New research shows music can lift the mood of listeners who are feeling low, and researchers want to better understand how listening to music can boost wellbeing.
JCU music psychology scholar and senior lecturer Dr Amanda Krause co-authored the paper, with researchers using a mobile app to track students' experiences at the start of their listening, and again after five minutes and 20 minutes.
The study collected data including music choices, purpose, context and mood during the listening episodes, while baseline wellbeing measures were also recorded at the beginning of the study.
All of the participating students were asked to fill out a mental health survey prior to the study, yielding a baseline level of languishing, moderate or flourishing wellbeing.
The largest positive change in episode wellbeing was evident for the languishing group and Dr Krause said the study homed in on whether different patterns of listening behaviours and outcomes existed relative to these baseline wellbeing levels.
"And what stood out is those people who would be categorised as languishing, sort of the poor mental health category at baseline, seemed to have different patterns compared to the moderate and flourishing wellbeing folks," she said.
"So, it has implications as this is a practice that people do in everyday life. Can we teach people to be aware of how music impacts their wellbeing, and can we then teach people to have healthy uses of music?
"If we're seeing that the languishing folks maybe have a different pattern, they're the ones who need help in improving their wellbeing the most out of those three groups.
"This isn't an answer we can get from this study, but we can use this to build other studies and other interventions to augment people's wellbeing through something they're already doing, which is music listening."
Dr Krause said that while there's increasing evidence that shows music listening can be beneficial to your wellbeing, the success of deliberate, self-directed and goal-focused listening has remained largely unexplored.
"The students are asked at the start, why are they listening? So, we get a little picture of their motivation, or their aim, and then the idea is after five minutes and 20 minutes into their listening, have they achieved that goal?" Dr Krause said.
"What's happened to their mood? Are they feeling better? What's happened to their wellbeing?
"We were really interested in looking at this idea of their wellbeing unfolding across the music listening, relative to whether they were meeting that listening goal that they had.
"We weren't really trying to quantify what reason for listening was more or less popular.
"We were more concerned about whether you were meeting that reason or goal that you set out to achieve and how listening to music might influence how you're feeling in real-time."
The research article was published in Frontiers in Psychology and can be accessed here.
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