Childhood Emotional Abuse and Short-Term Stress Continuity Among University Students: The Role of General Music Preference

We examined whether childhood emotional abuse was associated with short-term stress continuity among university students and whether general music preference was related to variation in the T1–T2 stress pathway. A two-wave prospective study with a three-month interval was conducted among 237 Chinese university students. Participants completed self-report measures of childhood emotional abuse, stress at both waves, and general music preference. Conditional process analysis was conducted while controlling for gender, academic year, and major type. Attrition and sensitivity analyses were also performed. Childhood emotional abuse was positively associated with both T1 and T2 stress, and T1 stress strongly predicted T2 stress, indicating short-term stress continuity. In the full sample, the interaction between T1 stress and general music preference was statistically significant, indicating that the T1–T2 stress association varied across levels of general music preference. However, the index of moderated mediation was not statistically significant because its bootstrap confidence interval included zero. Attrition analysis showed no significant difference in T1 stress between retained and lost participants. After music-major students were excluded, the associations among childhood emotional abuse, T1 stress, and T2 stress remained significant, whereas the interaction between T1 stress and general music preference was no longer significant. Childhood emotional abuse was associated with elevated and persistent stress across a three-month period among university students. The T1–T2 pathway should be interpreted as short-term stress continuity or carryover rather than as evidence of a distinct causal mediation process. Although general music preference was related to variation in stress continuity in the full sample, the nonsignificant index of moderated mediation and the sensitivity-analysis results indicate that this finding was not robust. The role of general music preference should therefore be considered preliminary and hypothesis-generating.