Seven Ways Music Influences Mood
Good music has direct access to the emotions. As such it's a fantastic tool for tweaking our moods. Saarikallio and Erkkila (2007) investigated the ways people use music to control and improve their mood by interviewing eight adolescents from Finland. The participants may be a small, very specific group, but they actually present a really useful list:
- Entertainment - At the most fundamental level music provides stimulation. It lifts the mood before going out, it passes the time while doing the washing up, it accompanies travelling, reading and surfing the web.
- Revival - Music revitalises in the morning and calms in the evening.
- Strong sensation - Music can provide deep, thrilling emotional experiences, particularly while performing.
- Diversion - Music distracts the mind from unpleasant thoughts which can easily fill the silence.
- Discharge - Music matching deep moods can release emotions: purging and cleansing.
- Mental work - Music encourages daydreaming, sliding into old memories, exploring the past.
- Solace - Shared emotion, shared experience, a connection to someone lost.
Many of Saarikallio and Erkkila's findings chime with previous research. For example, distraction is considered one of the most effective strategies for regulating mood. Music has also been strongly connected with reflective states. These tend to allow us greater understanding of our emotions.
One of the few negative connections Saarikallio and Erkkila consider is that sad music might promote rumination. Rumination is the constant examination of emotional state which, ironically, can lead to less clarity. On the contrary, however, Saarikallio and Erkkila found that music increased the understanding of feelings, an effect not associated with rumination.
Over to you...
Perhaps the way we use music varies with factors like age and culture. Do these adolescent's experiences ring true for you? If not, what would you add to the list?
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4 comments
thanks for the info. Currently I am investigating music preferences and empathy here in Malaysia.
Or perhaps we could do cross-cultural study regarding the issue
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Glad it is useful for you. Good luck with your research - hope it goes well.
I think there is an issue here with mood congruence and direction of effect. By this I mean supposing a teenager listens to a lot of thrash/grunge/death metal. Is he doing this as a way of evoking and then dealing with negative emotions in a socially acceptable way, or is the music itself creating those negative emotions ? Does choice of music reflect mental state, or create it, from what I can remember of memory research the former is likely, but many in the media, and possibly many social psychologits would argue that it is the media (in this case the music) which creates mental states.
Matt, yes, self-report data like this is not going to be able to get at the question you're asking here. My guess is it'll be difficult to separate causal directions - music and emotion probably feed into each other.
(Did you mean to write social psychologits? I guess not, but funny typo!)