Singing Your Heart Out

The act of singing in evaluative contexts (e.g., singing in front of an audience) creates acute stress; however, individuals may vary in terms of the nature of stress responses. In the current work, we explored the relationship between singing pitch accuracy and individuals’ cardiovascular stress responses during singing performance. In an initial vocal screening session, we assessed 60 university students’ singing accuracy with a pitch imitation paradigm. Then, in a separate session, we examined the degree to which those who sang less accurately in the initial screening session—relative to those who sang more accurately—exhibited cardiovascular responses consistent with perceiving an active singing task to be manageable (challenge/threat responses), as well as important or valuable (task engagement). During both a singing and speech task, less accurate singers exhibited responses consistent with greater threat and lower task engagement, suggesting that they evaluated these tasks as less manageable and less important than did more accurate singers. Further, using hierarchical linear regression analyses, we found robust associations between singing pitch accuracy and challenge/threat responses in particular, existing above and beyond other theoretically relevant variables, including pitch discrimination, past singing training, and self-efficacy. Overall, the current results suggest valuable insight and directions for future research within the stress psychophysiology and singing cognition literatures.