Mind-Wandering during Personal Music Listening in Everyday Life: Music-Evoked Emotions Predict Thought Valence

Liila Taruffi
Additional contact information
Liila Taruffi: Music Department, Durham University, Durham DH1 3RL, UK

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 23, 1-22

Abstract: Research has shown that mind-wandering, negative mood, and poor wellbeing are closely related, stressing the importance of exploring contexts or tools that can stimulate positive thoughts and images. While music represents a promising option, work on this topic is still scarce with only a few studies published, mainly featuring laboratory or online music listening tasks. Here, I used the experience sampling method for the first time to capture mind-wandering during personal music listening in everyday life, aiming to test for the capacity of music to facilitate beneficial styles of mind-wandering and to explore its experiential characteristics. Twenty-six participants used a smart-phone application that collected reports of thought, mood, and emotion during music listening or other daily-life activities over 10 days. The application was linked to a music playlist, specifically assembled to induce positive and relaxing emotions. Results showed that mind-wandering evoked during music and non-music contexts had overall similar characteristics, although some minor differences were also observed. Most importantly, music-evoked emotions predicted thought valence, thereby indicating music as an effective tool to regulate thoughts via emotion. These findings have important applications for music listening in daily life as well as for the use of music in health interventions.

Keywords: mind-wandering; music-evoked emotions; visual mental imagery; mood regulation; health; wellbeing; digital health interventions; experience sampling method; personal music listening (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/23/12321/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/23/12321/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:23:p:12321-:d:686413

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().