Music therapy and its impact on anxiety and mental well-being of Chinese students: An experimental comparison of traditional and VR approaches

The incorporation of advanced technologies into music therapy can potentially benefit many therapeutic approaches. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of music therapy, conventional and VR-enhanced, in improving graduate students' mental well-being and reducing their anxiety level. The study involved 270 fourth-year undergraduate students from three universities in China. Using the Chinese versions of the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (WEMWBS) and the Test Anxiety Scale (TAS), the study found that the control group experienced the worsening of mental well-being and higher anxiety when compared to baseline, with the mean differences of 2.62 and 2.60 points, respectively. The conventional music therapy group exhibited an improvement in mental well-being of 3.81 points, whereas their anxiety level decreased by 3.53 points. The effects of the intervention were even more pronounced in the VR-MT group, with an increase in the WEMWBS score of 7.48 points and a decrease in the anxiety score of 6.36 points. The results provided strong evidence of significant differences between the three conditions (p < 0.001). This study provides empirical evidence that VR-enhanced music therapy is a more effective method for reducing anxiety and improving mental health than the conventional approach.