Bouncing back: Can music be used to restore wellbeing?

Several researchers have explored possible pathways between engagement with music and subjective wellbeing. A recent Australian study suggests that dancing to music and singing, are activities that are related to high levels of subjective wellbeing. This study, which involved 1000 telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 500 men and 500 women, highlighted the importance of musical social networks – the positive relationship with wellbeing was strongest amongst those who said that they danced or sang with others.

But can engaging with music help us to bounce back from stressful and threatening experiences, and to restore our sense of wellbeing? The authors of the Australian study, Melissa Weinberg and Dawn Joseph, explain that subjective wellbeing represents a stable and consistent sense of general mood happiness. In the face of stressful events, we draw upon external and internal resources to restore our baseline ‘setpoint’ for subjective wellbeing. Music, it is argued, might function as such a resource.

Emotional regulation may play an important role in restoring the status quo for subjective wellbeing. One recent study, carried out in Spain, adds to the growing evidence that listening to music can help to regulate emotion, in this case helping individuals to regain a sense of relaxation and equilibrium following an acute stressful event. Alejandro de la Torre-Luque, and his colleagues used an experimental approach (randomized controlled trial), and measured cardiovascular outcomes as well as affective state following a recovery period after the stress-inducing task. While the experimental group listened to their own preferred calming music during the recovery period, the control group rested in silence. Listening to self-selected calming music helped physiological recovery from the stressful event and the music-listeners also reported more positive feelings after the recovery period, as compared with their colleagues who had not listened to music.

The deliberate use of listening to music as a way to alleviate negative moods has been highlighted in a study by William Randall and Nikki Rickard at Monash University. Using an experience sampling report method, these researchers collected data from 327 participants about reasons and contexts associated with their music listening. Emotional reasons were the most frequently cited, and it was particularly when individuals were in a negative mood that they chose to listen to music in order to release emotion, feel stronger, forget problems, cope, reflect, express themselves, or improve their mood.

Engaging with music may have an even more profound role in relation to wellbeing. According to those who have theorised the idea of Terror Management Theory, the greatest existential threat that we must negotiate, as humans, is the unconscious or conscious knowledge of our inevitable death. In her thought-provoking paper, Audrey Cardany reviews the literature concerned with the role of music as a mechanism for mitigating what is referred to as ‘mortality salience’ – that is, the conscious awareness of the certainty of death. Cardany discusses a small but growing body of empirical evidence in support of the idea that musicking (including listening, creating, and performing) may function as a buffer in the face of mortality salience because it promotes a sense of social connectedness, and strengthens our cultural identities.  In this psychological account of why we ‘do’ music, it is proposed that the power of music lies in its potential as a symbolic world that distracts us from our physical existence, helping us in our quest for meaning, and providing a safe space within which to develop a relationship with death.

In a curiously roundabout way, this brings me back to the idea of bouncing back and regaining one’s subjective wellbeing, in the face of threat or stress. The emerging evidence provides ever stronger support for the view that musicking, be it listening, creating, or performing, can function as a profoundly important mechanism for coping with the multitude of threats that life presents, including loss, stressful events, and even our deepest existential crises. Whether we refer to deliberate individual music listening musical social networks, music in community, or shared musical identity, the power of musicking seems to be extraordinary.