube that I came accross the beat parrot. It is generally assumed that music is a human thing, and no animals can understand or create music. This is why is it interesting to see this parrot "dancing" on the beat of a song. Notice how he "looses" the beat when the beat of the song is less obvious. He gets better towards the end of the video as well. Enjoy!

Welcome

More and more people use blogger.com to share their thoughts and interesting information. Not that I have many thoughts to share, but once in a while I come across interesting information that might be nice to check out for others. Youtube videos, interesting articles, programs etc.
"Why not start a blogger page too?", I thought. And here it is. Although I already have some things in mind which I could share with you, I will slowly feed it into the blog to prevent an overload, followed by a long silence.

I hope you will enjoy the blog!