| Popis: |
Previous studies have shown that listening to music may modulate various stress-related outcomes, such as heart rate, blood pressure, anxiety, and negative affect. Thus, it is often assumed that listening to music is a promising method to facilitate stress recovery. A modest corpus of empirical studies has yielded mixed support for this assumption. Furthermore, the musical and psychological mechanisms underlying the supposed association between music listening and stress recovery remain to be elucidated. As such, more and improved research is required to fully understand the effects of music listening on stress recovery (Adiasto et al., under review[a]). An outstanding question in the existing literature concerns which type of music works best for the purpose of stress recovery. Outside of medical and therapeutic settings, it is thought that participant-selected (i.e., self-selected) music will result in the most beneficial effects on stress recovery: compared to experimenter-selected music, self-selected music may result in more beneficial emotional changes due to participants’ preference, familiarity, and associated memories of their respective music choices (Thoma et al., 2013). Concurrently, studies suggest that experimenter-selected music may be equally beneficial for stress recovery: as persistent, recurring thoughts about a stressor may hinder stress recovery (Brosschot et al., 2010), less familiar, experimenter-selected music may captivate individuals’ attention more than self-selected music (Kumagai et al., 2018; Madsen et al., 2019), ultimately facilitating recovery. Finally, self-selected music choices for the purpose of stress recovery may not be as distinctive as initially thought. Adiasto and colleagues (under review[b]) have shown that cluster analyses of a large selection of songs chosen by different individuals for the purpose of recovery share similarities in danceability (i.e., the extent to which a song is danceable), dynamics (i.e., the extent to which a song is calm or exciting), and musical valence (i.e., the extent to which a song conveys positive emotions). Specifically, to unwind from stress, individuals tend to select music with low-to-moderate danceability, moderate dynamics, and moderate musical valence. It remains to be seen whether experimenter-selected music with these characteristics will yield effects equivalent to self-selected music for the purpose of stress recovery. Thus, this study aims to compare the effects of self- and experimenter-selected music on psychological stress recovery. Furthermore, the study aims to investigate the extent to which the effect of music listening on stress recovery is mediated by emotional changes and cognitive distraction from the stressor. |
