Acute stress recovery through listening to Melomics relaxing music: A randomized controlled trial

ABSTRACT

Daily life entails having to cope with many stressful situations. Although stress-related reactions could sometimes provoke impairments in physiological processes due to the frequency of exposure or the stress burden of the event, physiological recovery after coping with stressors is highly implied in the aversive consequences of stress. To analyze the effects of listening to relaxing music (generated by the Melomics computer system) on the cardiovascular recovery and subjective feelings of anxiety after undergoing an acute-stress episode, a double-blind randomized controlled trial was conducted in healthy adults (N = 24; M = 23.05 years, SD = 2.97). Participants reported their levels of psychiatric symptomatology and anxiety and were then exposed to a stress induction protocol. Afterward, they underwent a period of recovery where they would be exposed to either a relaxing music track or silence, depending on a random assignation. Heart-derived functioning and self-reported anxiety were monitored throughout the study stages. All the participants showed stress-related reactions throughout the study stages, as it was shown for the study outcomes. Regarding the effect of listening to music, participants who listened to relaxing music during the recovery stage showed higher levels of sample entropy than controls, highlighting a large effect size on this difference (η²_partial = .59). Relaxing music promotes more adaptive emotional regulation after coping with an acutely stressful event. This study aims to shed light on the actual effects of music interventions, and encourage the use of music-based interventions on health services.

KEYWORDS:

• Stress
• music
• relaxing music
• heart rate variability
• entropy

Disclosure statement

None of the authors has biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [grant INNPACTO IPT300000-2010-10].

Notes on contributors

Alejandro de la Torre-Luque

Alejandro de la Torre-Luque is a full-time PhD candidate, granted by a scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Economy at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain). Three master’s degrees and his work within clinical settings provided him the chance to gain significant expertise in Clinical and Health Psychology. His main interests in research are to provide some evidence on the processes involved in stress, anxiety, and context adjustment and to test how might interventions and therapeutic devices promote health and psychological well-being.

Rafael A. Caparros-Gonzalez

Rafael A. Caparros-Gonzalez is a full-time PhD candidate at the University of Granada (Spain) and a full-time clinical midwife at Poniente Hospital (Spain). Caparros-Gonzalez is currently a researcher at the Neuropsychology and Clinical Psychoneuroinmunology Research Group (CTS-581, University of Granada) on Perinatal Stress from both a psychological and a physiological perspective and its relation with maternal health and infant neurodevelopment.

Teresa Bastard

Teresa Bastard is graduate in Psychology from the Universitat Jaume I de Castellón (Spain). Several postgraduate levels complemented her curriculum: a master’s degree in Legal Psychology (Spanish Association of Psychology) and another master’s degree in Research Design and Application in Psychology and Health (University of Granada, Spain). Her main interests in research cover the study on psychophysiological concomitants of complex human responses and the promotion of psychological-based interventions for adaptive emotion regulation.

Francisco J. Vico

Prof. Francisco Vico is full-time professor at the University of Malaga (Spain). His main subject of interest is the complexity of living matter, and how to approach it from computer modeling and simulation. Prof. Vico has taken part in more than 20 research projects. Noteworthy among these is the Melomics project, which is focused on developing a genomic-based computational system for the automatic music composition, with important implications in music therapy.

Gualberto Buela-Casal

Prof. Gualberto Buela-Casal is full-time professor at the University of Granada (Spain). Currently, Prof. Buela-Casal leads the Clinical Psychophysiology and Health Promotion Group (CTS-261, University of Granada) and possesses a remarkable expertise in the field of sleeping and physiological stress from a psychological and empirical perspective. More than 200 journal articles and 20 books encompass his vast contribution to Psychology and Human Sciences.