Can Fantasizing While Listening to Music Play a Protective Role Against the Influences of Sensation Seeking and Peers on Adolescents’ Substance Use?

Abstract

“The combination of music and drugs proved to be potent, and

scientific research has yet to explain it”

(Levitin, 2008, p. 74; The World in Six Songs).

This study examined if fantasizing while listening to music could represent a potential protective factor against adolescent substance use (cigarette, alcohol, and cannabis). The first hypothesis was that fantasizing while listening to music would moderate (buffer) the link between sensation-seeking and substance use. The second hypothesis was that fantasizing while listening to music would also moderate (buffer) the link between peer substance use and individual substance use. The sample comprised 429 adolescent boys and girls who answered a self-report questionnaire in 2003. They were regular students attending a public high school in Montreal, Canada. The results revealed that fantasizing while listening to music came short of buffering the link between sensation-seeking and substance use among highly musically involved adolescents. Still, fantasizing while listening to music significantly attenuated the relationship between peer substance use and individual substance use (thereby, showing a protective effect) among highly musically involved adolescents. Fantasizing while listening to music did not buffer the relation between either risk factor (sensation-seeking or peer substance use) and substance use among moderately musically involved adolescents.

Keywords :

• music
• fantasizing
• sensation-seeking
• peers
• substance
• adolescence
• protective factor
• risk factor

THE AUTHORS

Dave Miranda, Ph.D., was a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Psychology of the University of Ottawa during the writing of this article. He is presently a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Psychiatry (Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry) of McGill University (Montreal, Canada). His research areas are developmental psychology, social psychology of music, personality psychology, developmental psychopathology, and cross-cultural psychology.

Patrick Gaudreau, Ph.D., is an associate professor of social psychology at the School of Psychology of the University of Ottawa in Canada. He conducts research on achievement, motivation, and the regulation of action in the education, sport, and work domains. His research interests include personality, coping, motivation, and goal-related processes studied with a mixture of experimental, longitudinal, and multilevel research designs.

Julien Morizot, Ph.D., is a professor at the School of Psychoeducation of the University of Montreal (Montreal, Canada). He has been involved in research aimed at understanding the development of personality traits, the development of psychopathology as well as desistance from antisocial behavior. He also works on the application of modern statistical and psychometric methods aimed at better conceptualizing personality and psychopathology.

Jean-Sébastien Fallu, holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Montreal, Canada. He obtained postdoctoral training at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto where he contributed to several papers on the relationship between drug or alcohol use and aggression. He is currently an assistant professor at the School of psychoeducation of the University of Montreal, Canada. His main research interest is in the developmental etiology, particularly protective factors, and prevention of adolescent substance misuse. He is also the founder and president of a harm reduction synthetic drug misuse prevention community based group, GRIP Montreal.

Notes

1 These are basic correlational models that can serve as methodological templates within which more conceptual complexity can be gradually added. For instance, Hill (1965) has suggested criteria to help researchers and clinicians determine when risk factors involve causation or correlation. Recent advances in developmental psychopathology have also suggested that the causality of risk and protective factors could also be determined through carefully designed longitudinal randomized prevention trials (Howe, Reiss, & Yuh, 2002).

2 Extraversion was related to sensation seeking among both the highly musically involved (r = 0.28, p < .05) and the moderately musically involved adolescents (r = 0.37, p < .001).

3 The correlation between sensation seeking and substance use was indeed significant (r = 0.12, p = .01) in the entire sample (N = 429).

4 The journal's style utilizes the category substance abuse as a diagnostic category. Substances are used or misused; living organisms are and can be abused. Editor's note.