Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. The study examined the impact of music’s emotional content on the aesthetic experience of visual artworks during combined stimulation. The hypothesis posited that incongruity of emotional states induced by music would impede accurate comprehension of emotional aspect of artworks. A total of 18 university students were presented with 192 paintings and 20 emotionally congruent or incongruent musical excerpts. Both paintings and music were validated as belonging to four emotional categories with different valence (positive vs negative) and arousal (high vs low ..read more

Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. Research in the area of Positive Psychology typically investigates positive psychological interventions and their impact on the lives of participants, positive psychology as an approach to enhance the lives of participants, or investigations of particular populations in search of evidence of flourishing. This paper presents a research process of embodied, creative engagement to facilitate the exploration of research phenomena within community contexts. Entitled Spiralling Engagement Experiences of Creativity (SEEC), the process adapts concepts from Poetic I ..read more

Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. Beneficial effects of music on wellbeing and group cohesion are well established. Furthermore, participation in music groups has been shown to be associated with increased orientation to the host culture, while orientation to culture of origin appears to remain unaffected. In order to gain insight into the effects of music activities on acculturative stress in adult migrants, a group of musically active migrants to Germany (n = 80) was compared with migrants who had never played a musical instrument (n = 86). We saw that music group members (n = 42) reporte ..read more

Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. This study examines how cultural workers in the music sector coped with the COVID-19-induced lockdown, and how coping is associated with growth in personal strength during the pandemic. We conducted an online survey 1 year into the pandemic among members of Creo, Norway’s largest trade union in the music sector. Respondents (N = 658) were to a large degree engaged in fight coping. Furthermore, seeking and giving social support, adopting new digital technologies, rotating job plans, as well as generating and maintaining professional skills were positively re ..read more

Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. It has been demonstrated that exposure to music with prosocial lyrics can increase the accessibility of prosocial thoughts, leading to greater empathy and fostering helping behaviors. However, existing studies have largely neglected the intertemporal nature of altruism, limiting their scope of interpretation. The present research investigates the effects of attentively listening to music with prosocial lyrics (Study 1) and playing prosocial background music (Study 2) on intertemporal charitable donations. Both studies indicated that relative to neutral musi ..read more

Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. Strongly disliked music has the capacity to evoke strong negative emotions and physical sensations—at least in some listeners. Although previous (qualitative) studies on disliked music have provided valuable descriptions of listeners’ experiences, more generalizable approaches are needed for understanding individual differences in the intensity of music-evoked aversive experiences. This study set out to explore these individual differences by developing a standardized questionnaire to measure the intensity of aversive musical experiences, the Aversive Music ..read more

Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. Mindfulness meditation practices have garnered a lot of popularity in recent years. Various psychological benefits of mindfulness meditation have been documented in a myriad of literature. In this pilot study, we evaluated the effectiveness of a short-term mindfulness training program on time-based musical perceptions of pre-service music teachers. Here, time-based perception entails the accurate perception of pattern, meter, and tempo. A one-group pretest–posttest design was implemented as a model. Pre-service music teachers (n = 8) completed the rhythm, r ..read more

Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. Music performance anxiety (MPA) is most often defined as a negative experience that is harmful to successful performance, but potential facilitating effects of MPA often are acknowledged. The distinction between facilitating and debilitating effects often is attributed to various cognitive frameworks based on the quantity of anxiety, where smaller amounts may be helpful and larger amounts harmful. The hypothesis underlying the present study holds that the difference between facilitating and debilitating MPA is more a matter of quality than quantity, specifi ..read more

Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. This study aimed to explore whether music perception is correlated with the load of exposure to musical activities in daily life, such as attending musical events, playing an instrument, attending music classes (at school or for a social project), and the time children spend listening to music using a non-experimental design. We are reusing data from the studies by Barros et al. and Cogo-Moreira & Lamont, from a random school-based sample (multilevel design) including 1,006 children from first to fifth grade in 14 schools in São Paulo, Brazil. Data were ..read more

Psychology of Music, Ahead of Print. Online participatory music creation provided an opportunity to build the public’s psychological resilience during the COVID-19 lockdown measures that led to widespread negative emotions on a societal level. This study explored how online participation in music creation as a crisis response contributes to the public’s mental health. The study employed a qualitative method that combines network ethnography and multimodal performance discourse analysis to conduct participatory observation and content analysis of people’s activities related to the song “Wuhan Y ..read more