Research Focus

As an undergraduate psychology student, I crafted a research capstone project around my two areas of study: psychology and music. I developed a research question that represented the base of a topic I have always felt is important: Do musicians and non-musicians think differently about music? I chose to look specifically at the experience of emotion present in music. Musicians and non-musicians alike are intrinsically aware of music's ability to both convey and elicit certain emotions, but the research as to how this occurs is limited. In summary, the findings showed statistical significance in favor of the musically trained participants' performance on the listening task. In addition, there was a significant correlation between performance on the listening task and score on the global empathy scale, suggesting that people with higher empathic ability are generally more able to pick up on the emotive qualities of music with or without musical training.

For my graduate work I chose to focus on the relationship between musical training and emotion regulation. My research questions were as follows:

1) How does musical training affect emotional processing and regulation outside of music?

2) What are the differences in musicians and non-musicians regarding the use of effective emotion regulation strategies?

3) What are the potential effects of music listening on emotion processing for musicians and non-musicians?

4) How does the emotional state of the performer affect the perceived emotionality of a piece of music to a listener?

My research protocol was to use a mixed methods approach in order to examine both the quantitative element of observable reactions and the qualitative element of the personal experience of the musician. Musicians have an understanding of music that is difficult to quantify in a laboratory setting, and I wanted to take advantage of this knowledge in order to fully answer my research questions and gain a more holistic understanding of the topic.

I began my research in the Spring of 2018. I designed a semi-structured interview addressing the musician's preferred methods of emotion regulation as well as the ways in which their emotional state affects their ability to practice and perform. I chose this particular focus for my initial research because I hoped to gain a sense of how musicians reconcile the potential emotionality of a piece of music they are working on and their own emotional state.

After analyzing the data based on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) I identified six themes that appeared with frequency in the interviews: 1) Social connection, 2) Confidence, 3) Communicating emotion, 4) Problem Solving, 5) Physical expression, and 6) Comfort and Familiarity.

As these themes related heavily to the use of music specifically, I pursued this avenue further with Saarikallio’s Music in Mood Regulation scale (MMR) (2012). To supplement the MMR, I used the State Emotion Regulation Inventory (SERI) (Katz, Lustig, Assis, and Yovel, 2017) as a means of gauging emotion regulation ability in daily life. Participants were taken from a much wider base, utilizing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) service as well as participants from the university.

Findings from the second phase of research indicated that there was no significant difference between musicians and non-musicians in the use of music as a regulation tool, although some surprising results were observed when divided into groups based on years of musical training. For example, individuals with over 20 years of musical training experience were statistically less likely to use music as a means of entertainment, as a way of inducing positive feelings, and releasing negative feelings. They were, however, statistically more likely to use music as a method of incurring an intense emotional experience.

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