Mood regulation and music

On the 7th of November 2008, I gave a presentation at the RNCM in Manchester at the conference Music Health and Happiness. Due to the positive reactions and many emails being send to request more information I decided to provide the abstract on this blog. If you have any further questions do not hesitate to contact me.

Music is not simply a source of enjoyment or recreation; it can also affect health and psychological well-being. In particular, music can regulate emotions and moods, and there is evidence that people deliberately and regularly use it for this purpose. Mood regulation is generally considered as one of the most important skills one needs to possess in order to function in a healthy adaptive way (Larsen 2000). It has been demonstrated that people who do not know how to regulate their affect are more likely to suffer from psychological and social problems than people who do. It has also been shown in several studies that music is one of the most widely used ways to regulate mood in everyday life (e.g. Thayer, Newman and McClain, 1994). However, it has yet to be precisely established how music contributes to this regulation, and which moods are in fact regulated. In previous studies of this project it was indicated that music as a tactic might serve mood regulation strategies. For example, it can help a person to become distracted from a prevailing emotion or a difficult situation, to relax, to think rationally, or to vent emotions. It was therefore expected that participants would report to use music for a wide variety of strategies, situations as well as moods. Due to the explorative character of the study, no hypotheses were made. To discover the exact way in which music helps people to regulate their mood, a diary study followed by interviews was conducted. A total of 44 participants wrote down details about their daily music listening episodes during a period of one week, and then took part in an in-depth semi structured interview to explain more about the effect of the music on their mood, and the exact working of the music to help the different strategies. Key results will be presented in this paper. Preliminary analysis has shown that people indeed use music to regulate a large variety of moods in a large variety of situations. It was found that music is used in an often complex way, involving a wide variety of strategies. In many occasions people use several strategies simultaneously or in a sequential order. The data help explain how even sad music and sadness can contribute to happiness, and they also show that individuals can learn from mood regulation attempts that did not have the desired effect. The findings of the study will be evaluated for their potential to inform interventions which could help people to further develop their mood regulation skills through the use of music.

Larsen, R.J. (2000), Toward a Science of Mood Regulation. Psychological Inquiry, 11 [3], 129-141. Thayer, R.E., Newman, J.R., and McClain, T.M. (1994). Self-regulation of mood: Strategies for changing a bad mood, raising energy, and reducing tension. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 910-925.