Soothing Melodies: How Preferred Music Influences Anxiety Reduction

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of preferred music on anxiety reduction compared to music that is not preferred and white noise. Thoma et al. (2012) demonstrated that people have preferences as to the type of music they listen to in an effort to regulate their emotions in day-to-day life. Parada-Cabalerio, Batliner, & Schuller (2020) found that familiarity with the genre of music correlated with the participants' self-perception of calm. It has also been shown that preferred music resulted in lower arousal than non-preferred music (Jiang, Rickson, & Jiang, 2016). Given these findings, preferred music should show a greater impact on anxiety reduction which could be applied in counseling settings and perhaps, after further research, therapeutic settings to aid individuals in lowering their anxiety levels by simple and accessible means. In the present study, participants will be asked to fill out a Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety (VAS-A) before completing a Serial Arithmetic Task. After this task is done, they will fill out the VAS-A again. Then they will be placed in one of 3 auditory conditions (white noise, researcher selected music, preferred music) and listen to the auditory stimulus in full (songs to completion, 4 minutes of white noise) after which they will complete a final VAS-A measure. It is hypothesized that the application of any music will have a greater anxiety reducing effect than the white noise condition. It is also hypothesized that the preferred music condition will have a greater effect on the reduction of anxiety than the researcher selected music condition.