The Seasons of a Man’s Life

One reason for the universal appeal of music lies in the emotional rewards that music offers to its listeners. But what makes these rewards so special? The authors addressed this question by progressively characterizing music-induced emotions in 4 interrelated studies. Studies 1 and 2 (n 354) were conducted to compile a list of music-relevant emotion terms and to study the frequency of both felt and perceived emotions across 5 groups of listeners with distinct music preferences. Emotional responses varied greatly according to musical genre and type of response (felt vs. perceived). Study 3 (n 801)—a field study carried out during a music festival—examined the structure of music-induced emotions via confirmatory factor analysis of emotion ratings, resulting in a 9-factorial model of music-induced emotions. Study 4 (n 238) replicated this model and found that it accounted for music-elicited emotions better than the basic emotion and dimensional emotion models. A domain-specific device to measure musically induced emotions is introduced—the Geneva Emotional Music Scale.

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Emotions evoked by the sound of music: Characterization, classification, and measurement.

Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) is the coordination of rhythmic movement with an external rhythm, ranging from finger tapping in time with a metronome to musical ensemble performance. An earlier review (Repp, 2005) covered tapping studies; two additional reviews (Repp, 2006a, b) focused on music performance and on rate limits of SMS, respectively. The present article supplements and extends these earlier reviews by surveying more recent research in what appears to be a burgeoning field. The article comprises four parts, dealing with (1) conventional tapping studies, (2) other forms of moving in synchrony with external rhythms (including dance and nonhuman animals’ synchronization abilities), (3) interpersonal synchronization (including musical ensemble performance), and (4) the neuroscience of SMS. It is evident that much new knowledge about SMS has been acquired in the last 7 years.

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Sensorimotor synchronization: A review of recent research (2006–2012)

Background The number of mental health apps (MHapps) developed and now available to smartphone users has increased in recent years. MHapps and other technology-based solutions have the potential to play an important part in the future of mental health care; however, there is no single guide for the development of evidence-based MHapps. Many currently available MHapps lack features that would greatly improve their functionality, or include features that are not optimized. Furthermore, MHapp developers rarely conduct or publish trial-based experimental validation of their apps. Indeed, a previous systematic review revealed a complete lack of trial-based evidence for many of the hundreds of MHapps available. Objective To guide future MHapp development, a set of clear, practical, evidence-based recommendations is presented for MHapp developers to create better, more rigorous apps. Methods A literature review was conducted, scrutinizing research across diverse fields, including mental health interventions, preventative health, mobile health, and mobile app design. Results Sixteen recommendations were formulated. Evidence for each recommendation is discussed, and guidance on how these recommendations might be integrated into the overall design of an MHapp is offered. Each recommendation is rated on the basis of the strength of associated evidence. It is important to design an MHapp using a behavioral plan and interactive framework that encourages the user to engage with the app; thus, it may not be possible to incorporate all 16 recommendations into a single MHapp. Conclusions Randomized controlled trials are required to validate future MHapps and the principles upon which they are designed, and to further investigate the recommendations presented in this review. Effective MHapps are required to help prevent mental health problems and to ease the burden on health systems.

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Mental Health Smartphone Apps: Review and Evidence-Based Recommendations for Future Developments

Carolyn Saarni’s book is one of a very practical series of titles by Guilford Press examining emotional and social development. The author stated a number of goals for the book including: writing about emotional development in mid-childhood and adolescence, examining emotion as a part of culture, and establishing a pattern of studying emotion within the lives of children. The book was organized into three parts: research and theories of emotional competence; skill levels of emotional competence and the clinical application of emotional competence.

In the first part, Dr. Saarni defined emotional competence as the functional capacity wherein a human can reach their goals after an emotion-eliciting encounter. She defined emotion as a building block of self-efficacy. She described the use of emotions as a set of skills achieved which then lead to the development of emotional competence. Attainment of the skills of emotional competence is crucial to self-efficacy. Dr. Saarni outlined her theoretical position in relation to theories of emotion and social learning and cognitive development. Her approach to theory in each of these fields was integrative and focussed on self-development with a strong social-contructivist perspective. I enjoyed the culture and folk theories of emotional regulation in chapter three. Also, chapter three contained an interesting section on parent and peer influences on emotional regulation, very useful for child psychiatrists who work to discern abnormal emotional regulation and mood patterns in context.

The bulk of the book was devoted to the eight emotional competence skills:


Awareness of one’s own emotions,


Ability to discern and understand other’s emotions,


Ability to use the vocabulary of emotion and expression,


Capacity for empathic involvement,


Ability to differentiate subjective emotional experience from external emotion expression,


Adaptive coping with aversive emotions and distressing circumstances,


Awareness of emotional communication within relationships, and


Capacity for emotional self-efficacy.



Skills one through six are based on developmental research on emotions but the final two skills are based on her experience as a clinical developmental psychologist. Each chapter contained organizing subtitles and ended with culture, developmental stage and gender information. In keeping with her leanings to Lewis and Michaelson, her most basic skill, ‘awareness of one’s own emotions,’ is one that requires cognitive ability. She stipulated that, to accomplish the first skill, (Lewis’ argument) the child must know how the body feels to have an emotion. A child needs to be age four or five to demonstrate this skill reliably. Of all the skills, skill four, the capacity for empathic involvement appears to be an outlier. While the material she presented was interesting to read, the role of empathy as a skill of emotional competence wasn’t argued convincingly. On the other hand, skill 7 had a great deal of face validity. It suggested that there is a skill of emotional meta-communication.

A strength of the book is its comprehensive examination of the skills she proposed. She covered many practical issues in emotional competence. The book conveyed a strong sense of children in their world and thus it was easy and enjoyable to read. A limitation of the book related to Dr. Saarni’s description of the differences between the theoretical models and how she applied them. There is a distinct difference between the social constructivists and functionalists. If child psychiatrists or residents are not familiar with the difference, this book will confuse their understanding. The former see emotions as arising from the development of cognition and the latter see emotion as not developmentally dependent upon cognition, rather, an organizing principle in development in its own right. Despite this, the effort and breadth of the treatment of emotional competence as illustrated in this book makes it well worth the read.

The Development of Emotional Competence

The aim of this study was the exploration and theoretical clarification of the role of music in adolescents' mood regulation. The phenomenon was approached through an inductive theory construction. The data were gathered from eight adolescents by means of group interviews and follow-up forms, and were then analysed using constructive grounded theory methods. The analysis resulted in a theoretical model, which describes mood regulation by music as a process of satisfying personal mood-related goals through various musical activities. The general nature of the mood regulation is described, the goals and strategies of mood regulation are examined, and finally the specific role of music in mood regulation is discussed.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0305735607068889

The role of music in adolescents' mood regulation:

Emotional self-regulation is acknowledged as one of the most important reasons for musical engagement at all ages. Yet there is little knowledge on how this self-regulatory use of music develops ac...

Music as emotional self-regulation throughout adulthood

Music makes us move. Several factors can affect the characteristics of such movements, including individual factors or musical features. For this study, we investigated the effect of rhythm- and timbre-related musical features as well as tempo on movement characteristics. Sixty participants were presented with 30 musical stimuli representing different styles of popular music, and instructed to move along with the music. Optical motion capture was used to record participants’ movements. Subsequently, eight movement features and four rhythm- and timbre-related musical features were computationally extracted from the data, while the tempo was assessed in a perceptual experiment. A subsequent correlational analysis revealed that, for instance, clear pulses seemed to be embodied with the whole body, i.e., by using various movement types of different body parts, whereas spectral flux and percussiveness were found to be more distinctly related to certain body parts, such as head and hand movement. A series of ANOVAs with the stimuli being divided into three groups of five stimuli each based on the tempo revealed no significant differences between the groups, suggesting that the tempo of our stimuli set failed to have an effect on the movement features. In general, the results can be linked to the framework of embodied music cognition, as they show that body movements are used to reflect, imitate, and predict musical characteristics.

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Influences of rhythm- and timbre-related musical features on characteristics of music-induced movement

Music is recognized as an effective means of regulating mood. However, there has not been a scale for assessing the use of different regulatory strategies related to musical activities, and the pur...

Music in Mood Regulation: Initial Scale Development

Music therapists use guided affect regulation in the treatment of mood disorders. However, self-directed uses of music in affect regulation are not fully understood. Some uses of music may have negative effects on mental health, as can non-music regulation strategies, such as rumination. Psychological testing and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were used explore music listening strategies in relation to mental health. Participants (n = 123) were assessed for depression, anxiety and Neuroticism, and uses of Music in Mood Regulation (MMR). Neural responses to music were measured in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in a subset of participants (n = 56). Discharge, using music to express negative emotions, related to increased anxiety and Neuroticism in all participants and particularly in males. Males high in Discharge showed decreased activity of mPFC during music listening compared with those using less Discharge. Females high in Diversion, using music to distract from negative emotions, showed more mPFC activity than females using less Diversion. These results suggest that the use of Discharge strategy can be associated with maladaptive patterns of emotional regulation, and may even have long-term negative effects on mental health. This finding has real-world applications in psychotherapy and particularly in clinical music therapy.

/pdf/maladaptive-and-adaptive-emotion-regulation-through-music-a-3u9y2r90p8.pdf

Suvi Saarikallio

Papers

The role of music in adolescents' mood regulation:

Music as emotional self-regulation throughout adulthood

Influences of rhythm- and timbre-related musical features on characteristics of music-induced movement

Music in Mood Regulation: Initial Scale Development

Maladaptive and adaptive emotion regulation through music: a behavioral and neuroimaging study of males and females