ArticleBMC psychology2023
The sound of stress recovery: an exploratory study of self-selected music listening after stress.
Article in BMC psychology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Relaxation music for stress alleviation: Exploring relationships of audio features and listener profiles.Musicae scientiae : the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music · 2026Article
- Comparable Physiological Stress Responses following Music Listening and Quiet Reading: An exploratory pilot study.International journal of stress management · 2026Article
- Individual differences in the effects of musical familiarity and musical features on brain activity during relaxation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Multifaceted Music Therapy for Depression in Dementia: A Network Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundEmpirical support for the notion that music listening is beneficial for stress recovery is inconclusive, potentially due to the methodological diversity with which the effects of music on stress recovery have been investigated. Little is presently known about which recovery activities are chosen by individuals for the purpose of stress recovery, and whether audio feature commonalities exist between different songs that are selected by individuals for the purpose of stress recovery. The current pre-registered study investigated whether audio feature commonalities can be extracted from self-selected songs for the purpose of stress recovery. Furthermore, the present study exploratorily examined the relationship between audio features and participants' desired recovery-related emotions while listening and after listening to self-selected music.
methodsParticipants (N = 470) completed an online survey in which they described what music they would listen to unwind from a hypothetical stressful event. Data analysis was conducted using a split-sample procedure. A k-medoid cluster analysis was conducted to identify audio feature commonalities between self-selected songs. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between audio features and desired recovery emotions.
resultsParticipants valued music listening as a recovery activity to a similar extent as watching TV, sleeping, or talking to a significant other. Cluster analyses revealed that self-selected songs for the purpose of stress recovery can be grouped into two distinct categories. The two categories of songs shared similarities in key, loudness, speechiness, acousticness, instrumentalness, liveness, musical valence, tempo, duration, and time signature, and were distinguished by danceability, energy, and mode. No audio features were significantly associated with participants' desired recovery emotions.
conclusionsAlthough a comprehensive portrait of the relationship between audio features and stress recovery still warrants further research, the present study provides a starting point for future enquiries into the nuanced effects of musical audio features on stress recovery.
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