Coping with Stress: The Effectiveness of Different Types of Music

Appl Psychophysiol Biofeedback (2007) 32:163168 DOI 10.1007/s10484-007-9043-9

Coping with Stress: The Effectiveness of Different Types of Music

Elise Labb Nicholas Schmidt Jonathan Babin Martha Pharr

Published online: 27 October 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Abstract Listening to classical and self-selected relaxing music after exposure to a stressor should result in signicant reductions in anxiety, anger, and sympathetic nervous system arousal, and increased relaxation compared to those who sit in silence or listen to heavy metal music. Fifty-six college students, 15 males and 41 females, were exposed to different types of music genres after experiencing a stressful test. Several 4 2 mixed design analyses of variance were conducted to determine the effects of music and silence conditions (heavy metal, classical, or self-selected music and silence) and time (prepost music) on emotional state and physiological arousal. Results indicate listening to self-select or classical music, after exposure to a stressor, signicantly reduces negative emotional states and physiological arousal compared to listening to heavy metal music or sitting in silence.

Keywords Stress Anger SNS arousal Music types

Music may be a medium to help young people reduce negative emotions. In reviewing the research literature one nds a lack of scientic studies on the psychophysiological effects of different types of music in young people. Music is an important aspect of youth culture and most young people listen to music for a variety of reasons (Trzcinski 1994). Young people report that music can help them relax and will often have a collection of favorite tunes that they will listen to when they are feeling stressed out (Knobloch and Zillman 2002). Burns et al. (1999, 2002) and Labb et al. (2004) report ndings that suggest

listening to relaxing music, such as some selections of classical music, results in the listener experiencing positive emotions and increases in parasympathetic nervous system arousal. They observed participants reaction to what is traditionally considered relaxing music and hypothesized that an individuals perception of whether they believed the music was relaxing may be an important factor in inducing relaxation. Self-selected music refers to music that the participants chose as relaxing.

In the current study we evaluated music the person believes is relaxing to determine whether listening to music that one is attracted to can be an effective...