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Metal Music Studies

Published by Intellect since 2015, the aims and scope of the journal are:

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This peer-reviewed journal provides a focus for research and theory in metal music studies, a multidisciplinary (and interdisciplinary) subject field that engages with a range of parent disciplines. It provides a platform for high-quality research and theory and aims to be a unique resource for metal music studies.

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OPINION article

Bang your head: using heavy metal music to promote scientific thinking in the classroom.

• Department of Psychology, MacEwan University, Edmonton, AB, Canada

While heavy metal music may not be something typically covered in an introductory psychology textbook, there are many useful resources from this area of popular culture that can help promote scientific thinking in the classroom. From hidden messages in Judas Priest's music to Slayer being accused of inciting murder, heavy metal music has a long history of unique instances that are directly related to psychology. By incorporating examples from the world of heavy metal, educators can discuss scientific thinking in a way that is engaging and memorable for students.

Helping students think like scientists—that is to apply the rigorous principles of hypothesis testing outside of the classroom—is a challenge ( Willingham, 2008 ). Robert Cialdini proposed that creating mystery in the classroom is an effective means to engage students and promote learning ( Cialdini, 2005 ). Specifically, Cialadini argued that instructors should frame a lecture in the same way a mystery writer frames a novel, by posing a puzzle and providing the information for the reader—or in this case, the student—to solve it. The question, or mystery, can be broadly stated as, “Can music lead people to commit harmful acts?”

Using the Cialadini approach of creating mystery, educators can frame a discussion around music as a way to introduce a variety of topics related to scientific thinking, such as logical fallacies, issues in research methodology, and biases in thinking. For example, the belief that there is a causal link between music and harm could be discussed in terms of the argumentum ad antiquitatem fallacy, also known as the appeal to traditional (e.g., Vaughn and Schick, 1999 ). For over two thousand years, there has been public concern about the impact of certain types of music on behavior. Aristotle stated that “…if over a long time (a person) habitually listens to music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form” ( Grout, 1988 ). As music has historically been associated with causing harm, people may fall prey to the argumentum ad antiquitatem fallacy and accept the claim of causality between music and harm, without examining any empirical evidence.

Further discussion of fallacies and biases can be grounded in cases where heavy metal has been implicated in graphic and disturbing crimes. Heavy metal music came under intense scrutiny in the 1980's when heavy metal artists, such as Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne, were blamed for adolescent violence and suicide ( Martin et al., 1993 ; Weinstein, 2000 ) 1 . The shocking nature of these crimes are memorable, and as such are easily brought to mind when people think of heavy metal music. By discussing the availability heuristic—basing the likelihood of an event on the ease with which it comes to mind—educators can challenge students to consider what evidence they have used to assess the impact of music on behavior ( Kahneman et al., 1982 ).

To facilitate scientific thinking, especially in terms of methodological issues, educators can present cases in popular culture and challenge students to determine the validity of the claims made. One of the most famous cases of heavy metal being implicated with harm is of Judas Priest. The band was charged with planting a subliminal message in the song Better By You, Better Than Me ( Moore, 1996 ; Bushong, 2002 ). Specifically, when the song is played backwards the phrase “Do It” can be heard 2 . In this case, two teenage boys who had spent several hours listening to Judas Priest while drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana went to a local park and attempted suicide with a shotgun. Judas Priest was eventually acquitted of any wrongdoing, though for a somewhat surprising reason. Rather than the case being dismissed on account of the clear empirical evidence that subliminal messages could not cause a person to commit suicide (e.g., Vokey and Read, 1985 ; Egermann et al., 2006 ; Moore, 2008 ), the band was found not guilty because the “Do It,” which can be heard backwards, was not intentionally placed in the song. This case can lead to an interesting class discussion on how extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim that a backwards, subliminal message can lead someone to take their own life is an extraordinary claim. Students can be challenged to describe how they would experimentally test the impact of subliminal messages on behavior, followed by a class discussion of how the actual research was conducted in the field (e.g., Vokey and Read, 1985 ). This is an engaging example to help students better understand variable manipulation, demand characteristics, and issues of generalizability. At least in the case of subliminal messages, students will learn that music does not lead to problematic or harmful behavior 3 .

In terms of creating mystery in the classroom, Cialdini suggests that instructors need to “deepen the mystery” and provide more details to the “case.” While there is no evidence that subliminal messages in music produce changes in behavior, there are examples where the link between harm and music is less clear. Norwegian Black Metal, an extreme form of heavy metal music consisting of distorted guitars and vocals, has been associated with murder, arson, and even cannibalism ( Moynihan and Soderlind, 2003 ). To highlight the alarming nature of some of the acts associated with this type of music, educators may want to provide examples incorporating bands such as Mayhem, whose lead singer committed suicide in the band's recording studio in 1991. Upon finding the body, rather than calling the police, the guitarist for the band took polaroid photos and collected pieces of the skull to make necklaces for those he deemed “worthy.” 4

Another example of music associated with disturbing and harmful acts can be found in the case of the band Slayer. In 1996, two teenagers were charged in the murder of a 15-year-old girl ( Horn, 2000 ). The boys claimed they took inspiration to commit the crime from lyrics in the Slayer songs Postmortem and Dead Skin Mask 5 . The parents of the victim sued Slayer and their record label for unlawfully marketing and distributing obscene and harmful products to minors ( Phillips, 2001 ; Potter, 2003 ). The crimes committed in the name of Black Metal and Slayer are very disturbing. While reliance on the availability heuristic provides an explanation as to why people could overestimate the likelihood of music causing harm, the mystery is far from solved.

Students should be challenged with providing the nature of the claim, and then exploring the evidence supporting the claim ( Bartz, 2002 ). Is the evidence sufficient to demonstrate a causal relationship between heavy metal and problematic and deviant behavior? One approach to further engage students is to divide the class into groups to act as the prosecutor or defense in a mock trial of the Slayer murder case. The value in using this case is that the real-world outcome is known. The case did not go to trial, as the perpetrators of the crime had a history of criminal behavior, drug and alcohol abuse, as well as other factors that clearly demonstrated that listening to the music of Slayer was not the cause of the horrific crimes 6 . Cases like Slayer and Mayhem can lead to fruitful class discussion regarding how correlation does not equal causation.

There is a correlational relationship, but not a causal one, between music preference and problematic behavior. People who engage in problematic or criminal behaviors are more likely to listen to problem music, such as Black Metal (e.g., Epstein et al., 1990 ; Hansen and Hansen, 1991 ); however, the style of music a person prefers does not allow us to predict any problematic behavior. Simply put, if someone is wearing a Mayhem t-shirt, we cannot make any predictions about the likelihood that this person will commit a criminal act. If we know though, that a person has burned down a church, we are able to predict which type of music they most likely prefer. In these cases, the impact of music on behavior is mediated by other variables such as psychoticism ( North et al., 2005 ), sensation-seeking ( Litle and Zuckerman, 1986 ; Arnett, 1992 ), or negative family relationships ( Arnett, 1992 ; Took and Weiss, 1994 ).

One of the reasons heavy metal music ideally fits Cialdini's structure of creating mystery in the classroom is that many of the mysteries regarding heavy metal music and harm have been solved. An interesting example, and an ideal one for class discussion, is the impact of the Parent's Music Resource Centre (PRMC), formed in 1985 and led by Tipper Gore ( Chastagner, 1999 ). The PMRC believed that the lyrics in heavy metal music were directly contributing to the rise in suicide attempts and sexual assault among adolescents ( Sampar, 2005 ). The PMRC demanded that albums be censored, leading to the “Parental Advisory” sticker now found on many popular albums. The PMRC implemented measures specifically, putting warning labels on music and trying to ban certain types of music, in order to protect people from the supposedly harmful effects of listening to heavy metal music. The PMRC can be used as a way to introduce further logical fallacies, such as the emotional fallacy (e.g., Slovic and Peters, 2006 ) and the argument from authority ( Smith, 2010 ). The evidence on which the PRMC based their decisions was entirely anecdotal, and the anecdotes were highly emotional. While the members of the PMRC portrayed themselves as experts, none of the members had sufficient expertise in understanding human behavior. The PMRC is an ideal discussion point, as research has been done to demonstrate that the claims made by the organization were incorrect.

Contrary to the concerns of the PMRC, people who were fans of heavy metal music in adolescence fared better in many aspects of their adult lives than people who were not fans. Howe et al. (2015) surveyed people who were adolescent fans of the heavy metal in the 1980's. In comparison to college students and to a middle-aged comparison group, heavy metal fans reported that they were happier during adolescence, and were better adjusted as adults 7 . While the Howe et al. (2015) study shows that listening to heavy metal does not appear to have any negative long-term effects, what about the impact of listening to aggressive music on people who are fans of heavy metal? The PMRC claimed that listening to problematic music would lead to a cause in aggression. Sharman and Dingle (2015) found that listening to extreme music actually led to an increase in positive emotions for people who enjoy this type of music. The data indicate that the PMRC would have been wise to direct their attention elsewhere.

Heavy metal is certainly not the only topic, let alone music, that is associated with problematic behavior. Instructors are encouraged to use Cialdini's approach of bringing mystery to the classroom with other elements of pop culture, such as film, videogames, comic books, and other forms of music to promote scientific thinking. The value of using examples in heavy metal is that instructors can refer to the research that sheds light directly on the relationship between harm and this style of music. By using examples from heavy metal music, instructors are able to pose the question of the relationship between harm and heavy metal, allow students to consider the claims, apply critical thinking skills, propose how these claims should be tested, and finally solve the mystery with data from the relevant literature.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The reviewer, MD, and handling Editor declared their shared affiliation, and the handling Editor states that the process nevertheless met the standards of a fair and objective review.

1. ^ See North and Hargreaves (2008) for more historical examples of public panic regarding music.

2. ^ To enhance the impact of this example, I encourage educators to allow students to hear the audio of the backwards message in class. The backwards version of the song is available on YouTube.

3. ^ Judas Priest is arguably the most famous case of backwards messaging, though there are many more examples. A thorough list of songs including backwards messaging, which can be useful class material, can be found on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backmasked_messages ). A personal favorite is “Weird Al” Yankovic's backwards message in the song, “I Remember Larry.” When played backwards, the listener hears, “Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands.”

4. ^ For further details on Black Metal and criminal behavior, see Moynihan and Soderlind (2003) .

5. ^ To increase the impact of these examples, I recommend playing parts of these songs, or showing videos of the songs performed live. Both of these songs are available on YouTube.

6. ^ For a detailed example of how critical thinking skills can be related to a legal setting, see Ennis (1987) .

7. ^ Howe et al. (2015) also surveyed groupies and heavy metal musicians. While not the focus of this paper, the results from groupies and musicians can also make for interesting class discussion.

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Keywords: scientific thinking, teaching resources, heavy metal, music, introductory psychology

Citation: Schmaltz RM (2016) Bang Your Head: Using Heavy Metal Music to Promote Scientific Thinking in the Classroom. Front. Psychol . 7:146. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00146

Received: 20 August 2015; Accepted: 26 January 2016; Published: 10 February 2016.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2016 Schmaltz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Rodney M. Schmaltz, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Suicide, Self-Harm and Survival Strategies in Contemporary Heavy Metal Music: A Cultural and Literary Analysis

• Published: 29 March 2014
• Volume 37 , pages 1–17, ( 2016 )

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• Charley Baker 1 &
• Brian Brown 2  

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This paper seeks to think creatively about the body of research which claims there is a link between heavy metal music and adolescent alienation, self-destructive behaviours, self-harm and suicide. Such research has been criticised, often by people who belong to heavy metal subcultures, as systematically neglecting to explore, in a meaningful manner, the psychosocial benefits for individuals who both listen to contemporary heavy metal music and socialize in associated groups. We argue that notions of survival, strength, community, and rebellion are key themes in contemporary heavy metal music. Through literary-lyrical analysis of a selection of heavy metal tracks, this paper aims to redress the balance of risk and benefit. We argue that listening to this type of music, the accompanying social relationships, sense of solidarity and even the type of dancing can ameliorate tumultuous and difficult emotions. Songs which could be read as negative can induce feelings of relief through the sense that someone else has felt a particular way and recovered enough to transform these emotions into a creative outlet. This genre of music may therefore not increase the risk of untoward outcomes in any simple sense but rather represent a valuable resource for young people in difficulty.

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Baker, C., Brown, B. Suicide, Self-Harm and Survival Strategies in Contemporary Heavy Metal Music: A Cultural and Literary Analysis. J Med Humanit 37 , 1–17 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9274-8

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Heavy metal music and managing mental health: Heavy Metal Therapy

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Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

Heavy metal music may have a bad reputation, but it has numerous mental health benefits for fans

Summary: Heavy metal music may have a bad reputation, but a new study reveals the music has positive mental health benefits for its fans.

Source: The Conversation

Due to its extreme sound and aggressive lyrics, heavy metal music is often associated with controversy. Among the genre’s most contentious moments, there have been instances of blasphemous merchandise, accusations of promoting suicide and blame for mass school shootings. Why, then, if it’s so “bad”, do so many people enjoy it? And does this music genre really have a negative effect on them?

There are many reasons why people align themselves with genres of music. It may be to feel a sense of belonging, because they enjoy the sound, identify with the lyrical themes, or want to look and act a certain way. For me, as a quiet, introverted teenager, my love of heavy metal was probably a way to feel a little bit different to most people in my school who liked popular music and gain some internal confidence. Plus, I loved the sound of it.

I first began to listen to heavy metal when I was 14 or 15 years old when my uncle recorded a ZZ Top album for me and I heard singles by AC/DC and Bon Jovi. After that, I voraciously read music magazines Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Metal Forces, and RAW, and checked out as many back catalogs of artists as I could. I also grew my hair (yes, I had a mullet … twice), wore a denim jacket with patches (thanks mum), and attended numerous concerts by established artists like Metallica and The Wildhearts, as well as local Bristol bands like Frozen Food.

Over the years, there has been much research into the effects of heavy metal. I have used it as one of the conditions in my own studies exploring the impact of sound on performance. More specifically, I have used thrash metal (a fast and aggressive sub-genre of heavy metal) to compare music our participants liked and disliked (with metal being the music the did not enjoy). This research showed that listening to music you dislike, compared to music that you like, can impair spatial rotation (the ability to mentally rotate objects in your mind), and both liked and disliked music are equally damaging to short-term memory performance.

Other researchers have studied more specifically why people listen to heavy metal, and whether it influences subsequent behavior. For people who are not fans of heavy metal, listening to the music seems to have a negative impact on well-being. In one study , non-fans who listened to classical music, heavy metal, self-selected music, or sat in silence following a stressor, experienced greater anxiety after listening to heavy metal. Listening to the other music or sitting in silence, meanwhile, showed a decrease in anxiety. Interestingly heart rate and respiration decreased over time for all conditions.

Metalheads and headbangers

Looking further into the differences between heavy metal fans and non-fans, research has shown that fans tend to be more open to new experiences, which manifests itself in preferring music that is intense, complex, and unconventional, alongside a negative attitude towards institutional authority. Some do have lower levels of self-esteem, however, and a need for uniqueness.

One might conclude that this and other negative behaviors are the results of listening to heavy metal, but the same research suggests that it may be that listening to music is cathartic. Late adolescent/early adult fans also tend to have higher levels of depression and anxiety but it is not known whether the music attracts people with these characteristics or causes them.

Despite the often violent lyrical content in some heavy metal songs, recently published research has shown that fans do not become sensitized to violence , which casts doubt on the previously assumed negative effects of long-term exposure to such music. Indeed, studies have shown long-terms fans were happier in their youth and better adjusted in middle age compared to their non-fan counterparts. Another finding that fans who were made angry and then listened to heavy metal music did not increase their anger but increased their positive emotions suggests that listening to extreme music represents a healthy and functional way of processing anger.

Other investigations have made rather unusual findings on the effects of heavy metal. For example, you might not want to put someone in charge of adding hot sauce to your food after listening to the music, as a study showed that participants added more to a person’s cup of water after listening to heavy metal than when listening to nothing at all.

Finally, heavy metal can promote scientific thinking but alas not just by listening to it. Educators can promote scientific thinking by posing claims such as listening to certain genres of music is associated with violent thinking. By examining the aforementioned accusations of violence and offense – which involved world-famous artists like Cradle of Filth, Ozzy Osbourne, and Marilyn Manson – students can engage in scientific thinking, exploring logical fallacies, research design issues, and thinking biases.

So, you beautiful people, whether you’re heading out to the highway to hell or the stairway to heaven, walk this way. Metal can make you feel like nothing else matters. It’s so easy to blow your speakers and shout it out loud. Dig!

About this neuroscience research article

Source: The Conversation Media Contacts: Nick Perham – The Conversation Image Source: The image is adapted from The Conversation news release.

The reality is the relationship between metal and it’s fans can only be understood by said fans. Non-metal listeners will *never* understand what this music does for us, what it means to us, and the positive outlook it can breed. Such is the workings of the human ego.

Oh boy, making people listen to commercialized pop music and claiming that it’s metal… Why am I not surprised?

Bullshit. Heavy metal breeds pychos.

What the music lacks in harmonic diversity it makes up for in repetition.

I am 65 and from NZ. Love all sorts of live music and dancing. Belong to a ladies choir, do latin dancing, have done a mashall art and am in a long term relationship. Found Heavy Metal about 5 years ago. Love the live gigs, amazing……fast, loud and hard plus sweat.. The fans come for the music and the intense release of energy, but at all times respect each other. Gigs always start on time. And men there are there for the total expireance not to chat women up like at pop concerts. Best total body experience you can have and my last concert was in Warsaw, Poland…Alien Weaponry from NZ plus a Polish band….even if you don’t know the words you can sing full pellet. Everyone must try it

My opinion is that someone must be smoking pot, shooting smack, crack or any other mind blowing drug to think heavy metal promotes scientific thinking. HA! HA! HA!

I enjoy and learn from the articles published here. However I have a problem when I want to share some of them with family, friends, etc… Please, give me access to send information through email or gmail; it is better and faster… Thank you!

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Metal Music Studies is the journal of the International Society for Metal Music Studies. The aims of the journal are: • To provide an intellectual hub for the International Society of Metal Music Studies and a vehicle to promote the development of metal music studies; • To be the focus for research and theory in metal music studies – a multidisciplinary (and interdisciplinary) subject field that engages with a range of parent disciplines, including (but not limited to) sociology, musicology, humanities, cultural studies, geography, philosophy, psychology, history, natural sciences; • To publish high-quality, world-class research, theory and shorter articles that cross over from the industry and the scene; • To be a world leader in interdisciplinary studies and be a unique resource for metal music studies.

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Beneficial effects of heavy metal music on wellbeing

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We welcome Martikainen and colleagues’ findings highlighting the potential health and wellbeing benefits of exposure to heavy metal music. 1

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Global Metal Music and Culture

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This book defines the key ideas, scholarly debates, and research activities that have contributed to the formation of the international and interdisciplinary field of Metal Studies. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including popular music, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics, this volume offers new and innovative research on metal musicology, global/local scenes studies, fandom, gender and metal identity, metal media, and commerce. Offering a wide-ranging focus on bands, scenes, periods, and sounds, contributors explore topics such as the riff-based song writing of classic heavy metal bands and their modern equivalents, and the musical-aesthetics of Grindcore, Doom metal, Death metal, and Progressive metal. They interrogate production technologies, sound engineering, album artwork and band promotion, logos and merchandising, t-shirt and jewellery design, and fan communities that define the global metal music economy and subcultural scene. The volume explores how the new academic discipline of metal studies was formed, also looking forward to the future of metal music and its relationship to metal scholarship and fandom. With an international range of contributors, this volume will appeal to scholars of popular music, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as those interested in metal communities around the world.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 | 21  pages, introduction, chapter 2 | 10  pages, reflections on metal studies 1, part i | 54  pages, metal musicology, chapter 3 | 15  pages, iron and steel, chapter 4 | 18  pages, ‘it's like a mach piece, really’, chapter 5 | 19  pages, the distortion paradox, part ii | 56  pages, metal music scenes, chapter 6 | 17  pages, voracious souls, chapter 7 | 19  pages, the unforgiven, chapter 8 | 18  pages, use your mind, part iii | 64  pages, metal demographics and identity, chapter 9 | 22  pages, the numbers of the beast, chapter 10 | 23  pages, the social characteristics of the contemporary metalhead, chapter 11 | 17  pages, un(su)stained class, part iv | 36  pages, metal markets and commerce, chapter 12 | 18  pages, tunes from the land of the thousand lakes, chapter 13 | 16  pages, death symbolism in metal jewelry, part v | 51  pages, metal and gender politics, chapter 14 | 16  pages, ‘getting my soul back’, chapter 15 | 16  pages, gender and power in the death metal scene, chapter 16 | 17  pages, masculine pleasure, part vi | 35  pages, metal and cultural studies, chapter 17 | 14  pages, retro rock and heavy history, chapter 18 | 19  pages, transforming detail into myth, part vii | 19  pages, metal futures, chapter 19 | 10  pages, the future of metal is bright and hell bent for genre destruction, chapter 20 | 7  pages, a reply to niall w.r. scott and tom o'boyle.

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This peer-reviewed journal provides a focus for research and theory in metal music studies, a multidisciplinary (and interdisciplinary) subject field that engages with a range of parent disciplines. It provides a platform for high-quality research and theory and aims to be a unique resource for metal music studies.

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The aims and scope of the journal are as follows: To provide an intellectual hub for the International Society of Metal Music Studies and a vehicle to promote the development of metal music studies; To be the focus for research and theory in metal music studies – a multidisciplinary (and interdisciplinary) subject field that engages with a range of parent disciplines, including (but not limited to) sociology, musicology, humanities, cultural studies, geography, philosophy, psychology, history, natural sciences; To subject all journals to a double-blind peer-review and publish high-quality, world-class research, theory and shorter articles that cross over from the industry and the scene; To be a world leader in interdisciplinary studies and be a unique resource for metal music studies. For more information about the International Society of Metal Studies visit https://www.metalstudies.org/ and the Facebook page.

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The Social Psychology Of Heavy Metal & Rock Music: Research On Metalheads

Aditya Shukla  |  September 19, 2022 March 10, 2019  |  Disclaimer: Links to some products earn us a commission

Home » Social Psychology » The Social Psychology Of Heavy Metal & Rock Music: Research On Metalheads

Picture this: A bunch of unique-looking headbanging people listening to heavy music; entering a whirlpool of human collision in front of their favorite artist; raising their fists in the air; raising the devil’s horns \m/. What is that all about? Who are they? These are the metalheads. What is their psychology?

We are going to look at the social psychology of heavy metal and rock music fans. In this article, I’ll review the scientific research done on their personality, their behavior, why they do what they do, what they get out it, etc. The effects of heavy metal music can be described through a social-music psychology lens. Let’s look through it.

Heavy metal has many connotations that relate to social psychology. I’ll highlight the most prominent ones here. These come from the heavy metal audience – the musicians as well as the fans.

Brotherhood, Rebellion, Honest Expression, Repression, Outsider, Anger and Aggression, Brutality, Conformity and Non-conformity, Isolation, Depression, Oneness, Homogeneity, Dissolving in the crowd, Respect and Victory, Sincerity and Discipline, Dramatization, and Authority.

These connotations signify something. Heavy metal music caters to some very fundamental feelings and experiences humans have in society.

I’ve left out many more connotations that don’t help this post but feel free to take a moment and think. Some of them may contradict each other and that is because heavy metal has many different sub-genres (death metal, thrash metal, power metal, doom metal, etc.) which cater to certain aspects of human experiences.

Positive behavioral outcomes occur when the audience is a fan of metal music. Let’s find out what they are.

What about the personality of metal music fans?

Psychology of a metal musician, psychology of metal musicians & metal fans interacting, psychology of heavy metal fans.

Just like most other forms of music, people synchronize with each other. Heavy metal relates people to one another and gives existential meaning to many.

Even though people have considered rock music as the devil’s music and opined that this form of music creates negative outcomes like aggression, the story is not that simple. A longitudinal study shows that people who grew up in the 80s and 90s with metal as the popular culture lead healthy and fulfilling lives today. In fact, the research report [1] says that they are better adjusted than non-fans and their metalhead identity serves as a protective barrier against negative life experiences. They also say that participation in fringe cultures can enhance identity development in troubled youth.

While there is a known analogy [2] between bipolar disorders (alternating depression & mania) and heavy metal, there is no known cause-effect between the two. Songs might just reflect the human condition of bipolarity without a direct cause-effect relationship.

Researchers have found that people who are angry and aggressive can experience more positive emotions because of the increased arousal from metal music which matches the person’s physiological state. This congruence between anger/aggression and arousal from metal helps with anger regulation. The popular notion that heavy music makes one angry is not substantiated. In fact, listening to heavy metal may be a healthy way of processing anger [3] .

Go headbang to Megadeth if you want to process anger constructively.

When we look at the stress-reducing capacity of music (as a coping mechanism), for non-fans, classical music and self-chosen music works better than a prescription of heavy metal [4] .

A thesis based on case studies [5] shows that listening to music (heavy metal included) helps people who have been traumatized. It helps them regulate their emotions, overcome suicidal thoughts, and occupy their sensory environment. Extreme forms of music give people a sense of relatability and shared communal support (death metal, doom metal) if they are predisposed to negative outcomes. For example [6] , if someone is already experiencing harsh realities (survival issues, self-harm, abuse) the underlying themes in extreme metal which resonate with those realities provide a sense of relief.

Wait … So far, it looks like metal music is a bed of roses, but it might just be a bed of razors [7] . Research on metal music has one deadly finding to showcase.

Metal music can induce serious amounts of negative emotions and predatory instincts in mice while solving a maze. Mice listening to hard rock music ended up killing each other. While mice who listened to Mozart did not kill each other. Mice who listened to heavier music also took more time solving the maze than mice who listened to classical or no music. The auditory stress of rock music might have pushed the mice into a frenzy. Read about it here: Educational CyberPlayGround [8] .

Humans have an ethics-based guiding system in the brain which makes sure that the strong negative emotional states evoked by metal do not translate into such aggressive behavior as that in mice; at least in well-adjusted humans. Severe personality, mood, and psychotic disorders change the picture completely, and the reactions may not be favorable. It is possible that complex metal music cannot be properly processed by mice and is interpreted as a stressor & a threat.

On similar lines, one study by a road-safety authority [9] found that listening to Slipknot’s (sic) can be detrimental to driving. They explain this as an effect of compromised attention.

I did speak of metal music as a way to combat negative emotions and cope with them, even reduce aggressive tendencies. However, this effect appears to be more in fans [10] than in non-fans. Those who don’t prefer high-intensity metal music have an increase in uneasiness after listening [11] but fans appear to have an increase in positive emotions after listening.

This begs the question – How do other music genres fare in emotion regulation ? Emotion regulation is about managing and modifying emotions fruitfully. One paper addressed this question [12] . They found that rock music and heavy metal music is potent for managing negative moods. Jazz, Blues, Classical, Rap, Hip-Hop, Soul, Funk, and Electronic/Dance are potent in both negative and positive mood regulation. While the genre classification is crude in this study, they analyzed broad dimensions of music. They provide evidence for rhythm and energy being the two critical factors in regulating emotions.

A study on the link between mental health and metal fans [13] from France shows that the baseline rates of mental health issues (depression, anxiety, suicide) are similar to those of the general population; sometimes, even lower. One explanation for this is the power of emotional regulation via metal and the sense of community that comes with the fandom. This is in direct contradiction with the general perception that metalheads are more mentally unstable.

Metal and rock music is diverse with many sub-cultures which have certain characteristics, these characteristics may play a role in explaining [14] some observations of deteriorating mental health. For example, a study found evidence that teens who are heavily associated with a goth sub-culture are at a higher risk of suicide and self-harm. Although the link was present, the study doesn’t dish out whether at-risk teens prefer a goth sub-culture or the goth-culture normalizes this behavior.

Fun fact: An interesting physics-chemistry-music cross-over study showed that people in a mosh-pit behave like molecules of a gas. Where the act of bumping into one other in a pseudo-random way resembles the mathematical structure of the molecules in a gas. You can read about its implications here: Mosh pit physics could aid disaster planning [15] .

Because the audience is small and the person who likes metal does so at a very personal level, you’ll see that a huge number of metal fans are musicians themselves. Apart from the sound of ‘metal’ being an acquired taste for many, being a musician further bolsters the connotations I mentioned at the start of this post.

A survey-based research [16] study on 414 British undergraduates showed that those who liked metal music tended to be more open to experiences, wanted to be unique, and were not in favor of authority. While this isn’t groundbreaking research, it corroborates people’s narratives about why they like metal.

You might be surprised by how metal music relates to romantic relationships. If your significant other sports a Judas Priest teeshirt, chances are he/she is not going to cheat on you as much as someone sporting jazz music teeshirts. A survey study [17] showed that metalheads were least likely to cheat on their partner and jazz fans were most likely to cheat. Turns out, metalheads are loyal and faithful people. As per musical preferences and lifestyle preferences analyzed in this paper [18] , rock music (not metal, data lacking) fans tend to have fewer sexual partners than fans of dance, house, hip-hop, rap, jazz, and indie music. A whopping 93.5% of metalheads had lesser than 5 sexual partners over a 5-year span.

But doesn’t this romantic faithfulness contradict the very essence of a lot of metal music? After all, metal music has the connotations of defiance, rebellion, and a dislike toward law and authority. Cheating is defined as breaking mutually accepted rules. So it looks like metalheads don’t see romance in a social context that has a governing system that dictates rules. One could speculate that romance/love, for metalheads, is deeply personal and asocial. The mutual rules in romance depend only on the partner(s).

There is this lingering question that many have in mind- Do violent & angry themes in music make a person violent? A study explored [19] this question by testing positive & negative emotions and awareness of violent themes on their mental processing of music. They found that violent music does partially desensitize a person depending on how much they like the music. Non-fans showed an increased negativity bias – selective processing of negative information. This shows that non-fans did amplify the processing of violent themes. Fans did not have this bias in spite of being aware of the violent themes. This is probably due to a) Liking the music, b) Long-term exposure, and c) Evaluating the musical experience as positive.

Heavy metal music is intricate. It is based on the acquisition of skills that take a long time to get refined. It’s a genre that clearly evolved from simple to complex musical structures; mostly bound by guitars, vocals, drums, keyboards, and bass. That is just the nature of natural selection applied to music. When a metal musician makes music, it is the result of years of practice. That entails the discipline of studying, focusing on complicated sounds, sweating, and creating something new. Simply because the musician is involved in such mental and physical activity which costs a lot and often does not yield much monetarily, the musician attaches feelings of ‘sacrifice’ to it. This increases the sense of accomplishment felt by the musician.

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I can only imagine that such a routine makes hard-working, sincere, and creative people who are proud of their struggle to make something interesting with music.

One important factor is the feedback loop between music and the self. Making structured music will start making the musician structure other things in life. A showy guitarist will most likely be flashy in other parts of his or her life. A person who generally listens to a variety of things would be open-minded in other factors. Whereas an extremely fussy musician will also tend to be fussy about the food he/she eats. These are some likely examples, they are not generalizations.

Metal musicians often make music with other musicians. This is a form of ‘coupling’ or synchronized behavior. Songs sound like songs because of this inherent quality of coupling. Random sounds do not sound like music because they lack coupling. In fact, this coupling is popularly understood as the chemistry between musicians. A study showed how the brains of guitarists who are playing together synchronize their brain waves before the music begins, thereby supporting the idea of this intuitive coupling. Read about it here. [20]

When coupled, fans and musicians experience similar emotional states which foster bonding through dedicated systems. These dedicated systems [21] are interesting meta-networks of neurons that fire in a way that mirrors (for lack of a better word) someone else’s behavioral, cognitive, and emotional state. They are associated with observation, mimicking, synchronizing, and understanding different perspectives. They also foster nurturing and companionship which is required for pair-bonding. This musical coupling is likely to make a person more sensitive and empathetic. I’m not talking about mirror neurons, I’m talking about a dozen other networks which explain similar functions in humans.

One research study suggests [22] that the metal ‘gig’ ritual (headbanging included) allows musicians to go in a state of flow. The very act of playing along with a band on stage made a musician more likely to experience flow. Taking a step backward, flow is the mental state where one is completely absorbed in a task and feels one with it. Flow is a positive desirable state because it is connoted by task engagement, a deep connection with the task, intrinsic satisfaction, challenge, and joy.

The curiously interesting bit is that the musicians experience flow in spite of the deeply embedded negative emotional states like anger, frustration, and rebellion in metal music. You can read more about the flow state and how to achieve it here .

There certainly are pros and cons observed in heavy metal music-making and listening. And that’s hardly a problem – career difficulties, community building, in-group & out-group aggression, etc. are a part of many sects. You look at any sub-section of society – there will be extreme outliers, quirks, pros, and cons. That’s a discussion more suited to the human condition on the whole than on any form of music.

General life stories of heavy metal fans show: 1. Significant emotional depth is added to like-mindedness in music 2. There is a phase in their lives where metal music added meaning to their ‘not so pleasant lives.’ 3. Metal becomes an integral part of their lives and the related attitudes and behavior are seen across many facets of their lives including relationships, school, parenthood, etc.

These are the reasons metalheads get obsessive about their music as well. Which, sometimes, is unhealthy as they could become dogmatic and disrespectful toward music which isn’t their own.

Although this isn’t a tested hypothesis, I would say that metal music makes people behave in a collective way largely because it is a minority. This is similar to a phenomenon in evolutionary biology called negative frequency-dependent selection [23] . In simple terms, the value of heavy metal is high because of its relatively low frequency in the whole population. That is, heavy metal fans are a minority and heavy metal music is more valuable because it is rare as opposed to pop music – which is, by definition, popular and abundant.

People may slightly overestimate its effects and be biased due to the music being relatively rare. It’s like seeing a person you know in a foreign country, you end up evaluating that person in a more favorable way. Metal music itself is democratic within this minority, fans become musicians and vice-versa . They maintain the genre & subculture by assuming at least one of the two roles. That is why you can say that heavy metal is of the people, by the same people, and for the same people.

For those about to rock, we salute you! [24]

There is one last thing I’d like to introduce. When you look at a lot of sub-genres of music, the various emotions associated with each sub-genre, and the musical complexity, there is an overarching theme that emerges. This theme is about how metal music evolves alongside people, culture, science, art, technology, and the environment.

The theme has multiple feedback loops & transfer effects – thinking about science could be informed by musical complexity, socio-cultural nuances of metal could inform technological advancement, metal could foster newer public sentiments such as concern for climate change, etc. You can read this paper [25] to know more about the holistic bird’s eye view of how metal music interacts with the human condition.

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Hey! Thank you for reading; hope you enjoyed the article. I run Cognition Today to paint a holistic picture of psychology. My content here is referenced and featured in NY Times, Forbes, CNET, Entrepreneur, Lifehacker, about 15 books, academic courses, and 100s of research papers.

I’m a full-time psychology SME consultant and I work part-time with Myelin, an EdTech company. I’m also currently an overtime impostor in the AI industry. I’m attempting (mostly failing) to solve AI’s contextual awareness problem from the cognitive perspective.

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I’m based in Pune, India. Love Sci-fi, horror media; Love rock, metal, synthwave, and K-pop music; can’t whistle; can play 2 guitars at a time.

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7 thoughts on “The Social Psychology Of Heavy Metal & Rock Music: Research On Metalheads”

Great article Aditya, I really enjoyed reading it.

The themes in your paper cover something that I have been thinking about for a while (I have an Art Therapy background and work with children with emotional and behavioural problems) about the psycho-emotional aspects to listening to metal and anger/emotion regulation. I have always dreamed of doing a Quantitative study on it amongst friends hah!

Your section on flow catches what my own experiences are with listening to metal music, particularly with lyrics that tap into a certain emotionally charged memory (I’m a massive TOOL fan, as well as Deftones, Mastodon and Messhugah XD).

Personally I would definitely support the thesis that listening to music with negative-emotion themes helps process and deal with difficult experiences. Catharsis, similar to the Art Therapy process of pouring and mess-making is very present in Metal music to me. Again I would say the concept of flow as either an active player or listener at a gig/in-headphones was at times a spiritual experience, like BHarath is saying above, and I think of it as being taken out of your mind and body by the sound and having a feeling of great release at those moments, when certain riffs or lyrical content hits the right nerve.

Anyway, great article, thank you very much for posting!

Hey Alistair, thank you so much for appreciating my article and sharing your experience! I’m delighted to hear you also think negatively charged themes can help with regulation! Regarding the parallel between mess-making and so-called “noise-making” actually has so much value. Probably not just in regulation & catharsis, but also in creative exploration and accidental discoveries.

Certainly, feeling “flow” while listening and/or playing is quite powerful. I personally enjoy listening flow more than playing flow, particularly when I am in an exploratory zone. That complete engagement of your senses when all else drowns out is amazing.

Its a Gate way to spirituality (Don’t mistake it for religious) – Spirituality in understanding the oneself (U) so that you could understand everything else. The Stigma of Metal being Evil or the Devils Music is bullshit – In India Its hard to find one True Metal head (Fan or performer) – Who has the complete understanding of the above and who ha the richness with humility kind of notion. I have literally not met one – and i doubt i would find any; In India, these so called metal heads are either – fools or stupid enough to think they are the best – because of the weird look, (In a way, attraction) a wasted talent, which is called Music; never used with a purpose rather used to show off. Stupid competition of feeling great by stamping an innocent or week. Feeling special for smoking up. Lol. WHo has no respect for his own culture but curiously and clueless running behind a culture with ZERO wisdom

I have not found one solid Metal head in India. All are so fake – that they can say; they have never heard Bollywood music, MC** are you serious – how much would anyone fake. Just a trying copy of the one already existing.

DOn’t respond to this if you want to prove coz you will never succeed, As an Example – The Indian Heavy Metal Music itself is your answer. It has always been a copy and never authentic … A*** Holes all of them ..

DO you know something – A Character like Bhagath, Bismil, Azad, I am sure if they knew heavy metal existed – They would have been the one. Hai Ki Nahi SKula Ji

It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d certainly donate to this outstanding blog! I guess for now i’ll settle for bookmarking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to new updates and will talk about this website with my Facebook group. Chat soon!

Hey, thank you so much for thinking about donation, really appreciate your sentiment:) I do have a donate button in the footer section!

I’m a 40-year-old Heavy Metal musician and this article basically explains everything that has been going on in my mind since I was 13.

If I had to comment on every point and expand it, I could write a book, so I’ll stick to one issue:

The apparent contradiction with romantic faithfulness and rebellion.

I have always been faithful in relationships, and a rebel all my life.

Here’s why:

1. Faithfulness is not about obedience, but loyalty. And while we hate obeying rules, we love loyalty. It’s actually rewarded in the culture (at least it was in my country Malta’s, metal scene) 2. Being a “Metal couple” is in itself an act of rebellion. Though nowadays I’m much more into the music than the fashion, I remember being young and feeling proud that my girlfriend wore studs and Type O Negative t-shirts. 3. The passion for metal, makes the relationship stronger. When I had non-metal girlfriends there were times we ended up talking about the weather. With metal girlfriends, we only talked about the weather if a storm was coming and there was an open-air gig.

When you’re young, and you don’t have kids, the passion for metal could be near as bonding as bringing up a child.

Thanks for commenting Robert:D The 3 reasons you gave – spot on! Loyalty is a very different concept for us and is completely different from rebellion. I see it rewarded in the Indian metal scene too. I am not really in the scene anymore but can confirm point 2 and 3 anecdotally.

The passion gave me a new way of life after a dull and boring school life!

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What is Heavy Metal?

Heavy metal is a broad genre of music that began in the late 1960's and became especially popular in the 1970's with acts like Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Deep Purple, and many more. Subgenres like glam, thrash, death and black metal developed in the 1980's and continue to develop to this day. It is characterized by a loud, aggressive sound featuring distorted electric guitars, dissonant vocals, and often a fast beat. The subject matter of songs can range tremendously depending on genre, but have been known to include themes of rebellion, death, mysticism, and love. 

Doing Research About Heavy Metal

The types of sources used for heavy metal research will largely depend on what discipline the researcher is coming from. An musicologist may use Primary Sources   (eg, the music itself) and perhaps books and articles from music journals. A sociologist or historian will turn to books and articles as well, but perhaps use other types of primary sources, such as artist interviews and  autobiographies. Other types of sources include documentaries , ephemera (fanzines, flyers, photographs), and some websites.

Many sources in this LibGuide are available in the PHSC Libraries. Links to online books and articles will be made available, and the call number will be provided if available in print. However, many sources will not be available immediately and may require interlibrary loan services or a trip to the public library. A good place to start is below, with Reference Articles . Each article is written by an expert in heavy metal studies and will give you a solid basis on which to start your research.

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• "Heavy metal (music)" by Aaron D. Purcell in Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2019 Encyclopedia article with general information about heavy metal history and an overview of key albums. A good place to start your research.
• Biography (Gale in Context) (Gale) This link opens in a new window Excellent place to start if you are looking for information about specific musicians or bands.

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Music listening and stress recovery in healthy individuals: A systematic review with meta-analysis of experimental studies

Krisna Adiasto

1 Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Nijmege, Netherlands

Debby G. J. Beckers

Madelon l. m. van hooff, karin roelofs.

2 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmege, Netherlands

Sabine A. E. Geurts

Associated data.

All materials relevant to our review, including: (a) the pre-registered study protocol; (b) an outline of the search strategy; (c) a list of screened articles with rationales for exclusion; (d) the meta-analysis data set with extracted data; and, (e) R code to replicate the analysis, are available on the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/9pxhj/?view_only=0f2f28db4adf4a2492aa57e5e003cc9f ).

Effective stress recovery is crucial to prevent the long-term consequences of stress exposure. Studies have suggested that listening to music may be beneficial for stress reduction. Thus, music listening stands to be a promising method to promote effective recovery from exposure to daily stressors. Despite this, empirical support for this opinion has been largely equivocal. As such, to clarify the current literature, we conducted a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized, controlled experimental studies investigating the effects of music listening on stress recovery in healthy individuals. In fourteen experimental studies, participants ( N = 706) were first exposed to an acute laboratory stressor, following which they were either exposed to music or a control condition. A random-effects meta-regression with robust variance estimation demonstrated a non-significant cumulative effect of music listening on stress recovery g = 0.15, 95% CI [-0.21, 0.52], t (13) = 0.92, p = 0.374. In healthy individuals, the effects of music listening on stress recovery seemed to vary depending on musical genre, who selects the music, musical tempo, and type of stress recovery outcome. However, considering the significant heterogeneity between the modest number of included studies, no definite conclusions may currently be drawn about the effects of music listening on the short-term stress recovery process of healthy individuals. Suggestions for future research are discussed.

Introduction

The prevalence of stress-related diseases worldwide has seen no decrease over the previous decade [ 1 , 2 ], as stress has become so pervasive in daily life that our physiological systems are under constant pressure to cope with various stressors [ 3 ]. Stress recovery has been introduced as a process which may mitigate the adverse consequences of frequent stress exposure [ 4 , 5 ]: effective stress recovery on a daily basis may prevent the occurrence of blunted or exaggerated stress responses that over time develop into various physiological and psychological disorders, such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, hypertension, burnout, and depression [ 2 , 5 – 8 ].

Given the importance of effective stress recovery from exposure to daily stressors, research on potential means to promote stress recovery has experienced significant growth [ 5 ]. Various activities have been proposed that may lead to better stress recovery, one among them being music listening. Music listening may have a modulatory effect on the human stress response [ 9 ]. Furthermore, given that music is readily available through online streaming services, music listening stands to be a time- and cost-effective method to facilitate daily stress recovery. Indeed, a recent meta-analysis of 104 randomized controlled trials on the effects of music concluded that music-based interventions have a positive impact on both physiological ( d = .380, 95% CI [0.30–0.47]) and psychological ( d = .545, 95% CI [0.43–0.66]) stress-related outcomes [ 10 ]. However, a large proportion of studies included in this meta-analysis were conducted in medical or therapeutic settings, and the included music-based interventions encompassed not only music listening but also music therapy. Thus, a more specific review to determine whether music listening alone is beneficial for the recovery of healthy individuals outside medical and therapeutic settings seemed justified.

To expand on the above considerations: stressors in medical or therapeutic settings (e.g., treatment anxiety, pregnancy, and labor) and their subsequent stress recovery processes can be difficult to generalize to more daily settings [ 10 – 13 ]. Next, with regards to music-based interventions, music listening simply involves listening to a particular song, while music therapy is characterized by the presence of a therapeutic process and use of personal music experiences, and thus must be performed by a trained music therapist [ 14 ]. In practice, music therapy may not only involve music listening, but also music playing, composing, songwriting, and interaction with music [ 10 , 14 ]. The effects of music therapy on stress appear to be more consistent compared to music listening [ 10 , 15 , 16 ]. Studies on music listening and stress recovery in healthy individuals are indeed equivocal: though music listening is considered beneficial for physiological stress recovery, several studies have reported no differences in heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, blood pressure, or cortisol recovery between participants who listened to music and those who either sat in silence or listened to an auditory control [ 17 – 20 ]. Similarly, although music is notable for its anxiolytic effects, several studies have reported no significant differences in post-stressor anxiety between participants who listened to music and those who did not [ 3 , 18 , 21 ]. Taken together, it is currently difficult to draw definite conclusions about the effects of music listening on stress recovery in healthy individuals, particularly outside medical and therapeutic settings [ 15 , 22 ].

Therefore, to expand on previous reviews, we opted to conduct a systematic review with meta-analysis on experimental studies in healthy individuals, focusing specifically on the role of music listening in stress recovery. In our review, we focus specifically on experimental studies, under the assumption that greater control over study variables would help reduce between-study heterogeneity. Furthermore, considering the crucial role of stress recovery in preventing the long-term consequences of stress exposure [ 5 , 23 ], we believe the acute stress responses elicited by laboratory stressors would more closely approximate typical stress responses in daily life. The aim of our review was two-fold: through systematic review, we provide a comprehensive account of experimental studies examining the effect of music listening on stress recovery. Through meta-analysis, we assess the reliability of the effect of music listening on stress recovery, including the extent and impact of publication bias, and weigh-in on outstanding discussions within existing literature.

The stress response

The stress response can be conceptualized as a compensatory reaction aimed at mitigating the potential consequences of a stressor [ 24 , 25 ]. The stress response is best illustrated by the archetypal ‘fight-flight-freeze’ reaction: in the presence of a stressor, the brain initiates an elegant synergy of neuroendocrine, physiological, and psychological processes that serve to mobilize energy resources and direct attention towards prominent stimuli, with the aim of promoting appropriate and rapid action [ 26 , 27 ]. During a stress response, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) suppresses parasympathetic activity and promotes sympathetic exertion, resulting in marked increases in heart rate, respiration rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and salivary secretion of the dietary enzyme, alpha-amylase [ 27 – 31 ]. These changes are mediated by neuropeptides (e.g., corticotropin-releasing factor) and catecholamines (e.g., norepinephrine, dopamine) [ 24 , 25 ]. Simultaneous with ANS activity, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis begins a process which leads to a surge of cortisol production in the adrenal cortex [ 24 , 25 ]. Cortisol acts as a regulator of the stress response, whose effects occur in a temporally specific manner due to variations in corticosteroid receptor affinity and distribution throughout the body [ 24 , 26 , 32 ]. Cortisol may require up to 45 minutes to reach peak concentration levels, during which it binds to high-affinity corticosteroid receptors [ 24 ]. This process enables rapid, non-genomic effects that sustain ANS-mediated changes for the duration of the stressor, while suppressing immune system function [ 32 – 34 ]. This suppression is visible through lower concentrations of immunoglobulins, such as salivary immunoglobulin-A (s-IgA) [ 35 ].

The physiological changes triggered by the ANS and HPA axis are supplemented by psychological changes that motivate adaptive behaviours required to cope with the stressor [ 25 , 27 ]. For example, the unpleasant feeling one gets when experiencing anxiety and negative affect in response to a stressor is thought to prompt behaviours aimed at reducing these unpleasant states. Since psychological reactions to stressors are contingent on how individuals perceive, evaluate, and react to threats and challenges [ 36 ], self-reported measures of stress, anxiety, arousal, and emotion are common in psychological research on stress and its consequences [ 18 , 37 – 39 ].

Stress recovery

The stress response is considered adaptive when it is short-lived and immediately followed by a period of recovery following stressor cessation. In this period, ANS- and HPA-mediated changes that have occurred in response to a stressor revert to pre-stress baselines [ 24 , 25 , 27 ]. Therefore, stress recovery may be conceptualized as the process of unwinding that is opposite to the neuroendocrine, physiological, and psychological activation that occurs during the stress response [ 4 , 5 ]. Following a stress response, ANS-mediated changes quickly revert to pre-stress levels within 30 to 60 minutes [ 26 ]. This manifests as a restoration of parasympathetic activity, marked by a deceleration of heart rate and respiration rate, lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and less activity of salivary alpha-amylase [ 4 , 28 – 31 ]. This restoration of parasympathetic activity typically precedes any decline in cortisol. Instead, during the same window of time, cortisol levels will have just reached their peak, activating low-affinity corticosteroid receptors [ 40 ]. This process is thought to signal the termination of the stress response, as the binding of cortisol to low-affinity receptors inhibits further autonomic activation [ 24 , 26 ]. As cortisol levels begin to decrease, slow, cortisol-mediated genomic changes are initiated, which directly oppose the rapid effects of catecholamines and the non-genomic effects of cortisol [ 24 , 26 ]. Following a stressor, these genomic changes may take up to one hour to commence and may continue for several hours [ 24 , 26 ].

At a psychological level, stress recovery is typically experienced as a reduction of unpleasant states, which is often reflected by lower ratings of self-reported stress, anxiety, and negative affect, along with higher ratings of relaxation and positive affect [ 5 , 15 , 18 ]. However, it is worth noting that persistent, ruminative thoughts about a stressor may delay stress recovery by prolonging the physiological activation that occurs during the stress response [ 41 – 45 ]. Indeed, participants who reported higher rumination following a stress task demonstrated poorer heart rate, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and cortisol recovery compared to participants who did not [ 41 , 42 , 44 , 46 , 47 ].

Music listening and stress recovery

Within the current literature, music listening has frequently been related to various neuroendocrine, physiological, and psychological changes that are considered beneficial for stress recovery [ 10 , 11 , 15 , 22 ]. For example, music listening has been associated with lower heart rate [ 48 – 50 ], systolic blood pressure [ 21 , 49 , 51 ], skin conductance [ 17 , 19 , 52 , 53 ], and cortisol [ 54 , 55 ] compared to silence or an auditory control condition. Furthermore, music listening has been associated with higher parasympathetic activity [ 56 ] compared to silence [ 3 , 37 ]. Together, these findings suggest that music listening may generate beneficial changes in ANS and HPA axis activity that should be conducive to the stress recovery process [ 27 , 57 , 58 ]. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that listening to music may influence mood [ 59 , 60 ]. Indeed, music listening has been associated with lower negative affect [ 37 ], higher positive affect [ 18 , 61 ], and fewer self-reported depressive symptoms [ 37 ] compared to silence or an auditory control condition. Music listening has also been associated with lower subjective stress [ 53 , 54 ], lower state anxiety [ 37 , 48 , 49 ], and higher perceived relaxation [ 17 , 48 , 62 ].

The exact mechanisms underlying the effects of music listening on stress recovery remain to be elucidated. Music-evoked positive emotions are thought to be particularly beneficial for stress recovery, as they may help undo the unfavourable changes wrought by negative emotions during stress, ultimately aiding the stress recovery process [ 63 ]. Alternatively, music-evoked emotions may promote a more robust, and thus more adaptive, stress response [ 61 ], which may be followed by an equally robust period of stress recovery. Next, it has been theorized that music may act as an anchor that draws attention away from post-stressor ruminative thoughts or negative affective states, thus preventing a lengthening of physiological activation, and facilitating a more regular stress recovery process [ 45 , 64 ]. Finally, physiological rhythms in our body, such as respiration, cardiovascular activity, and electroencephalographic activity, may become fully or partially synchronized with rhythmical elements perceived in music [ 65 – 68 ]. This rhythmic entrainment process is thought to occur via a bottom-up process that originates in the brainstem: salient musical features, such as tempo, pitch, and loudness, are continuously tracked by the brainstem, generating similar changes in ANS activity over time [ 69 , 70 ]. Indeed, studies have demonstrated that changes in a song’s musical envelope, which represents how a song unfolds over time, are closely followed by proportional changes in blood pressure and skin conductance [ 52 , 65 ]. Similarly, incremental changes in musical tempo, which represents the speed or pace of a song, were predictive of similar changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate [ 71 – 73 ]. It is further hypothesized that the physiological changes resulting from rhythmic entrainment may evoke any number of associated emotions via proprioceptive feedback mechanisms [ 66 , 69 , 70 ]. Indeed, higher self-reported entrainment predicted increased positive affect, along with other self-reported emotional responses, such as transcendence, wonder, power, and tenderness [ 66 ].

Which music works best?

There are several ongoing discussions about potential moderating effects in the relationship between music listening and stress recovery. We briefly describe these effects below, and later contribute to the discussion through moderator analyses.

Classical music vs. other genres

Classical music is considered the golden standard in many stress management efforts. Indeed, a copious amount of ‘anti-stress’ playlists often feature some selection of classical pieces. To discern which music best promotes stress recovery, studies have contrasted the effects of classical music with other musical genres, including rock [ 48 ], jazz and pop [ 21 ], and heavy metal [ 17 ]. We compare the effects of different musical genres in our moderator analysis.

Instrumental vs. lyrical

It is commonly believed that instrumental, as opposed to lyrical music, would better promote stress recovery. However, several studies have argued that lyrics may act as a stronger distractor compared to the sound of instruments. Thus, lyrical music may be more effective than instrumental music in preventing the prolonged physiological activation that may occur due to ruminative thoughts [ 17 , 18 , 74 ]. We compare the effects of instrumental and lyrical music in our moderator analysis.

Self- vs. experimenter selected

Studies on the effects of music often fail to consider the differential effects of self-selected (i.e., chosen by participants) and experimenter selected (i.e., chosen for participants by the experimenter) music [ 15 ]. It is hypothesized that allowing participants to select their own music may be more helpful to promote stress recovery due to a restoration of perceived control [ 15 ]. It has also been argued that individuals select music in service of personal self-regulatory goals [ 64 , 75 , 76 ], meaning that individuals know precisely which music to select for them to effectively recover from stress [ 38 , 77 ]. Furthermore, previous studies have found that listening to self-selected music may help elicit stronger and more positive emotional responses regardless of a song’s valence (positive or negative) and arousal (high or low), possibly due to increased preference and familiarity towards the self-selected music [ 78 – 80 ]. In theory, self-selected music should thus be more beneficial compared to experimenter-selected music for the purpose of stress recovery. We compare the effects of self- and experimenter selected music in our moderator analysis.

Fast vs. slow tempo

Several studies have investigated whether listening to music with slower tempo will better facilitate stress recovery compared to music with faster tempo. For example, while listening to an instrumental song, proportional increases and decreases in tempo resulted in similar changes in participants’ heart rate [ 73 ]. Similarly, sequential decreases in tempo predicted greater increases in parasympathetic activity compared to sequential increases in tempo [ 71 ]. We investigate whether slower tempi differentially influence the effect of music listening on stress recovery in our moderator analysis.

The present review was designed following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) guidelines [ 81 ]. All materials relevant to this review, including: (a) the pre-registered study protocol; (b) an outline of the search strategy; (c) a list of screened articles with rationales for exclusion; (d) the meta-analysis data set with extracted data; and, (e) R code to replicate the analysis reported in this review, are available on the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/9pxhj ).

Study selection

The study selection process is summarized in Fig 1 . In April 2021, we conducted a comprehensive literature search for experimental studies on the effect of music listening on stress recovery. The search was conducted using RUQuest, the electronic search system of Radboud University library, which accesses several notable bibliographic databases, including MEDLINE, Wiley Online Library, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Taylor and Francis, and JSTOR. The results of this primary search were supplemented with three additional electronic searches in the publication databases of Web of Science, PsycINFO, and PubMed. Appendix A provides a complete description of our search terms. Together, this first step resulted in 3124 articles.

Next, the first author (KA) screened all titles and abstracts for studies examining the effects of music listening on stress recovery. If there was any doubt about the eligibility of an article, it was retained for further review. During this initial screening, 3008 articles were excluded. KA then scanned the reference lists of the 116 remaining articles for potentially relevant studies, resulting in an additional three articles. Together, this second step resulted in 119 full-text reports to be assessed for eligibility.

Lastly, KA used the following criteria to assess full-text reports for eligibility:

First, to minimize between-study heterogeneity, and to ensure that included studies investigated the effects of music listening on stress recovery as precisely as possible, studies must employ an experimental design including stress induction, with random assignment of participants to experimental and control conditions. Quasi-experimental studies were included only when they incorporated a control or comparison group. Second, studies should compare music listening to silence or an auditory stimulus (e.g., white noise, audiobooks). To ensure that included studies tested the immediate effect of music listening on stress recovery, exposure to music, silence, or auditory stimuli must occur after the stress induction procedure. Third, to demonstrate this effect, studies must include at least one measure of neuroendocrine (e.g., cortisol), physiological (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure), or psychological (e.g., subjective stress, positive and negative affect) stress recovery outcome. Fourth, given that stress reactivity and recovery responses differ between children and adults, and with consideration to the potential role of music in the prevention of stress-related diseases in adults, studies must include healthy, adult, human participants. Fifth, to improve the generalization of our results in the context of daily stress recovery, studies where stress recovery occurred within a medical or therapeutic context, such as a hospital or operating room, were excluded. Finally, for the purpose of the meta-analysis, means and standard deviations of stress recovery outcomes following stressor cessation must be available. Corresponding authors were contacted when this information was not available. When authors did not or could not provide the required information (e.g., due to data no longer being accessible), outcomes were dropped from the meta-analysis. Following attempts to obtain missing information, the final sample for our review consisted of 14 studies.

Methodological moderators of interest

Several methodological differences were identified between included studies that may moderate the effect of music listening on stress recovery:

Stress induction procedures

Studies utilized a diverse array of stress induction procedures. These include mental arithmetic tasks [e.g., 21 ], adaptations of the Trier Social Stress Task [e.g., 3 ], impromptu presentations [ 49 , e.g., 50 ], unpleasant stimuli [e.g., 82 ], cognitive tests [e.g., 48 ], or a CO 2 stress task [ 61 ]. Stress induction procedures may generally be classified based on the inclusion of a social-evaluative threat (SET) component, which are designed to induce psychosocial stress and have been shown to elicit greater cardiovascular and cortisol responses [ 83 ]. In the event of a greater stress response, the effects of music listening on stress recovery may be larger, since there may be a larger window for the stress recovery process to occur. We examined this possibility in our moderator analysis.

Stress induction checks

Stress induction procedures in included studies were not always successful. Given that successful stress induction procedures are crucial to ensure that participants experience some physiological or psychological change they may recover from, in our moderator analysis we examined whether the effect of music listening on stress recovery differed based on the outcome of a study’s stress induction check (manipulation check).

Type of outcome

Studies adopted numerous outcome measures as indicators of stress recovery. These include indicators related to ANS and HPA axis activity, such as heart rate [e.g., 49 ], heart rate variability [e.g., 3 ], blood pressure [e.g., 84 ], respiration rate [e.g., 17 ], skin conductance [ 58 ], salivary cortisol [e.g., 54 ], salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) [e.g., 38 ], and salivary immunoglobulin-A (sIgA) [e.g., 85 ], as well as indicators for psychological consequences of the stress response, such as subjective stress [e.g., 18 ], perceived relaxation [e.g., 17 ], state anxiety [e.g., 21 ], rumination [e.g., 18 ], and affect [e.g., 37 ]. In our moderator analysis, we examined whether the effects of music listening on stress recovery differed across general (neuroendocrine, physiological, psychological) and specific outcome types.

Duration of music

Studies differed with regards to how long participants listened to music following stressor cessation. This duration ranged from two minutes [e.g., 53 ] to forty-five minutes [e.g., 54 ]. We examined whether the effect of music listening on stress recovery differed based on duration of music listening.

Data extraction, moderator coding, and quality assessment

KA extracted means, standard deviations, and total participants per condition for each stress recovery outcome. When these statistics were not included in text, but informative graphs were provided, KA used an open-source program to extract data from the graphs [ 86 ]. Coding criteria for each moderator can be found in Table 1 . The ‘141–160 bpm’, ‘unsuccessful’, ‘salivary IgA’, and ‘salivary alpha-amylase’ moderator levels were ultimately not included in the meta-analysis due to unavailable information.

Next, KA assessed the quality of included studies using the revised Cochrane risk of bias tool for randomized trials (RoB 2) [ 87 ]. Based on criteria in the RoB 2, studies with low risk of bias were considered high quality, while those with some concerns and high risk of bias were considered moderate and low quality respectively. Fig 2 summarizes the results of the quality assessment procedure.

All studies were of overall moderate quality due to little-to-no information on pre-specification of analysis plans, making it difficult to fully rule out any bias that may occur due to selection of reported results.

Based on the RoB 2, all included studies were of moderate quality due to unavailable information on pre-specification of analysis plans. Thus, it was difficult to completely rule out bias that may have occurred due to a selection of reported results. Since the quality of included studies was homogenous, study quality was thus not included in our moderator analysis. An exploratory analysis with less stringent criteria, where potential risk of bias from selection of reported results is not included in our quality assessment procedure, is reported in Appendix B.

Data extraction, moderator coding, and quality assessment were conducted by KA in coordination with DB and MvH. Disagreements were resolved through face-to-face discussions, or through consultation with SG and KR when no consensus could be reached.

Meta-analytic approach

Effect size index.

We calculated Hedges’ g for each comparison using the escalc function of the metafor package [ 88 ] in R 3.6.3 [ 89 ]. In the present study, a Hedges’ g of zero indicates the effect of music listening on stress recovery is equivalent to silence or an auditory control. Conversely, a Hedges’ g greater than zero indicates the degree to which music listening is more effective than control, while a g less than zero indicates the degree to which music listening is less effective than control. The effect sizes are reported in Table 2 .

Note . A more detailed data file is available on the Open Science Framework.

† = In beats per minute (BPM);

†† = in minutes.

Check = stress induction check/manipulation check; SIP = stress induction procedure; N = total observations for two group comparison; g = Hedges’ g .

Due to use of multiple stress recovery outcomes, eleven out of fourteen studies included in the meta-analysis contributed multiple effect sizes of interest. To deal with the statistical dependency caused by the inclusion of multiple effect sizes from the same study, we use a combination of multivariate meta-regression [ 90 ] and robust variance estimation (RVE) [ 91 ] to estimate overall effect sizes and conduct moderator analyses. Although we believe our approach using RVE was the most suitable for our data, we also calculated overall effect sizes using the aggregation method outlined in Borenstein et al. [ 92 ], and random-effects meta-analyses without correcting for dependencies. These yielded estimates that were nearly identical to those generated by our approach and were therefore not reported.

Outlier detection

Currently, methods to identify outliers in meta-regression models with RVE are not yet available. Therefore, we first fit a random-effects meta-regression model without correcting for dependencies between effect sizes. Values for influential case diagnostics (e.g., covariance ratios, Cook’s distance, studentized residuals) were subsequently requested using the ‘influence’ function of the ‘metafor’ package [ 88 ]. As this approach does not fully consider the nature of dependencies between effect sizes from each study, the results of this analysis were treated as a sensitivity analysis for the estimated overall effect of music listening on stress recovery. All extracted effect sizes were retained in further analyses.

Test of overall effect and moderators

To estimate the overall effect of music listening on stress recovery, we fit an intercept-only, random-effects meta-regression model with RVE using the ‘robu’ function of the ‘robumeta’ package [ 93 ]. The intercept estimated by this model can be interpreted as the precision-weighted overall effect size which has been corrected for dependencies. We used a similar approach to estimate cumulative effect sizes at each level of each moderator. For cases where a level of a moderator had too few observations for the RVE approach, we calculated cumulative effect sizes by fitting a random-effects meta-regression using the ‘rma.mv’ function of the ‘metafor’ package [ 88 ].

Prior to conducting moderator analyses, categorical moderators (e.g., ‘Genre’) were dummy coded, while the continuous moderator ‘Duration’ was left as is. For cases where the categorical moderator only had two levels, moderator variables were entered into separate meta-regression equations using the RVE approach. The significance test of the regression coefficient for the predictor variable in the meta-regression equation was interpreted as a test of whether the variable was a significant moderator. We used the same approach to test the effect of continuous moderators. For cases where the categorical moderator had more than two levels, moderator variables were entered into separate random-effects meta-regression models. This yielded QM and QE statistics: the QM statistic indicated whether there was a significant difference among all levels of the tested moderator, while the QE statistic indicated whether there were significant amounts of residual heterogeneity after accounting for the effect of the moderator [ 94 ].

Publication bias

The most common method to assess publication bias in meta-analytic data sets with dependent effect sizes is to aggregate individual effect sizes from the same study, and subsequently perform standard publication bias tests on the aggregated estimates. Therefore, we first aggregated individual effect sizes using the ‘agg’ function of the ‘MAd’ package [ 95 ]. The ‘agg’ function calculates aggregated effect size and variance estimates using formulas specified in Borenstein et al. [ 92 ]. These aggregated estimates were then used to assess publication bias by means of: (a) Egger’s regression of funnel plot asymmetry [ 96 ]; (b) a trim-and-fill analysis [ 97 ]; and (c) PET-PEESE models [ 98 ].

Overall, the analyses comprised s = 14 studies, from which k = 90 effect sizes were calculated. The cumulative sample size of these studies was N = 706, while individual sample sizes ranged from 12–143 participants, with a mean of approximately 68 participants per study.

Overall effect

Based on a meta-regression with RVE, the estimated overall effect of music listening on stress recovery was g = 0.15, 95% CI [-0.21, 0.52], t (13) = 0.92, p = 0.374. This estimate suggests that, taking all variations in music and outcomes into consideration, the effect of music listening on stress recovery is equivalent to silence or an auditory control.

Using the ‘influence’ function of the ‘metafor’ package [ 88 ], one influential outlier in the negative direction was detected [ 18 ]. The overall effect of music listening on stress recovery with outlier removed was g = 0.18, 95% CI [-0.18, 0.54], t (13) = 1.08, p = 0.300. The full meta-analytic data set was retained in subsequent analyses.

Moderator analyses

There was significant heterogeneity of effect sizes ( T 2 = 0.71, I 2 = 89.29) from each study, which suggests that meaningful differences may exist among studies that could be further explored through moderator analyses. Cumulative effect size estimates at each level of each moderator, along with their respective significance tests, are reported in Table 3 .

† = moderator level contained too few observations to obtain an estimate using the RVE approach, so estimate was obtained by means of random-effects meta-regression.

s = number of studies; k = number of effect sizes; g = Hedges’ g . β 1 coefficients are from separate meta-regressions with RVE, where a categorical moderator with two levels was dummy coded and entered into the model as a predictor; Q M statistics are a Wald-type chi-square test which indicate whether there are significant differences among all levels of a moderator. The number of studies may not always add up, since most studies contributed multiple effect sizes.

Our results suggest that the effect of music listening on stress recovery may differ across musical genres, QM (4) = 27.19, p < .001. Despite this, it is difficult to further elaborate on these differences as the individual estimated effects of pop ( g = 0.317, 95% CI [0.09, 0.53], p = .025) and jazz music ( g = 0.137, 95% CI [0.00, 0.27], p = .049) were derived from single studies, while the estimates for classical ( g = 0.431, 95% CI [-0.03, 0.88], p = .059) and heavy metal music ( g = -0.076, 95% CI [-0.64, 0.48], p = .619), along with music collapsed into the ‘unspecified’ category ( g = 0.067, 95% CI [-0.42, 0.56], p = .765), were non-significant. Residual heterogeneity was statistically significant, QE (67) = 1147.43, p < .001.

The effects of music listening on stress recovery did not differ between lyrical music ( g = 0.159, 95% CI [-1.13, 1.45], p = .362), instrumental music ( g = 0.194, 95% CI [-0.22, 0.65], p = .273), and music with ‘unspecified’ lyrical presence ( g = 0.151, 95% CI [-0.46, 0.78], p = .581), QM (2) = 3.44, p = .179. Residual heterogeneity was statistically significant, QE (69) = 1171.95, p < .001.

Our results suggest that there may be differences in magnitude between the effect of self-selected, pseudo self-selected, and experimenter selected music on stress recovery, QM (2) = 19.13, p < .001. However, these differences were difficult to expand on since the estimated effect of pseudo self-selected music (i.e., self-selected music from a list composed by experimenters) was derived from only one study ( g = 0.377, 95% CI [0.27, 0.48], p = .004), while the estimated effects of self-selected ( g = 0.336, 95% CI [-0.29, 0.96], p = .226) and experimenter selected music ( g = 0.030, 95% CI [-0.33, 0.45], p = .874) were non-significant. Residual heterogeneity was statistically significant, QE (69) = 1139.39, p < .001.

Our results suggest that the effects of music listening on stress recovery may differ in magnitude based on musical tempo, QM (5) = 43.66, p < .001. However, little can be said about these differences since the estimated effects of music at 80 bpm or below ( g = 0.084, 95% CI [-0.06, 0.23], p = .086), 81–100 bpm ( g = 0.497, 95% CI [-0.62, 1.62], p = .197), 101–120 bpm ( g = -0.260, 95% CI [-11.3, 10.8], p = .815), 121–140 bpm ( g = 0.067, 95% CI [-1.58, 1.71], p = .696), 161 bpm and above ( g = -0.020, 95% CI [-1.33, 1.29], p = .870), and ‘unspecified’ tempo ( g = 0.235, 95% CI [-0.26, 0.73], p = .301) were non-significant. Residual heterogeneity was statistically significant, QE (67) = 1128.90, p < .001.

Stress induction procedure

There were no significant differences in the effects of music listening on stress recovery between studies whose stress induction procedures included SET ( g = 0.319, 95% CI [-0.15, 0.79], p = .154) and those without SET ( g = -0.141, 95% CI [-0.90, 0.62], p = .636), β 1 = -0.450, p = .218.

There were no significant differences in the effects of music listening on stress recovery for studies with successful ( g = 0.173, 95% CI [-0.26, 0.61], p = .399) and unreported ( g = 0.062, 95% CI [-0.08, 0.20], p = .115) stress induction checks, β 1 = -0.108, p = .661.

Our results suggest that the effects of music listening on stress recovery may differ between neuroendocrine, physiological, and psychological outcomes QM (2) = 164.22, p < .001. These differences were challenging to further expand on since the estimated effects of music listening for neuroendocrine ( g = -0.004, 95% CI [-14.6, 14.6], p = .794), physiological ( g = 0.135, 95% CI [-0.39, 0.67], p = .585), and psychological ( g = 0.298, 95% CI [-0.11, 0.71], p = .127) stress recovery outcomes were not statistically significant. We noted a similar pattern when comparing the effects of music listening between specific stress recovery outcomes: the magnitude of the effect of music listening may vary across stress recovery outcomes, QM (18) = 545.09, p < .001, but estimated effects per outcome were non-significant ( Table 3 ). Residual heterogeneity was statistically significant despite the inclusion of general outcome type ( QE (69) = 1018.57, p < .001) and specific outcome measure ( QE (53) = 629.144, p < .001) as moderators.

There was no evidence that the effect of music listening on stress recovery may differ depending on how long participants were exposed to music, β 1 = -0.005, p = .870 ( range duration = 2–45 minutes).

To further illustrate the methodological heterogeneity among experimental studies on the effect of music listening on stress recovery, we provide a more extensive, qualitative overview of the included studies in Appendix C. A summary of this overview is presented in Table 4 .

Note . (+) = Finding in support of the effect of music on physiological recovery from stress; (-) = Finding not in support of the effect of music on physiological recovery from stress.

To visually assess the extent of publication bias, the aggregated effect size estimates in our meta-analytic data set were first used to create a plot of the estimates and their standard errors. In the absence of publication bias, this pattern should resemble a funnel, where effect size estimates with smaller standard errors cluster around the mean effect size, while effect size estimates with larger standard errors spread out in both directions. A common pattern which suggests publication bias is asymmetry in the bottom of the plot. Fig 3 presents the funnel plot of the aggregated effect sizes.

The small number of studies renders it difficult to visually inspect asymmetry, and thus precludes an accurate assessment of publication bias.

Given the limited number of studies included in the meta-analysis ( n = 14), an accurate visual assessment of asymmetry was difficult. Thus, to supplement our visual inspection of the funnel plot, we conducted a trim-and-fill analysis, which trims the values of extreme estimates that may lead to asymmetry in the funnel plot and imputes values to balance out the distribution. No studies were imputed by the trim-and-fill analysis. Additionally, an Egger’s regression for funnel plot asymmetry using the aggregated effect sizes failed to detect significant evidence of publication bias ( t (12) = 1.26, p = 0.231). Lastly, both PET ( β 1 = 2.63, p = 0.311) and PEESE ( β 1 = 3.87, p = 0.356) models were not statistically significant. Taken together, based on the aggregated effect sizes, the different methods of publication bias detection suggest that there is no evidence of publication bias. However, considering the small number of included studies and the significant heterogeneity of our meta-analytic data set, firm conclusions about the extent of publication bias within the current literature on the effects of music listening and stress recovery are difficult to make.

Music listening has the potential to fulfill the promise of effective stress recovery in healthy individuals. However, cumulative evidence from 17 experimental studies suggests that support for the beneficial effect of music listening on stress recovery is currently lacking: for healthy individuals, the effect of music listening on stress recovery may be equivalent to that of other auditory stimuli, or even merely sitting in silence. Furthermore, the effect of music listening on stress recovery is heterogeneous, and moderator analyses suggest the effect may differ in magnitude according to musical genre, whether music is self-selected, musical tempo, and type of stress recovery outcome. Despite this, the limited number of available studies makes it difficult to draw further conclusions from these analyses.

Overall effects of music listening on stress recovery

The results of our review contrast those of previous meta-analyses, which underscore the relevance of music-based interventions for stress-reduction [ 10 , 11 ]. While previous reviews suggest that music-based interventions may be moderately beneficial for stress-related outcomes, particularly in medical and therapeutic settings, our results suggest that the magnitude of this effect outside of these settings, particularly for healthy individuals under acute, experimentally induced stress, may be more modest. We presume that one of the principal reasons for this difference was our decision to exclude studies conducted in medical and therapeutic settings. In previous reviews, randomized controlled trials of the effects of music-based interventions within medical and therapeutic settings constituted a large portion of included studies: 67 of 79 (85%) studies in de Witte et al. [ 10 ], and 15 of 22 (68%) studies in Pelletier [ 11 ], making it more likely that overall effect sizes were derived from studies conducted within these settings. Tentatively, the effects of music listening may be more prominent for the stress recovery of individuals in medical or therapeutic contexts, compared to that of individuals under acute stress in an experimental context. Whereas the time course of stress responses and stress recovery in experimental settings can be considered relatively brief [ 24 , 26 , 40 , 83 ], the time course of stress responses and stress recovery within medical and therapeutic settings may be significantly more protracted [ 12 , 13 ]. Thus, within medical and therapeutic settings, music may be exerting its influence on neuroendocrine, physiological, and psychological processes that have been subjected to longer periods of strain [ 27 , 99 ].

Furthermore, the difference in overall estimated effect sizes may be attributed to differences in the breadth of music activities encompassed by our review and that of de Witte et al. [ 10 ]: whereas we included studies in which participants merely listened to music following a stressor, de Witte et al. [ 10 ] also included music therapy, along with other unspecified music activities. We speculate that the effect of music on stress recovery may differ depending on whether music is merely listened to, performed, or used within a music therapy setting. However, studies comparing the stress recovery effects of these various music activities are rare [ 15 , 58 ]. Thus, future investigations into the differential effect of these music activities may therefore provide a more comprehensive picture of the effects of music on stress recovery.

Potential moderating effects

Our review highlights the considerable methodological variety between studies investigating the effects of music listening on stress recovery. This is particularly concerning given the modest number of experimental studies on music listening and stress recovery in current literature. Although we investigated the impact of these methodological differences through moderator analyses, many of the estimated effects at each level of each moderator were either non-significant or originated from single studies. Taken together, meaningful interpretations for these moderating effects are difficult to make. Therefore, for each significant moderator, we instead provide several recommendations for future research, which we believe may help delineate the effects of these potential moderators.

Musical genre

Although comparisons between musical genres seem relatively straightforward, investigating the differential effects of musical genres may be particularly challenging: the conceptualization of musical genres, along with the songs they encompass, tends to be somewhat arbitrary [ 69 , 75 , 100 , 101 ]. Indeed, studies display considerable variation in musical stimuli, even within the same genre ( Table 4 ). A notable example of this is the study by Sandstrom and Russo [ 53 ], which utilized four ‘classical’ songs, each at different extremes of valence and arousal. It should also be considered that new music is continuously being released which may not completely fit with the definition of any existing genre [ 9 ].

As such, an alternative approach to the investigation of musical genre involves describing these genres according to their musical features, such as tempo, timbre, and loudness, and subsequently investigating the effects of these individual musical features on stress recovery [ 9 , 101 ]. For example, classical music may be described as rhythmically complex, with mellow timbre and fluctuating loudness. Comparatively, though equally rhythmically complex, heavy metal possesses sharper timbre and more pronounced loudness. Investigating the differential effects of these musical features on stress recovery may provide relevant insight into the differential effects of listening to various musical genres on stress recovery.

Self- versus experimenter selection

In investigating the effects of self- versus experimenter selected music on stress recovery in healthy individuals, studies typically request participants to select music they consider ‘relaxing’ prior to an experiment [ 3 , 17 , 18 ]. Although this approach is viable, it precludes the potential role of perceived control in the relationship between music listening and stress recovery, since allowing participants to self-select their own music may already be helpful for stress recovery due to a restoration of perceived control [ 15 ]. Our results were not able to provide a significant contribution to this discussion, as hardly any experimental studies in our review have attempted to account for the potential effects of perceived control. As such, when contrasting the effects of self- and experimenter selected music on stress recovery, future studies may benefit from the inclusion of perceived control as an additional variable in their theoretical models.

It should also be noted that allowing participants to self-select their own music will result in a considerable variety of musical stimuli. Given that each of these musical stimuli may possess a different combination of musical features, the use of self-selected music may generate confounding effects that should preferably be accounted for. Arguably, self-selected music may produce consistent effects on stress-recovery regardless of underlying musical features, given that individuals tend to select music in service of personal self-regulatory goals [ 64 , 75 , 76 ]. However, given that variations in specific musical features, such as tempo, pitch, and loudness have been related to various physiological (e.g., heart rate) [ 73 ] and psychological stress recovery outcomes (e.g., positive and negative affect) [ 100 – 102 ], future studies may benefit from ensuring that musical features are consistent between self- and experimenter selected musical stimuli. This may be done, for instance, by comparing expert ratings of musical features [ 18 ]. Alternatively, there may be value in allowing participants to self-select music from a list provided by experimenters [ 21 ], as this would allow experimenters to standardize musical features a-priori, which may further help disentangle the effects of music listening from that of perceived control.

The comparison of musical features between self-selected and experimenter selected music may also offer a more nuanced perspective on the role of preference and familiarity. Specifically, preferences and familiarity towards certain songs could be described in terms of specific (combinations of) musical features. For example, an individual may prefer music with slow tempo, mellow timbre, and moderate loudness. This approach is often leveraged by music recommender systems, such as those implemented by music streaming platforms (e.g., Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, etc.), with the goal of recommending songs that listeners are likely to engage with. Future studies could investigate the extent to which preference and familiarity might differ between self-selected and experimenter selected music with similar combinations of musical features, to further clarify the role of selection in the relationship between music listening and stress recovery.

Musical tempo

The systematic review portion of our results demonstrates that no studies have directly compared the effect of different musical tempi on stress recovery in healthy individuals. As such, the most straightforward approach to delineate the effects of musical tempo on stress recovery would be to adopt procedures in which participants listen to the same musical stimulus post-stressor, which is then varied in tempo across experimental conditions. Furthermore, even when the goal of a particular study on music listening and stress recovery is not to clarify the effects of musical tempo, we suggest that tempo values for each musical stimulus should be noted down and reported, as this would facilitate the comparison of the differential effects of musical tempo on stress recovery in future meta-synthesis of the literature.

Alternatively, the notion that music with slow tempo is more beneficial for stress recovery compared to music with fast tempo is supported by the assumption that physiological parameters will entrain to musical rhythms [ 63 , 68 ]. As such, a more accurate approach to investigate the effects of musical tempo on stress recovery would be to leverage the dynamic, temporal nature of both music and physiological parameters through use of non-linear analyses of continuous data [ 52 , 103 ]. For example, cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA) [ 104 , 105 ] may enable future studies to quantify the magnitude and duration of rhythmic entrainment for each participant. These indexes of magnitude and duration could then be compared between different musical tempi. Studies have utilized CRQA to investigate cardiac entrainment between participants of collective rituals [ 106 ] and the entrainment of an audience’s heart rate to a live musical performance [ 107 ]. This analytical approach may therefore yield a more nuanced understanding of the effect of musical tempo on the recovery of autonomic parameters.

Stress recovery outcomes

During short-term stress responses, catecholamine- and cortisol-mediated stress responses follow temporally specific patterns: catecholamines rapidly exert their influence on ANS activity, and these changes tend to normalize within 30–60 minutes [ 26 ]. Meanwhile, decreases in cortisol that may be attributed to stress recovery will only become noticeable after recovery-related changes in autonomic activity have begun to occur [ 24 ]. As such, to further clarify the effect of music listening on various stress recovery outcomes, we recommend future studies to be more sensitive towards the innate, intricate, and temporally specific changes of each stress recovery outcome.

Furthermore, multiple studies included in our review have opted to analyze continuous data by means of multivariate analyses of variance, after averaging participants’ observed stress recovery outcomes at multiple time points (e.g., pre-stress, post-stress, post-recovery). Although this approach is practical, doing so may over-simplify the complex changes that may occur during the stress response and subsequent stress recovery, such as the temporal dynamics of different physiological responses [ 52 ] and emotion regulation strategies [ 108 ]. As such, we again suggest future studies to utilize non-linear analyses of data when appropriate, particularly when investigating the effects of music listening on the recovery of autonomic activity post-stressor. The idea of using non-linear analyses, such as time-series analysis, to investigate the stress recovery process is not new [ 5 ]. However, few studies on music listening and stress recovery have utilized this analytical approach.

Additional recommendations

Two studies with unreported stress induction procedures were still included in the review [ 17 , 84 ], as reported means for certain recovery outcomes still suggested an increase from baseline that participants could recover from. For example, with the information reported in Gan et al. [ 84 ], assuming a correlation of 0.5 between baseline and post-stressor measures of state anxiety, we estimated that their stress induction procedure elicited a significant increase in state anxiety in their sedative music ( t (34) = 5.87, p < .001, m diff = 8.17, SD diff = 8.24), stimulative music ( t (34) = 8.21, p < .001, m diff = 12.42, SD diff = 8.95), and control ( t (34) = 13.15, p < .001, m diff = 15.83, SD diff = 7.12) conditions. As the overall estimated effect of music listening on the recovery process of healthy individuals following laboratory stressors may be relatively modest, it becomes particularly important to ensure that a sufficient stress response is elicited, to provide a larger window of opportunity in which the effect of music listening may be exerted on participants’ recovery processes. We thus encourage future studies to adopt validated, (variations of) well-known stress tasks, such as the TSST [ 109 ], SECPT [ 110 ], or CO2 stress task [ 111 ], which have been demonstrated to consistently elicit marked physiological and psychological stress-related responses in laboratory settings. Furthermore, we remind future studies to candidly report the results of their stress induction procedures to facilitate subsequent meta-syntheses of the effects of music listening on stress recovery.

As the current review focused on the effects of music listening after a stressor, studies where music was played before or during a stressor were omitted from our analyses. However, several studies suggest that the timing at which music is played (i.e., before, during, or after a stressor) may influence its effects on stress recovery. For example, in Burns et al. [ 48 ], participants who listened to classical music while anticipating a stressful task exhibited lower post-music heart rate compared to participants who anticipated the stressor in silence. Similarly, concentrations of salivary cortisol were lower for participants who watched a stressful visual stimulus while listening to music compared to those who watched the same stimulus without music [ 112 ]. Together, these findings hint that, when listened during a stressor, music may attenuate cortisol responses [ 9 , 113 ], thus reducing the subsequent need for recovery. On the other hand, Thoma et al. [ 9 ] reported that participants who listened to music prior to a stressor exhibited higher post-stressor cortisol compared to participants who listened to an audio control. Interestingly, despite the stronger stress response, Thoma et al. [ 9 ] noted a trend for quicker ANS recovery among participants who listened to music, particularly with regards to salivary alpha-amylase activity. This pattern of findings is consistent with the notion forwarded by Koelsch et al. [ 61 ], in that music listening may promote a more adaptive stress response, thus facilitating subsequent stress recovery processes. To date, research on timing differences in the context of music listening and stress recovery is scarce. Thus, future studies could further examine the influence of such timing differences to better understand their role in the relationship between music listening and stress recovery.

Given the pervasiveness of stress, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies may provide a more intimate outlook on the dynamics of daily music listening behaviour, particularly for the purpose of stress recovery. For example, through an ambulatory assessment study, Linnemann et al. [ 38 ] revealed that music produced the most notable reductions in physiological and psychological stress outcomes when it was listened to for the purpose of ‘relaxation’, compared to other reasons such as ‘distraction’, ‘activation’, and ‘reducing boredom’. Indeed, given their high ecological validity, EMA studies may provide further insight into important contextual variables in the relationship between music listening and stress recovery. For example, in an EMA study, listening to music in the presence of others was related to decreased subjective stress, attenuated cortisol secretion, and higher activity of salivary alpha-amylase [ 55 ]. Furthermore, physiological responses to music may co-vary between members of a dyad when music is listened to by couples [ 114 ]. Thus, given the benefits of EMA studies, we invite future studies to continue exploring the dynamics and contextual factors of music listening behaviour for stress recovery in daily life.

Lastly, we encourage studies to support open science research practices, and to clearly report statistical information that may be relevant for meta-syntheses (e.g., means and standard deviations per time point, per experimental condition, etc.). Additionally, based on our assessment of study quality using the RoB 2, pre-registration of analysis plans can be helpful to ensure that the conducted study is of overall high quality. Next, we encourage studies to note down which specific musical stimuli were used, particularly those self-selected by participants [ 69 , 99 ], as this enables future exploratory analyses of structural commonalities between different musical stimuli. Musical features from individual songs may be extracted by means of audio information extraction packages, such as MIRtoolbox [ 115 ]. Alternatively, individual song titles may be used to query related meta-data from online databases of various music streaming platforms. This meta-data can subsequently be used to obtain additional insight into the effects of music listening on stress recovery.

Limitations of the current review

To our knowledge, our review is the first to comprehensively investigate the effect of music listening on stress recovery within healthy individuals. Given the explicit focus of our review, our meta-analytic data set excluded the more prominent effects of music listening in both medical and therapeutic settings [ 12 , 13 ], allowing us to obtain results that are tentatively more representative of daily stress recovery processes. Despite this, the present review is not without its limitations:

First, although the specific focus of our review has allowed us to obtain a portrait of the effects of music listening on stress recovery in well-controlled experimental settings, the results of our review may be difficult to generalize to situations in which individuals experience prolonged stress responses. Stress induction procedures in experimental studies are designed to elicit acute stress responses that are meant to subside upon conclusion of an experiment [ 83 ]. Although we believe these procedures provide a suitable approximation of typical stressors in daily life, certain stressors in daily life may also persist for a longer time. The manner and magnitude in which music listening influences prolonged stress responses may potentially differ from the way music influences acute, laboratory-induced stress responses [ 18 , 45 ]. However, studies investigating the effect of music listening on stress recovery in the long-term are particularly rare.

Next, despite our best efforts to obtain relevant meta-analytic information from all studies selected for our review, our meta-analytic data set was ultimately constructed from a subset of fourteen studies. Although the subset allowed us to extract sufficient information to estimate an overall effect of music listening on stress recovery, several estimated effects at moderator level were derived from merely one or two studies (see Table 3 ). This precluded us from drawing further, meaningful conclusions about the results of our moderator analyses.

Finally, despite our clear focus on the effects of music listening on stress recovery within healthy individuals, there was substantial heterogeneity in our meta-analytic data set that could not be fully explained by the inclusion of moderators. Although the systematic review portion of our results highlighted potential additional sources of between-study heterogeneity, these additional sources could not be evaluated in our meta-analytic data set. We note, for example, that all studies utilized different musical stimuli to investigate the effect of music listening on stress recovery (see Table 4 ). The differential effects of these musical stimuli were difficult to account for in our meta-analysis, given the limited number of included studies. Overall, the significant heterogeneity in our meta-analytic data set suggests that our moderator analyses should be interpreted with caution.

Studies commonly suggest that listening to music may have a positive influence on stress recovery. Based on cumulative evidence from 90 effect sizes in 14 studies, it may be premature to firmly conclude whether music listening is beneficial for the stress recovery of healthy individuals. The present review underscores the necessity for further and finer research into the effects of music, bearing the potential role of various moderators, such as musical genre, self-selection, musical tempo, and different stress recovery outcomes, to fully comprehend the nuanced effects of music listening on short-term stress recovery.

Search strategy

Using the advanced search feature within RUQuest, Web of Science, and PsycINFO, the following syntax was used so that the search returned results if keywords were found within the title, abstract, or keywords of relevant publications:

ti: ( music * OR “ music listening ”) AND (( stress * OR strain OR recover * OR relax * OR fatigue OR “ heart rate ” OR “ heart rate variability ” OR “ blood pressure ” OR cardiovascular OR physiological OR cortisol OR “ perseverative cognition ” OR ruminat * OR detachment OR distract * OR worry * OR emotion * OR affect * OR mood OR burnout OR depress *) NOT ( patient OR disease OR surgery OR operating OR theat ?? OR disorder OR clinical OR stroke OR animal OR dent* OR material OR recogni* OR recommend *))

ab: ( music * OR “ music listening ”) AND (( stress * OR strain OR recover * OR relax * OR fatigue OR “ heart rate ” OR “ heart rate variability ” OR “ blood pressure ” OR cardiovascular OR physiological OR cortisol OR “ perseverative cognition ” OR ruminat * OR detachment OR distract * OR worry * OR emotion * OR affect * OR mood OR burnout OR depress *) NOT ( patient OR disease OR surgery OR operating OR theat ?? OR disorder OR clinical OR stroke OR animal OR dent* OR material OR recogni* OR recommend *))

kw: ( music * OR “ music listening ”) AND (( stress * OR strain OR recover * OR relax * OR fatigue OR “ heart rate ” OR “ heart rate variability ” OR “ blood pressure ” OR cardiovascular OR physiological OR cortisol OR “ perseverative cognition ” OR ruminat * OR detachment OR distract * OR worry * OR emotion * OR affect * OR mood OR burnout OR depress *) NOT ( patient OR disease OR surgery OR operating OR theat ?? OR disorder OR clinical OR stroke OR animal OR dent* OR material OR recogni* OR recommend *))

Exploratory moderator analysis with study quality

Based on the RoB 2, all studies in the meta-analysis were of moderate quality, since the lack of pre-specified analysis plans from included studies made it difficult to completely rule out bias from the selection of reported results. Exploratorily, we conducted a less stringent assessment of study quality assuming all studies contained no bias due to selection of results. Based on this assessment, 7 (50%) of the included studies were high quality, while the remaining were moderate quality.

Following our procedure for moderator analyses, we conducted an additional random-effects meta-regression with RVE to test whether the estimated effect of music listening on stress recovery was stable across studies of different quality. The meta-regression suggests that study quality is a significant moderator of the effect of music listening on stress recovery, QM (1) = 41.95, p < .001. The estimated effect of music listening on stress recovery in high quality studies was g = 0.178, 95% CI [0.00, 0.35], p = .046, while the estimated effect of music in moderate quality studies was g = 0.102, 95% CI [-0.14, 0.35], p = .041.

In our meta-analysis, we generally distinguished between stress induction procedures with- or without a socio-evaluative threat component. However, specific stress induction procedures varied considerably between studies, as described below:

Arithmetic tasks

Four studies utilized arithmetic tasks to induce stress in participants. These tasks included single- and double-digit mental arithmetic operations [ 17 ], mental arithmetic operations “with harassment” [ 18 , 21 ], and standardized mathematic tests [ 84 ].

Trier Social Stress Task (with modifications)

One study [ 54 ] followed the standard administration protocol of the Trier Social Stress Task (TSST) [ 109 , 116 ]. Two studies modified the TSST [ 109 ] by having participants prepare and deliver their presentations in front of a camera instead of a panel of judges [ 3 , 37 ], while the subsequent mental arithmetic task was replaced by the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT) [ 117 ], administered through a laptop. One study administered the TSST with a shorter mental arithmetic component [ 118 ], while two studies omitted the TSST’s speech delivery component [ 119 , 120 ].

Anticipation

One study made use of anticipation to induce stress [ 50 ], where participants were asked to prepare an impromptu presentation that would be videotaped at the end of a preparation period. Participants were eventually not required to deliver the prepared presentation.

Unpleasant stimuli

Two studies exposed participants to unpleasant stimuli as a means of inducing stress. These unpleasant stimuli were either auditory [ 82 ] or visual [ 19 ] in nature.

CO 2 stress task

One study utilized the CO 2 Stress Task [ 61 ]. In this task, as a an acute physiological stressor, participants were instructed to take a single, vital-capacity breath of air containing 35% carbon dioxide and 65% oxygen [ 111 ].

The duration of each stress induction procedure varied according to procedure category. The longest stress induction procedures (15 minutes) typically involved (variations of) the TSST (e.g., [ 37 ]. Conversely, the shortest procedure (90 seconds) was the exposure to unpleasant noise in Nakajima et al. [ 82 ], as their experimental design involved repeated presentation of the stressor to participants. Finally, it is also worth noting that among studies which reported successful stress induction procedures (see Table 2 ), the magnitude of resulting stress responses was often not reported.

Selection of musical stimuli

All studies held a general assumption that ‘relaxing’ music would best promote stress recovery. However, studies utilized different strategies in selecting ‘relaxing’ music, resulting in considerable variation in musical stimuli between studies. These strategies are listed below:

Sampling from available music

Four studies utilized a relatively straightforward strategy in selecting music—musical stimuli were sampled from songs commonly found on ‘relaxing’, either from their inclusion in anti-stress cassettes [ 21 , 54 ], coverage in popular media [ 120 ], or the researcher’s opinion [ 118 ].

Referencing prior studies

Three studies selected music that, in prior studies, seemed to have positive effects on heart rate, respiration rate, perceived arousal, and perceived relaxation. One study made reference to pilot studies [ 82 ], while the remaining two cited previous published work by the same authors [ 19 , 50 ].

Theoretical conceptualization

Two studies attempted to theoretically conceptualize which music would be ‘relaxing’, and selected their musical stimuli accordingly. De la Torre-Luque et al. [ 3 ] utilized Melomics, a computational system for the automatic composition of music, to create songs that would be considered ‘relaxing’. These songs were slow-paced, instrumental pieces, which contained no sudden or abrupt changes in melody. Gan et al. [ 84 ] distinguished between stimulative and sedative (‘relaxing’) music based on musical tempo—the speed or pace of a given song, and dynamic range—the difference between the quietest and loudest parts of a song [ 121 ]. In their study, stimulative music was characterized by fast tempo and broad dynamic range, while sedative music was characterized by slow tempo and narrow (soft) dynamic range.

Self-selection

Six studies allowed participants to select and listen to their own ‘relaxing’ music. In four studies, participants were instructed to bring a list of ‘preferred’ relaxing music, which they would have the opportunity to listen to during the study [ 18 , 37 , 54 , 66 , 119 ]. In one study, participants selected ‘relaxing’ music from a list created by the experimenters ( pseudo self-selection) [ 21 ]. The specific musical stimuli chosen by participants in studies allowing self-selection were often not reported.

Effects of music listening on stress recovery

Studies utilized a variety of outcomes to investigate the effects of music listening on stress recovery. To expand upon the results of our meta-analysis, we detail the findings reported for each of these outcomes below. Given that three studies included in the systematic review could not be included in the meta-analysis due to incomplete reported data, the number of studies per outcome reported in this section may differ from the number of studies per outcome in the meta-analysis ( Table 3 ).

Scheufele [ 50 ] reported that participants who listened to classical music demonstrated lower post-stressor heart rate (HR) compared to participants in a comparable control group. By contrast, six studies reported no significant differences in post-stressor HR between participants who listened to music and those who did not [ 3 , 18 , 19 , 21 , 66 , 84 ]. In summary, only one study out of seven provides evidence in support of a positive effect of music listening on post-stressor HR recovery.

Heart rate variability

Four studies utilized various heart rate variability (HRV) indices as a means to assess stress recovery. Two studies reported higher post-stressor HF band power in participants who listened to music compared to those who sat in silence [ 3 , 37 ]. In Nakajima et al. [ 82 ], this difference was more pronounced for participants who listened to music with boosted high frequencies. Contrarily, in Sokhadze [ 19 ], participants who listened to peaceful music demonstrated lower post-stressor HF band power compared to those who sat in silence. Two studies reported that post-stressor sample entropy was higher for participants who listened to music compared to silence [ 3 , 37 ]. This difference was taken as indicator which suggested that the physiological parameters of participants in the music condition were more ready to change compared to those in the silence condition [ 3 ]. No studies reported significant differences in RMSSD, LF band power, and LF/HF ratio between participants who listened to music and those who did not [ 3 , 19 , 37 , 82 ]. Overall, three of four studies provide support for a positive effect of music listening on post-stressor HRV recovery, but these effects seem to vary across HRV indices.

Blood pressure

Four studies assessed the impact of music listening on stress recovery through changes in systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Chafin et al. [ 21 ] reported that the post-stressor SBP approached baseline values more quickly for participants who listened to experimenter-selected classical music compared to participants who sat in silence. On the other hand, three studies reported no significant differences in post-stressor SBP between participants who listened to music and those who did not [ 18 , 84 , 120 ]. Instead, compared to participants sitting in silence, post-stressor SBP recovery in participants who listened to either happy or relaxing music was delayed [ 18 ]. With regards to DBP, none of the above studies reported significant differences in post-stressor DBP between their respective experimental conditions. In summary, one study out of four provides support for a beneficial effect of music listening on post-stressor SBP recovery, while no studies provide support for a beneficial effect of music listening on DBP recovery.

Respiration rate

One study reported no significant differences in post-stressor respiration rate (RR) between participants listening to different musical genres and silence [ 17 ]. As such, there is currently no evidence to suggest that music listening is beneficial for post-stressor RR recovery.

Skin conductance

In Sokhadze [ 19 ], participants’ SC was lower while listening to pleasant music compared to during the stressor. In Fallon et al. [ 118 ], participants who listened to self-selected music experienced lower SC compared to those in the control condition during the recovery session of the study. In a post-hoc analysis, Labbé et al. [ 17 ] reported that post-stressor SC recovery was greater for the classical and self-selected music groups, compared to the heavy metal or no music groups. Collectively, three studies provide evidence for a positive effect of music listening on post-stressor SC recovery.

Two studies utilized cortisol to examine the effect of music listening on stress recovery. Khalfa et al. [ 54 ] reported that post-stressor cortisol decreased more rapidly for participants who listened to experimenter-selected classical music, compared to participants who sat in silence. Contrarily, Koelsch et al. [ 61 ] reported that music listening delayed cortisol recovery, as cortisol concentrations were higher for participants who listened to music post-stressor compared to silence. As such, only one study out of two provides support for a beneficial effect of music listening on post-stressor cortisol recovery.

Subjective stress

In Groarke & Hogan [ 119 ], participants who listened to self-selected music reported lower subjective stress post-stressor compared to those who listened to a radio documentary. By comparison, in Radstaak et al. [ 18 ], there were no differences in post-stressor subjective stress between participants listening to happy music, relaxing music, an audiobook, and silence. Thus, only one study out of two provides support for a beneficial effect of music listening on post-stressor subjective stress.

Perceived relaxation

In Labbé et al. [ 17 ], post-stressor perceived relaxation was higher for participants who listened to classical music compared to heavy metal, but not compared to silence. There were no significant differences in post-stressor perceived relaxation between participants listening to the various musical genres in Chafin et al. [ 21 ], and between participants listening to classical music or silence [ 50 ]. Thus, no studies provide conclusive evidence that music listening is beneficial for post-stressor perceived relaxation. However, the effects of music listening on perceived relaxation may differ depending on genre.

State anxiety

Three studies reported that music listening reduced post-stressor state anxiety compared to silence [ 17 , 37 , 119 ]. Furthermore, Gan, Lim, and Haw [ 84 ] reported that post-stressor changes in mathematics-related anxiety were significantly higher for participants who listened to sedative music compared to those who did not. Despite this, three studies reported no significant differences in post-stressor state anxiety between their respective experimental groups [ 3 , 19 , 21 ]. Thus, four of seven studies provide support for a beneficial effect of music listening on post-stressor state anxiety.

State depression

Two studies looked at the presence and/or severity of depressive symptoms in order to assess whether or not music facilitated psychological recovery [ 19 , 37 ]. However, only de la Torre-Luque et al. [ 37 ] reported significant positive differences in post-stressor depressive symptoms between participants who listened to music and those who did not.

Two studies measured rumination as an indicator of psychological stress recovery, and both reported no significant differences in post-stressor rumination between participants in their respective experimental conditions [ 18 , 21 ]. As such, there is currently no evidence to suggest that music listening is beneficial for post-stressor rumination.

Positive and negative affect

De la Torre-Luque et al. [ 37 ] noted that participants who listened to music reported higher positive affect scores and lower negative affect scores post-stressor compared to the control group. Similarly, Radstaak et al. [ 18 ] reported that participants who listened to happy or relaxing music reported higher post-stressor positive affect compared to participants who did not listen to music, but found no significant differences in post-stressor negative affect. Two studies utilized the Profile of Moods Scale (POMS) to assess post-stressor changes in affect. Koelsch et al. [ 61 ] noted that participants who listened to music demonstrated higher post-stressor POMS scores (suggesting higher positive affect) compared to those who sat in silence. On the other hand, Scheufele [ 50 ] reported no significant differences in post-stressor POMS scores between experimental groups. Two studies [ 118 , 119 ] measured affect by asking participants to report whether they felt various emotions (e.g., calmness, nervousness) throughout the study. Fallon et al. [ 118 ] reported that music listening did not have differential effects on affect compared to silence, while Groarke and Hogan [ 119 ] noted that participants who listened to music demonstrated less negative affect (as indicated by lower scores on the various emotions that participants were asked to rate) compared to those who did not. Collectively, the effect of music listening on post-stressor positive and negative affect seemed to be mixed. Three studies provide support for the beneficial role of music listening on post-stressor positive affect, and two studies provide support for the beneficial effect of music listening for negative affect.

Supporting information

S1 checklist, funding statement.

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Data Availability

• PLoS One. 2022; 17(6): e0270031.

Decision Letter 0

22 Oct 2021

PONE-D-21-22806Music listening and stress recovery in healthy individuals: A systematic review with meta-analysis of experimental studiesPLOS ONE

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Reviewer #1: This systematic review and meta-analysis examined the effects of music listening after experimentally induced stress on stress recovery in healthy participants. The authors found no evidence for a cumulative effect of music listening on stress recovery. They did find that the effectiveness of music was moderated by several factors, including musical genre, type of music selection, musical tempo, and type of stress recovery outcome, although definite conclusions on the nature of these effects could not be drawn.

The study addresses a very timely question within the growing body of research on music and stress, and is well-executed. As such, it provides a valuable and much-needed contribution to the research field. The selection of study parameters and moderators of interest is convincing, the results are presented in a clear and comprehensible way, and the authors provide a thoughtful interpretation of their findings, which they appropriately put into perspective by acknowledging the limitations of their study. Furthermore, they provide several helpful and well-considered recommendations for future research. The manuscript is well-written.

I only have several minor comments.

1. In discussing the potential moderating effect “Self- vs. experimenter selected” (page 9), the authors mention two presumed explanations for this effect, namely increasing perceived control and serving self-regularity goals. For a somewhat more comprehensive picture, it may be worth adding the potential roles of liking and familiarity as further mechanisms behind the suggested higher effectiveness of self-compared to experimenter-selected music in promoting stress recovery.

2. In the abstract (and throughout the theoretical sections of the paper), it is stated that participants of the studies included in the meta-analysis/review “were either exposed to music or silence.” I find this misleading, since in the Method section, it is stated on page 10 that to be included, “studies should compare music listening to silence or a comparable auditory stimulus (e.g., white noise, audiobooks)”.

Apart from the fact that it is not evident in what sense and to what extent silence can be considered comparable to auditory control stimuli, the use of the label “silence” to capture all non-music control conditions, is confusing. Please adapt the instances where you currently refer to silence by using more accurate wording (e.g. “silence or an auditory control condition”).

3. Page 11: “When authors did not or could not provide the required information (e.g., due to data no longer being accessible), the outcome was dropped from the meta-analysis. Based on these criteria, the final sample for the systematic review consisted of 17 studies. Following attempts to obtain missing information, the final sample for the meta-analysis consisted of 14 studies.”

This is phrased in a confusing way – it is not clear what the conceptual difference between these selection steps is. Please rephrase this in a way that makes it less confusing.

4. On page 11, the authors point out that “Stress induction procedures in included studies were not always successful. Given that successful stress induction procedures are crucial to ensure that participants experience some physiological or psychological change they may recover from, in our moderator analysis we examined whether the effect of music listening on stress recovery differed based on the outcome of a study’s stress induction check (manipulation check)”.

I fully agree with the authors that, for music to exert an effect on stress, a physiological and/or psychological stress response needs to be present, from which participants may then recover. I find it therefore difficult to understand why studies which failed to induce stress (i.e. did not report a successful stress induction) were included in the meta-analysis in the first place. The fact that the successfulness of the stress induction, surprisingly, did not affect the extent of stress recovery does not really resolve my concern.

Could the authors briefly comment on this issue, and motivate their decision to still include these studies in their meta-analysis (either under “stress induction checks” on page 11, or in the discussion section)?

5. Page 11: “In our moderator analysis, we examined whether the effects of music listening on stress recovery were reliable across general (neuroendocrine, physiological, psychological) and specific outcome types.”

I am not sure whether the moderator analysis allows any claims about the reliability of the effects across outcome types. In theory, an effect could be highly reliable across many outcome types, while at the same time still being clearly stronger for some outcome types than for others (hence being moderated by them), right? Wouldn’t it be more correct to state that it was assessed to what extent the size of the effect on stress recovery depended on outcome type (or some equivalent formulation)? I am no expert on this issue, but I invite the authors to reconsider their wording.

6. There is a type on page 15: Wisagreements --> Disagreements

7. As the authors rightly point out on page 6, stress recovery involves a process in which “changes that have occurred in response to a stressor revert to pre-stress baselines”. To quantify stress recovery, it therefore seems crucial to take individual pre-stress baseline levels into account.

To the reader, it does not readily become clear whether the effects derived from the studies included in the meta-analysis indeed reflect the extent to which stress levels “return to baseline”. From Table 4, the included studies seem to be a mix of 1) studies reporting differences in change scores with respect to pre-stress baseline levels and 2) studies reporting raw group differences in post-music stress levels. This may require some sort of disclaimer.

Could you please reflect on these analytical differences and their (possible) implications for the interpretation of your meta-analysis, in relation to the term “recovery”?

8. On page 37-38 you write: “Khalfa et al. [55] reported that post-stressor cortisol decreased more rapidly for participants who listened to experimenter-selected classical music, compared with participants who sat in silence”

In Table 2 you write, when referring to this study: “Increase in post-stressor cortisol for music group significantly lower compared to control group (+)”.

These descriptions differ – could you please adapt the main text to match the (correct) description in the table?

9. On page 40-41, you write: “While previous reviews suggest that music-based interventions may be moderately beneficial for stress-related outcomes, particularly in medical and therapeutic settings, our results suggest that the magnitude of this effect for healthy individuals may be more modest.”

While I largely agree with the contents of this paragraph (and with the further comments on this issue on page 46), I think the term “healthy individuals” (to label the category for which music is less effective for stress recovery) does not capture the essence of the differences between the different types of studies, and hence using this term may be a bit misleading.

As is stated further down the paragraph, the stress in studies conducted in medical and therapeutic settings likely has a more protracted time course, which does not directly have to do with the participants being (not) healthy. Furthermore, stress may differ in intensity between laboratory and medical real-life/settings, and the effectiveness of music may depend on the research setting as well.

It would be great if you could somewhat adapt the wording of this paragraph, to avoid the impression that the (non-) effectiveness of music depends on the participants being healthy. Rather, it seems more likely that several (interrelated) factors associated with the different research settings (e.g. type, intensity and duration of stress) are driving these differences. You might e.g. use the term “healthy individuals under brief, experimentally induced stress” instead.

Reviewer #2: Review:

The authors address an important research question as they aim at systemizing the empirical evidence on beneficial effects of music listening on stress recovery. Overall, the manuscript is well written and the authors demonstrate methodological rigour and diligence on many instances. However, I have some major concerns that question the adequacy of the hypothesis and statistical approach as well as the search strategy.

Major Concerns:

1) The authors identified 14 studies that are quite heterogenous in nature. I ask myself whether the approach of a meta-analysis is adequate for this rather small number of studies given this vast heterogenity. Furthermore, not all studies were successfull in stress induction. Wouldn't it be reasonable to exclude these studies from the analysis?

2) Concerning the search strategy, I wondered that PubMed was not included. Searching this data base might be useful as the number of studies identified is quite small.

3) Inclusion and exclusion criteria are not specifically justified. For example, in Figure 1 exclusion criteria are presented, e.g. 'no music presented after stressor'. This might be the reason why the study of Thoma et al. (2013) ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23940541/ ) is not party of the review, although I consider it highly relevant in the context of music listening and stress reduction. Overall, I would describe and justify more in detail criteria for inclusion and exclusion of studies.

4) Introduction: first paragraph: I really like the introduction to the topic, as the aspect of stress in daily life is emphasized. I wondered why the authors did not include ambulatory assessment/ecological momentary assessment studies in their review, as these studies have high ecological validity. I recommend to expand the review and to assess independently the evidence concerning controlled studies with high internal validity on the one hand and daily life studies with high ecological validity on the other hand.

5) It may be my personal opinion, but I was irritated by the many instances the authors use the term 'beliefs', e.g. abstract 'given the popular and widespread belief'. My recommendation is to re-word this and acknowledge the empirical evidence underlying this statement.

Minor Concerns:

Abstract: 'beneficial for stress' should be specified (beneficial for stress reduction)

Abstract: Please report how many participants in total were included in the 14 studies

Abstract: please specify that (randomized)-controlled studies were included

Introduction: 'It is a popular and widespread opinion that music may be beneficial for

stress recovery [10]': I am not convinced that the citation is that adequate in this context. Levitin demonstrates in this book many instances for beneficial effects of music. I am not satisfied with labeling his statement as 'popular and widespread opinion'. Furthermore, I do not consider this book an optimal citation for this peer-reviewed journal article as there is a vast body of empirical evidence available.

Introduction l.60: My first thought was to question the necessity of this review given the fact that an extensive review was just published. Although, the authors justify their review in the ensuing paragraph, I would recommend to state immediately more clearly that the scope of the other review was different.

Introduction l.78: Why not include studies demonstrating effects on cortisol?

l.133: I would not recommend to write 'smaller amounts of salivary alpha-amylase'. Rather, less activity of alpha-amylase.

l.153: Study 54 refers to an ambulatory assessment study – therefore, there was no control to silence or noise in a comparable manner to experimental studies. Please re-word.

l.164: I do not agree with the statement that the candidate mechanism underlying beneficial effects of music has already been identified. I would rather prefer to see here a more comprehensive statement acknowledging that the exact underlying mechanisms remain to be elucidated and that different notions exist, e.g., literature by Koelsch…

l.274: IgA is named as outcome measure but has not been introduced. As it is an immune marker, the introduction should contain some information on interactions among stress and immune system.

l.310: some typos need revision

l.425: Can you please indicate the range of music duration? As there is literature available on the effects of different music durations on beneficial effects, I assume that the range was very limited among these studies. Therefore, I would not state that duration is not important. Rather, that the range in experimental studies is not vast enough to allow for meaningful comparisons.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Submitted filename: Review_PONE-D-21-22806.pdf

Submitted filename: Review.docx

Author response to Decision Letter 0

17 Dec 2021

Dear Prof. Dr. Nater,

Thank you for your e-mail in response to our submission to PLOS ONE [PONE-D-21-22806], in which you explained your decision concerning our manuscript, enclosing the reviewers’ comments. We have carefully addressed each reviewer’s comments and adjusted our manuscript accordingly. Our responses to each reviewer’s comments have been provided in a point-by-point manner below.

We hope the revised version of our manuscript will fully meet PLOS ONE’s rigorous publication criteria. We look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

Krisna Adiasto, MSc.

On behalf of all authors.

---------------

Response to Reviewer #1

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for taking the time to review our manuscript. We appreciate your kind words about our work. More importantly, we sincerely appreciate the constructive comments and suggestions you have provided for various portions of our review and have thus updated our manuscript to address them. Below, we provide a summary of the changes we have made. In the response letter we have attached to our revision, you will see your comments in bold, our responses in regular text, and excerpts from our manuscript in italics (unless otherwise indicated).

We agree that preference and familiarity potentially play a role in making self-selected music more beneficial compared to experimenter selected music for the purpose of stress recovery. As we strive to make our review as comprehensive as possible, we have added the following sentences on the roles of preference and familiarity in our discussion of the potential moderating effects of self- vs. experimenter selected music (page 9):

“Furthermore, previous studies have found that listening to self-selected music may help elicit stronger and more positive emotional responses regardless of a song’s valence (positive or negative) and arousal (high or low), possibly due to increased preference and familiarity towards the self-selected music (Jiang et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2011; Sharman & Dingle, 2015). In theory, self-selected music should thus be more beneficial compared to experimenter-selected music for the purpose of stress recovery.”

And again in our discussion of the moderator analyses (page 45):

“The comparison of musical features between self-selected and experimenter selected music may also offer a more nuanced perspective on the role of preference and familiarity. Specifically, preferences and familiarity towards certain songs could be described in terms of specific (combinations of) musical features. For example, an individual may prefer music with slow tempo, mellow timbre, and moderate loudness. This approach is often leveraged by music recommender systems, such as those implemented by music streaming platforms (e.g., Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, etc.), with the goal of recommending songs that listeners are likely to engage with. Future studies could investigate the extent to which preference and familiarity might differ between self-selected and experimenter selected music with similar combinations of musical features, to further clarify the role of selection in the relationship between music listening and stress recovery.”

Jiang, J., Rickson, D., & Jiang, C. (2016). The mechanism of music for reducing psychological stress: Music preference as a mediator. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 48, 62-68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2016.02.002

Pereira, C. S., Teixeira, J., Figueiredo, P., Xavier, J., Castro, S. L., & Brattico, E. (2011). Music and emotions in the brain: Familiarity matters. PLOS ONE, 6(11), e27241. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0027241

Sharman, L., & Dingle, G. A. (2015). Extreme metal music and anger processing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 272. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00272

Apart from the fact that it is not evident in what sense and to what extent silence can be considered comparable to auditory control stimuli, the use of the label “silence” to capture all non-music control conditions, is confusing. Please adapt the instances where you currently refer to silence by using more accurate wording (e.g., “silence or an auditory control condition”).

Thank you for your suggestion. It was not our intention to use the label ‘silence’ as an overall term for all control conditions across studies. When the change was justified (i.e., when the cited studies indeed had an auditory control condition), we have adjusted the instances in which use of the label ‘silence’ only was not accurate. For example, in the Abstract:

“As such, to clarify the current literature, we conducted a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized, controlled experimental studies investigating the effects of music listening on stress recovery in healthy individuals. In fourteen experimental studies, participants (N = 706) were first exposed to an acute laboratory stressor, following which they were either exposed to music or a control condition.”

“Indeed, studies on music listening and stress recovery in healthy individuals are equivocal: although music listening is considered beneficial for physiological stress recovery, several studies have reported no differences in heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, or blood pressure recovery between participants who listened to music and those who either sat in silence or listened to an auditory control [18-21].”

“For example, music listening has been associated with lower heart rate [49-51], systolic blood pressure [22, 50, 52], skin conductance [18, 20, 53, 54], and cortisol [55] compared to silence or an auditory control condition.”

“Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that listening to music may influence mood [60, 61]. Indeed, music listening has been associated with lower negative affect [38], higher positive affect [19, 62], and fewer self-reported depressive symptoms [38] compared to silence or an auditory control condition.”

On page 16:

“In the present study, a Hedges’ g of zero indicates the effect of music listening on stress recovery is equivalent to silence or an auditory control. Conversely, a Hedges’ g greater than zero indicates the degree to which music listening is more effective than control, while a g less than zero indicates the degree to which music listening is less effective than control.”

On page 22:

“This estimate suggests that, taking all variations in music and outcomes into consideration, the effect of music listening and silence have equivalent effects on stress recovery is equivalent to silence or an auditory control.”

Thank you for pointing this out. To make the distinction between the two steps clearer, we have rephrased the sentences in question to:

“Based on these criteria, the final sample for the systematic review portion of our manuscript consisted of 17 studies. Finally, for studies to be included in the meta-analysis portion of our review, means and standard deviations of stress recovery outcomes following stressor cessation must be available. Corresponding authors were contacted when this information was not available. When authors did not or could not provide the required information (e.g., due to data no longer being accessible), the outcome was dropped from the meta-analysis. Thus, following attempts to obtain missing information, the final sample for the meta-analysis portion of our review consisted of 14 studies.”

I fully agree with the authors that, for music to exert an effect on stress, a physiological and/or psychological stress response needs to be present, from which participants may then recover. I find it therefore difficult to understand why studies which failed to induce stress (i.e., did not report a successful stress induction) were included in the meta-analysis in the first place. The fact that the successfulness of the stress induction, surprisingly, did not affect the extent of stress recovery does not really resolve my concern.

Could the authors briefly comment on this issue and motivate their decision to still include these studies in their meta-analysis (either under “stress induction checks” on page 11, or in the discussion section)?

Thank you for mentioning this. We agree that it is particularly important to further address the inclusion of studies with unsuccessful stress induction checks, as you and another reviewer have put forward similar concerns on the matter.

In the previous version of our manuscript, three studies were coded to have ‘unsuccessful’ stress induction checks. One of these studies (Scheufele, 2000) was erroneously coded, as the author did report a marked increase in heart rate following their stress induction procedure compared to baseline. Meanwhile, in the remaining two studies (Gan et al., 2016 & Labbé et al., 2007), the authors have hinted that their respective stress induction procedures were successful. However, we coded these as ‘unsuccessful’ since the statistical analyses comparing post-stressor and baseline values of their stress recovery outcomes were missing. We ultimately decided to still include these two studies in the meta-analysis given that the reported mean scores for certain stress recovery outcomes still suggested there was an increase from baseline from which participants could recover from. For example, in Gan et al. (2016), mean state anxiety for their three conditions during the stress task were msedative = 46.97, mstimulative = 50.51, and mcontrol = 52.00, compared to baseline means scores of msedative = 38.80, mstimulative = 38.09, and mcontrol = 36.17.

Based on this, we have thus updated the results of our analysis for the “stress induction checks” moderator (page 27), to reflect the change in coding for Scheufele (2000):

“Stress induction checks. There were no significant differences in the effects of music listening on stress recovery for studies with successful (g = 0.17301, 95% CI [-0.2635, 0.6155], p = .399625) and unsuccessful (g = 0.062361, 95% CI [-0.0894, 0.201.66], p = .115355) stress induction checks, β1 = -0.108257, p = .525661.”

Next, we have added a paragraph to acknowledge the inclusion of studies with unsuccessful stress tasks in our Discussion (page 49):

“Two studies with less successful stress induction procedures were still included in the review, given that reported raw scores for certain recovery outcomes still suggested an increase from baseline that participants could recover from. For example, in Gan et al. (2016), mean state anxiety for their three conditions during the stress task were msedative = 46.97, mstimulative = 50.51, and mcontrol = 52.00, compared to baseline means scores of msedative = 38.80, mstimulative = 38.09, and mcontrol = 36.17. Given that the overall estimated effect of music listening on the recovery process of healthy individuals following laboratory stressors may be relatively modest, it becomes particularly important to ensure that a sufficient stress response is elicited, to provide a larger window of opportunity in which the effect of music listening may be exerted on participants’ recovery processes. We thus encourage future studies to adopt validated (variations of) well-known stress tasks, such as the TSST, SECPT, or CO2 stress task, which have been demonstrated to consistently elicit marked physiological and psychological stress-related responses in laboratory settings.”

Gan, S. K. E., Lim, K. M. J., & Haw, Y. X. (2016). The relaxation effects of stimulative and sedative music on mathematics anxiety: A perception to physiology model. Psychology of Music, 44(4), 730-741. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735615590430

Labbé, E., Schmidt, N., Babin, J., & Pharr, M. (2007). Coping with stress: the effectiveness of different types of music. Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 32, 163-168. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10484-007-9043-9

Scheufele, P. M. (2000). Effects of progressive relaxation and classical music on measurements of attention, relaxation, and stress responses. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 23, 207-228. https://doi.org/10.21236/ad1012237

Thank you for your comment. Indeed, we utilized the term ‘reliable’ when in fact our intention was to assess the extent to which the size of the effect of music listening on stress recovery would differ, for example across outcome types. We have thus adjusted our wording to the following (page 12):

“In our moderator analysis, we examined whether the effects of music listening on stress recovery differed across general (neuroendocrine, physiological, psychological) and specific outcome types.”

6. There is a type on page 15: Wisagreements � Disagreements

Thank you for pointing this out. The typo (page 15) has been fixed.

“Disagreements were resolved through face-to-face discussions, or through consultation with SG and KR when no consensus could be reached.”

Previous research has shown that following an acute stress reaction, all elevated physiological and psychological parameters will naturally revert to pre-stress baselines within 30-60 minutes (Hermans et al., 2014). As such, the most immediate proof of the effect of music listening on stress recovery would be to see whether listening to music would allow participants to reach their respective baseline levels sooner within time frame. Unfortunately, as we also point out in our Discussion, it is rare for studies to adopt a design where such changes are monitored, particularly through use of continuous measures. Instead, as you have rightly pointed out, studies either compare post-stress and post-manipulation change scores between conditions or compare post-manipulation raw group differences between music and comparable control conditions. The effects of music listening on stress recovery that we describe in our meta-analysis thus reflect how reactive participants’ stress recovery processes are when listening to music, rather than how soon participants recover, with the assumption that greater reactivity (e.g., larger decreases in heart rate) post-stressor also results in earlier returns to baseline.

Hermans, E. J., Henckens, M. J., Joëls, M., & Fernández, G. (2014). Dynamic adaptation of large-scale brain networks in response to acute stressors. Trends in Neurosciences, 37, 304-314. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2014.03.006

Thank you for pointing this out. The correct description was what we wrote in text. We have thus adjusted the description in Table 4 to:

“Significant, rapid decrease in post-stressor cortisol in music group compared to control group (+).”

It would be great if you could somewhat adapt the wording of this paragraph, to avoid the impression that the (non-) effectiveness of music depends on the participants being healthy. Rather, it seems more likely that several (interrelated) factors associated with the different research settings (e.g., type, intensity, and duration of stress) are driving these differences. You might e.g., use the term “healthy individuals under brief, experimentally induced stress” instead.

Thank you for your comment. Indeed, the term “healthy individuals” may at times oversimplify the fact that the effect of music listening may differ based on differences in research settings. We have reworded the paragraph as follows:

“The results of our review contrast those of previous meta-analyses, which underscore the relevance of music-based interventions for stress-reduction [11, 12]. While previous reviews suggest that music-based interventions may be moderately beneficial for stress-related outcomes, particularly in medical and therapeutic settings, our results suggest that the magnitude of this effect outside of these settings, particularly for healthy individuals under acute, experimentally induced stress, may be more modest. We presume that one of the principal reasons for this difference was our decision to exclude studies conducted in medical and therapeutic settings. In previous reviews, randomized controlled trials of the effects of music-based interventions within medical and therapeutic settings constituted a large portion of included studies: 67 of 79 (85%) studies in de Witte et al. [11], and 15 of 22 (68%) studies in Pelletier [12], making it more likely that overall effect sizes were derived from studies conducted within these settings. Tentatively, the effects of music listening may be more prominent for the stress recovery of individuals in medical or therapeutic contexts, compared to that of individuals under acute stress in an experimental context. Whereas the time course of stress responses and stress recovery in experimental settings can be considered relatively brief [25, 27, 41, 85], the time course of stress responses and stress recovery within medical and therapeutic settings may be significantly more protracted [13, 14]. Thus, within medical and therapeutic settings, music may be exerting its influence on neuroendocrine, physiological, and psychological processes that have been subjected to longer periods of strain [28, 108].”

Response to Reviewer #2

Thank you for taking the time to review our manuscript. We appreciate the kind words you have mentioned on the execution of our review. More importantly, we sincerely appreciate the critical comments you have provided on our search strategy and adequacy of our approach. Below, we address your concerns in a point-by-point fashion and summarize the changes we have made to our manuscript based on your suggestions. In the response letter we have included with our revision, you will see your comments in bold, our responses in regular text, and excerpts from our manuscript in italics (unless otherwise indicated):

1) The authors identified 14 studies that are quite heterogenous in nature. I ask myself whether the approach of a meta-analysis is adequate for this rather small number of studies given this vast heterogeneity. Furthermore, not all studies were successful in stress induction. Wouldn't it be reasonable to exclude these studies from the analysis?

We acknowledge that the relatively small number of heterogeneous studies may render the results of our meta-analysis less meaningful. We can thus understand if concerns are raised about whether a meta-analysis is the most appropriate approach to synthesize the available empirical evidence on the relationship between music listening and stress recovery.

As we state in the Limitations of our manuscript (page 49), we are aware that the small number of included studies makes it difficult to draw meaningful, substantial conclusions based on the results of the meta-analysis alone. For this reason, we have supplemented the quantitative synthesis of the meta-analysis with a more qualitative synthesis from a systematic review. We think this combined approach has yielded a more nuanced review, as the qualitative description of the included studies have helped provide more context to the results of our meta-analysis. We have reported the systematic review in our Results section on page 27.

Thus, we think our review is still valuable despite the small number of studies, as it provides not only a quantitative synthesis of available evidence, but also provides a qualitative description of the potential sources of heterogeneity that the meta-analysis could not account for.

Next, thank you for mentioning your concern over the inclusion of studies whose stress induction procedures were not successful. A similar point was raised by another reviewer. We thus agree that it is particularly important to further address the inclusion of studies with unsuccessful stress induction checks.

Based on this, we have thus updated the results of our analysis for the “stress induction checks” moderator (page 26), to reflect the change in coding for Scheufele (2000):

Next, we have added a paragraph to acknowledge the inclusion of studies with unsuccessful stress tasks in our Discussion (page 48):

One of the goals of our review was to highlight the overall effect of music listening on stress recovery in healthy individuals. This meant excluding, for example, studies on the effects of music listening in the management of treatment anxiety or stress during pregnancy and labor. As we mention in the Introduction of our review (page 3), we reasoned that the nature of stressors in medical and therapeutic settings, along with their subsequent recovery processes, would be difficult to generalize to more daily settings.

From our experience, most studies on music listening published on the PubMed database reported experiments conducted within medical or therapeutic settings. Thus, when designing our search strategy, we made the decision to exclude the PubMed database from our search.

Despite this, based on your comment, we conducted an additional search in the PubMed database using the same search strategy listed in Appendix A. We limited the additional search to studies published until April 2021 to match our original search. This additional search returned 958 studies, but none of these studies met our inclusion criteria. Our search in PubMed thus resulted in no additional studies.

We have reported this additional search in our manuscript on page 10:

“The results of this primary search were supplemented with three additional electronic searches in the publication databases of Web of Science, PsycINFO, and PubMed. Appendix A provides a complete description of our search terms. Together, this first step resulted in 3124 articles.”

We have also updated Figure 1 to include the addition of the PubMed search:

Information in the paragraph following Figure 1 has also been updated to reflect the additional search:

“During this initial screening, 3008 articles were excluded. KA then scanned the reference lists of the 116 remaining articles for potentially relevant studies, resulting in an additional three articles. Together, this second step resulted in 119 full-text reports to be assessed for eligibility.”

Thank you for pointing this out. We agree that our inclusion and exclusion criteria could be better justified. As such, we have described our inclusion and exclusion criteria (pp. 10-11) more extensively, as follows:

“Lastly, KA used the following criteria to assess full-text reports for eligibility:

First, to minimize between-study heterogeneity, and to ensure that included studies investigated the effects of music listening on stress recovery as precisely as possible, studies must employ an experimental design including stress induction, with random assignment of participants to experimental and control conditions. Quasi-experimental studies were included only when they incorporated a control or comparison group. Second, to ensure that included studies tested the immediate effect music listening may have on the stress recovery process, studies should compare music listening to silence or an auditory stimulus (e.g., white noise, audiobooks) following stress induction. Third, to demonstrate this effect, studies must include at least one measure of neuroendocrine (e.g., cortisol), physiological (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure), or psychological (e.g., subjective stress, positive and negative affect) stress recovery outcome. Fourth, given that stress reactivity and recovery responses differ between children and adults, and with consideration to the potential role of music in the prevention of stress-related diseases in adults, studies must include healthy, adult, human participants. Fifth, to improve the generalization of our results in the context of daily stress recovery, studies where stress recovery occurred within a medical or therapeutic context, such as a hospital or operating room, were excluded.”

We agree that the findings of Thoma et al. (2013) are interesting and particularly relevant in the context of music listening and stress reduction. The experiment by Thoma and colleagues convincingly demonstrated that listening to music prior to a stressor resulted in a milder stress response compared to silence, which in turn resulted in a lower need for subsequent recovery. Although their finding speaks to the benefits of music listening in attenuating the stress response, their finding did not completely fit the scope of our review, which was the immediate effect of music listening on recovery from stress.

When we planned our review, we reasoned that focusing on experimental studies with high internal validity would allow us to examine the strongest available evidence on the presumed relationship between music listening and stress recovery. Furthermore, we hoped that, by focusing on experimental studies, between-study heterogeneity would thus be somewhat minimal – this was eventually not the case.

We agree that there is much to be gleaned from specifically investigating EMA studies on music listening and stress recovery, including further insight into interindividual differences when listening to music for the purpose of stress recovery, and how stress recovery outcomes may be influenced by music listening over time. Despite this, the inclusion of EMA studies in our review would have made it more difficult to determine the immediate effect of music listening on recovery from stress. Given the relatively lower control in EMA studies (e.g., the absence of a clear control condition), claims about causality may be trickier to draw from EMA studies compared to experiments. Furthermore, given that measurements occur outside of the laboratory, it becomes difficult to rule out the effects of contextual variables, particularly when they are not explicitly accounted for in the design of an EMA study. As such, we respectfully argue against the inclusion of EMA studies in our current review, given the stronger ‘causal’ evidence that may be derived from experimental studies, and because we agree that evidence from experimental and EMA studies should be assessed independently of each other due to differences in contextual factors.

5) It may be my personal opinion, but I was irritated by the many instances the authors use the term 'beliefs', e.g., abstract 'given the popular and widespread belief'. My recommendation is to re-word this and acknowledge the empirical evidence underlying this statement.

We apologize for the discomfort we have caused you as you reviewed our manuscript. We agree that, in principle, it is good to acknowledge available empirical evidence rather than labeling a statement a ‘belief’. We have thus adjusted the following instances of the term ‘belief’, starting with the Abstract:

“Studies suggest that listening to music is beneficial for stress reduction. Thus, music listening stands to be a promising method to promote effective recovery from exposure to daily stressors.”

“Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that listening to music may influence mood [59, 60].”

Finally, in our Conclusion:

“Studies commonly suggest that listening to music may have a positive influence on stress recovery”

Abstract: please report how many participants in total were included in the 14 studies

We have added the above suggestions to the Abstract:

“Studies have suggested that listening to music may be beneficial for stress reduction. Thus, music listening stands to be a promising method to promote effective recovery from exposure to daily stressors.”

“As such, to clarify the current literature, we conducted a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized, controlled experimental studies investigating the effects of music listening on stress recovery in healthy individuals.”

“In fourteen experimental studies, participants (N = 706) were first exposed to an acute laboratory stressor, following which they were either exposed to music or a control condition.”

Thank you for mentioning this. We have rewritten the sentence and provided an alternative reference for it. Below is an excerpt from the paragraph (page 3), with the new sentence highlighted in bold:

“Various activities have been proposed that may lead to better stress recovery, one among them being music listening. Music listening may have a modulatory effect on the human stress response (Thoma et al., 2013). Furthermore, given that music is readily available through online streaming services, music listening stands to be a time- and cost-effective method to facilitate daily stress recovery.”

Thoma, M. V., La Marca, R., Brönnimann, R., Finkel, L., Ehlert, U., & Nater, U. M. (2013). The effect of music on the human stress response. PLOS ONE, 8, e70156. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070156

Thank you for your suggestion. We agree that the urgency of our review could be stated earlier in the manuscript. We have restructured the two paragraphs as follows:

“Furthermore, given that music is readily available through online streaming services, music listening stands to be a time- and cost-effective method to facilitate daily stress recovery. Indeed, a recent meta-analysis of 104 randomized controlled trials on the effects of music concluded that music-based interventions have a positive impact on both physiological (d = .380, 95% CI [0.30–0.47]) and psychological (d = .545, 95% CI [0.43–0.66]) stress-related outcomes [11]. However, a large proportion of studies included in this meta-analysis were conducted in medical or therapeutic settings, and the included music-based interventions encompassed not only music listening but also music therapy. Thus, a more specific review to determine whether music listening alone is beneficial for the recovery of healthy individuals outside medical and therapeutic settings seemed justified.”

We have added studies demonstrating equivocal effects on cortisol to the sentence in question (page 4):

“Indeed, studies on music listening and stress recovery in healthy individuals are equivocal: although music listening is considered beneficial for physiological stress recovery, several studies have reported no differences in heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, or blood pressure, or cortisol recovery between participants who listened to music and those who either sat in silence or listened to an auditory control [18-21].”

We agree that ‘less activity of alpha-amylase’ is more appropriate given what the outcome represents. We have replaced ‘amounts of salivary alpha-amylase’ accordingly (page 6):

“This manifests as a restoration of parasympathetic activity, marked by a deceleration of heart rate and respiration rate, lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and less activity of salivary alpha-amylase [4, 29-32].”

Thank you for pointing this out. We have adjusted the sentences accordingly (page 7):

“For example, music listening has been associated with lower heart rate [49-51], systolic blood pressure [22, 50, 52], skin conductance [18, 20, 53, 54], and cortisol [55] compared to silence or an auditory control condition. Similarly, participants who listened to music following stress demonstrated less activity of salivary alpha-amylase and lower cortisol compared to when music was listened to for other purposes [56].”

Thank you for your suggestion. It was not our intention to suggest that a definite mechanism underlying the beneficial effects of music listening on stress recovery has been identified. We agree that a more comprehensive statement would help convey this point more clearly. Following your suggestion, we have adjusted the paragraph accordingly (page 7-8):

“The exact mechanisms underlying the effects of music listening on stress recovery remain to be elucidated. Music-evoked positive emotions are thought to be particularly beneficial for stress recovery, as they may help undo the unfavourable changes wrought by negative emotions during stress, ultimately aiding the stress recovery process (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004). Alternatively, music-evoked emotions may promote a more robust, and thus more adaptive, stress response (Koelsch et al., 2016), which may be followed by an equally robust period of recovery. Next, it has been theorized that music may act as an anchor that draws attention away from post-stressor ruminative thoughts or negative affective states, thus preventing a lengthening of physiological activation, and facilitating a more regular stress recovery process (Baltazar et al., 2019; Radstaak et al., 2014). Finally, physiological rhythms in our body, such as respiration, cardiovascular activity, and electroencephalographic activity, may become fully or partially synchronized with rhythmical elements perceived in music (Ellis & Thayer, 2010; Trost et al., 2017). This rhythmic entrainment process is thought to occur via a bottom-up process that originates in the brainstem: salient musical features, such as tempo, pitch, and loudness, are continuously tracked by the brainstem, generating similar changes in ANS activity over time…”

Baltazar, M., & Saarikallio, S. (2019). Strategies and mechanisms in musical affect self-regulation: A new model. Musicae Scientiae, 23(2), 177-195. https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864917715061

Ellis, R. J., & Thayer, J. F. (2010). Music and autonomic nervous system (dys) function. Music perception, 27(4), 317-326. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2010.27.4.317

Koelsch, S., Boehlig, A., Hohenadel, M., Nitsche, I., Bauer, K., & Sack, U. (2016). The impact of acute stress on hormones and cytokines and how their recovery is affected by music-evoked positive mood. Scientific reports, 6(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep23008

Radstaak, M., Geurts, S. A., Brosschot, J. F., & Kompier, M. A. (2014). Music and psychophysiological recovery from stress. Psychosomatic medicine, 76(7), 529-537. doi: 10.1097/PSY.0000000000000094

Trost, W. J., Labbé, C., & Grandjean, D. (2017). Rhythmic entrainment as a musical affect induction mechanism. Neuropsychologia, 96, 96-110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.01.004

Tugade, M. M., Fredrickson, B. L., & Barrett, L. F. (2004). Psychological resilience and positive emotional granularity: Examining the benefits of positive emotions on coping and health. Journal of personality, 72(6), 1161-1190. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2004.00294.x

Thank you for the reminder. We have added an additional sentence in the Introduction to present salivary IgA as a marker for stress (page 5):

“This process enables rapid, non-genomic effects that sustain ANS-mediated changes for the duration of the stressor, while suppressing immune system function [33-35]. This suppression is visible through lower concentrations of immunoglobulins, such as salivary immunoglobulin-A (s-IgA; Chojnowska et al., 2021).”

Chojnowska, S., Ptaszyńska-Sarosiek, I., Kępka, A., Knaś, M., & Waszkiewicz, N. (2021). Salivary biomarkers of stress, anxiety, and depression. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 10(3), 517. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm10030517

Thank you for pointing this out. The typos have been revised (page 15):

We have added the range of music duration in our report of the moderator analyses (page 26):

“Duration of music. There was no evidence that the effect of music listening on stress recovery may differ depending on how long participants were exposed to music, β1 = -0.005, p = .870 (rangeduration = 2 – 45 minutes).”

Submitted filename: ma20211025_rebuttal_PLOS_v1.docx

Decision Letter 1

PONE-D-21-22806R1Music listening and stress recovery in healthy individuals: A systematic review with meta-analysis of experimental studiesPLOS ONE

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript to PLOS ONE.  Both reviewers agree that your manuscript has greatly improved. One reviewer, however, has a few additional issues for you to consider. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by May 20 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at  gro.solp@enosolp . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

6. Review Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: The authors have satisfactorily addressed all my comments. I am satisfied with the manuscript in its current format, and recommend it for publication.

Reviewer #2: The authors clearly put a lot of work and time into the revisions, I highly appreciate that, and I think that the manuscript is now much stronger; I only have a few concerns left to be addressed:

1) When reading your response letter I considered it an excellent idea to combine both systematic review and meta-analytic approach. However, when I read the manuscript, I felt it overloaded the paper. Furthermore, I did not really understand, why the number of included studies varies among these two approaches (14 vs. 17 studies).

My suggestion would be to either start with describing the review approach and then calculate the overall meta-analytic effect or to move the systematic review to the Appendix (after having adjusted the analysis to the same number of studies included).

2) Thank you for describing in more detail how you operationalized unsuccesful stress induction. I am not entirely convinced by your approach. For example, you provide mean statistics for two studies and conclude that the mean difference represents a successful stress induction. At least, I would expect a citation backing this up or a statistical test considering mean and standard deviation. I wondered if it was more approproate to distinguish successful from unsuccessful and (third category) not reported. As for now, I would still argue to include only those studies with successful stress reduction (expecially given the unequal ratio that limits comparisons anyways).

3) Thank you for describign in more detail your inclusion criteria. As they do not cover 'music should have been played after the stressor', I still argue that the Thoma Paper should be included. Therefore, please change the inclusion criteria accordingly or include the paper. If you adjust the inclusion criteria, I would recommend to refer to the Thoma Paper in the discussion as time of intervention (before, during or after stressor) might be an important modulator.

4) I am sorry to read that you decided against EMA studies as I consider it a huge strength to combine both experimental and EMA evidence. I am not convinced that these two approaches should be studied separately, as they complement each other in a meaningful way. Also, I believe that including EMA studies would shed light on the heterogeneity as you have multiple time points and multiple contextual factors being repetatedly assessed over time. Nevertheless I accept your choice here, but recommend to acknowlegde EMA studies in the discussion (or outlook). Particularly as you describe in the introduction that music is so easily available, studying the mechanisms in daily life seems to be timely.

5) Please omit the following sentence from the manuscript as I am afraid that it does not reflect the findings on alpha-amylase appropriately.

Similarly, participants who listened to music following stress demonstrated less activity

of salivary alpha-amylase and lower cortisol compared to when music was listened to for other

purposes [56].”

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article ( what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Reviewer #1:  Yes:  Jasminka Majdandžić

Author response to Decision Letter 1

12 May 2022

----------------------------

Dear Dr. Majdandžić,

Thank you for taking the time to review our revised manuscript. Given your expertise in the effects of music listening on stress and wound healing, we are grateful that you have recommended the manuscript for publication in its current form.

Thank you for taking the time to review our revised manuscript. We once again appreciate your kind words on our work and are happy to read that you consider the manuscript to be stronger in its current form. Below, we address the additional issues you have raised and summarize the changes we have consequently made to our manuscript in a point-by-point fashion. You will first see your comments, followed by our responses and excerpts from our manuscript where applicable:

Thank you for your suggestion. In one of the earliest drafts of our review, we chose to present the systematic review section prior to the meta-analysis. Thus, the meta-analysis served to quantify the extensive qualitative evidence we presented in the systematic review. In line with this approach, we initially decided that studies which did not (or could not) provide the necessary means and standard deviations to estimate effect sizes (in our case, Hedge’s g) would be excluded from the meta-analysis. However, since means and standard deviations are less relevant to a qualitative review, we decided that studies without means and standard deviations could still be included in the systematic review section instead of being excluded completely, provided they met the rest of our inclusion criteria. As such, in the previous version of our manuscript, 17 studies were part of the systematic review section, while only 14 of those studies were part of the meta-analysis section.

In the previous version of our manuscript, we attempted to briefly explain this through the following information:

“Based on these criteria, the final sample for the systematic review portion of our review consisted of 17 studies. Finally, for studies to be included in the meta-analysis portion of our review, means and standard deviations of stress recovery outcomes following stressor cessation must be available. Corresponding authors were contacted when this information was not available. When authors did not or could not provide the required information (e.g., due to data no longer being accessible), the outcome was dropped from the meta-analysis. Thus, following attempts to obtain missing information, the final sample for the meta-analysis portion of our review consisted of 14 studies.”

In the current version of our manuscript, the meta-analysis section is currently presented first, with the systematic review section painting a more detailed picture about the methodological heterogeneity between included studies. We understand that an extensive qualitative portion which directly follows a straight-forward quantitative synthesis can feel somewhat overwhelming. Thus, we have decided to follow your suggestion and moved the bulk of the systematic review portion to the Appendix of our manuscript.

To accommodate this change. we have adjusted the paragraph in our inclusion criteria as follows (page 11):

“Finally, for the purpose of the meta-analysis, means and standard deviations of stress recovery outcomes following stressor cessation must be available. Corresponding authors were contacted when this information was not available. When authors did not or could not provide the required information (e.g., due to data no longer being accessible), outcomes were dropped from the meta-analysis. Following attempts to obtain missing information, the final sample for our review consisted of 14 studies.”

Furthermore, we have added the following paragraph after the results of our moderator analyses, to direct readers’ attention towards the systematic review in the Appendix (page 26):

“To further illustrate the methodological heterogeneity among experimental studies on the effect of music listening on stress recovery, we provide a more extensive, qualitative overview of the included studies in Appendix C. A summary of this overview is presented in Table 4.”

2) Thank you for describing in more detail how you operationalized unsuccessful stress induction. I am not entirely convinced by your approach. For example, you provide mean statistics for two studies and conclude that the mean difference represents a successful stress induction. At least, I would expect a citation backing this up or a statistical test considering mean and standard deviation. I wondered if it was more appropriate to distinguish successful from unsuccessful and (third category) not reported. As for now, I would still argue to include only those studies with successful stress reduction (especially given the unequal ratio that limits comparisons anyways).

Thank you for mentioning your concern. In the two studies we have labelled ‘unsuccessful’ with regards to their stress induction procedures, the authors do hint at the success of their stressors in their respective manuscripts. However, since this success was not explicitly reported (e.g., through a comparison between baseline and post-stressor outcomes), we ultimately decided to label these as ‘unsuccessful.’

For example, in Gan et al. (2015), the authors cite a statistically significant paired-samples t-test comparing pre-stressor and post-music math anxiety in their no-music control group (only) as evidence that their stress induction procedure was successful for all their conditions. Fortunately, Gan et al. (2015) have reported pre- and post-stressor (i.e., pre-music) means and standard deviations for all our outcomes of interest. Thus, we were able to conduct our own paired-samples t-tests using pooled standard deviations, assuming a correlation of 0.5 between pre- and post-stressor outcome measures (Estrada et al., 2018). Our own t-tests indeed demonstrate that there is a significant increase in stress from which participants can recover from.

We were not able to employ a similar method for Labbé et al. (2007), as the authors did not explicitly report pre- and post-stressor means and standard deviations for our outcomes of interest. However, Labbé et al. (2007) presented the results of several F-tests with significant effects of time (under stress/pre-music vs. post-music) for all their conditions. Though these tests are not as accurate as a baseline vs. post-stressor comparison to evaluate the effects of stress induction procedures, we considered it plausible that a stress reaction had indeed occurred.

With these considerations in mind, we agree that labeling both studies as ‘unsuccessful’, with regards to their stress induction procedures, may not be the most correct decision. Thus, we have decided to follow your suggestion and change their coding to ‘unreported’ instead – in the sense that what the studies reported were not an explicit test of their stress induction procedures.

Our final consideration to keep these two studies with unreported stress induction procedures in the meta-analysis is that the estimated cumulative effect size excluding the two studies (i.e., comprising studies with successful stress induction only), g = 0.173, 95% CI [-0.26, 0.61], p = .399 (page 25):

“Stress induction checks. There were no significant differences in the effects of music listening on stress recovery for studies with successful (g = 0.173, 95% CI [-0.26, 0.61], p = .399) and unreported (g = 0.062, 95% CI [-0.08, 0.20], p = .115) stress induction checks, β1 = -0.108, p = .661.”

…does not significantly differ in magnitude or significance with the overall cumulative effect size including the two studies (i.e., comprising studies with successful and unreported stress induction), g = 0.15, 95% CI [-0.21, 0.52], p = 0.374 (page 23):

“Based on a meta-regression with RVE, the estimated overall effect of music listening on stress recovery was g = 0.15, 95% CI [-0.21, 0.52], t(13) = 0.92, p = 0.374.”

With regards to this matter, we have updated our discussion on page 38:

“Two studies with unreported stress induction procedures were still included in the review [17,84], as reported means for certain recovery outcomes still suggested an increase from baseline that participants could recover from. For example, with the information reported in Gan et al. [84], assuming a correlation of 0.5 between baseline and post-stressor measures of state anxiety, we estimated that their stress induction procedure elicited a significant increase in state anxiety in their sedative music (t(34) = 5.87, p < .001, mdiff = 8.17, SDdiff = 8.24), stimulative music (t(34) = 8.21, p < .001, mdiff = 12.42, SDdiff = 8.95), and control (t(34) = 13.15, p < .001, mdiff = 15.83, SDdiff = 7.12) conditions. As the overall estimated effect of music listening on the recovery process of healthy individuals following laboratory stressors may be relatively modest, it becomes particularly important to ensure that a sufficient stress response is elicited, to provide a larger window of opportunity in which the effect of music listening may be exerted on participants’ recovery processes. We thus encourage future studies to adopt validated, (variations of) well-known stress tasks, such as the TSST [109], SECPT [110], or CO2 stress task [111], which have been demonstrated to consistently elicit marked physiological and psychological stress-related responses in laboratory settings. Furthermore, we remind future studies to candidly report the results of their stress induction procedures to facilitate subsequent meta-syntheses of the effects of music listening on stress recovery.”

Estrada, E., Ferrer, E., & Pardo, A. (2019). Statistics for evaluating pre-post change: Relation between change in the distribution center and change in the individual scores. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2696.

Gan, S. K. E., Lim, K. M. J., & Haw, Y. X. (2016). The relaxation effects of stimulative and sedative music on mathematics anxiety: A perception to physiology model. Psychology of Music, 44(4), 730-741.

Labbé, E., Schmidt, N., Babin, J., & Pharr, M. (2007). Coping with stress: the effectiveness of different types of music. Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback, 32(3), 163-168.

3) Thank you for describing in more detail your inclusion criteria. As they do not cover 'music should have been played after the stressor', I still argue that the Thoma Paper should be included. Therefore, please change the inclusion criteria accordingly or include the paper. If you adjust the inclusion criteria, I would recommend to refer to the Thoma Paper in the discussion as time of intervention (before, during or after stressor) might be an important modulator.

Thank you for pointing this out. We have revised our inclusion criteria to make it clearer that we elected to focus on studies looking at the effects of music listening on stress recovery after a stressor (page 11):

“Second, studies should compare music listening to silence or an auditory stimulus (e.g., white noise, audiobooks). To ensure that included studies tested the immediate effect of music listening on stress recovery, exposure to music, silence, or auditory stimuli must occur after the stress induction procedure.”

Next, given our focus, we agree that the timing of the music intervention may be an important moderator of the effects of music listening on stress recovery. Thus, we have added the following paragraph to our Discussion, referring to several studies investigating the effects of music listening at different timings, including the Thoma et al. (2013) paper (page 38-39):

“As the current review focused on the effects of music listening after a stressor, studies where music was played before or during a stressor were omitted from our analyses. However, several studies suggest that the timing at which music is played (i.e., before, during, or after a stressor) may influence its effects on stress recovery. For example, in Burns et al. [48], participants who listened to classical music while anticipating a stressful task exhibited lower post-music heart rate compared to participants who anticipated the stressor in silence. Similarly, concentrations of salivary cortisol were lower for participants who watched a stressful visual stimulus while listening to music compared to those who watched the same stimulus without music [112]. Together, these findings hint that, when listened during a stressor, music may attenuate cortisol responses [9,113], thus reducing the subsequent need for recovery. On the other hand, Thoma et al. [9] reported that participants who listened to music prior to a stressor exhibited higher post-stressor cortisol compared to participants who listened to an audio control. Interestingly, despite the stronger stress response, Thoma et al. [9] noted a trend for quicker ANS recovery among participants who listened to music, particularly with regards to salivary alpha-amylase activity. This pattern of findings is consistent with the notion forwarded by Koelsch et al. [61], in that music listening may promote a more adaptive stress response, thus facilitating subsequent stress recovery processes. To date, research on timing differences in the context of music listening and stress recovery is scarce. Thus, future studies could further examine the influence of such timing differences to better understand their role in the relationship between music listening and stress recovery.”

4) I am sorry to read that you decided against EMA studies as I consider it a huge strength to combine both experimental and EMA evidence. I am not convinced that these two approaches should be studied separately, as they complement each other in a meaningful way. Also, I believe that including EMA studies would shed light on the heterogeneity as you have multiple time points and multiple contextual factors being repeatedly assessed over time. Nevertheless, I accept your choice here, but recommend to acknowledge EMA studies in the discussion (or outlook). Particularly as you describe in the introduction that music is so easily available, studying the mechanisms in daily life seems to be timely.

Thank you for your explanation, and we apologize to not have been able to account for EMA studies at the present time. We have followed your suggestion and acknowledged the value of EMA studies in our Discussion section (page 39):

“Given the pervasiveness of stress, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies may provide a more intimate outlook on the dynamics of daily music listening behaviour, particularly for the purpose of stress recovery. For example, through an ambulatory assessment study, Linnemann et al. (38) revealed that music produced the most notable reductions in physiological and psychological stress outcomes when it was listened to for the purpose of ‘relaxation’, compared to other reasons such as ‘distraction’, ‘activation’, and ‘reducing boredom’. Indeed, given their high ecological validity, EMA studies may provide further insight into important contextual variables in the relationship between music listening and stress recovery. For example, in an EMA study, listening to music in the presence of others was related to decreased subjective stress, attenuated cortisol secretion, and higher activity of salivary alpha-amylase (55). Furthermore, physiological responses to music may co-vary between members of a dyad when music is listened to by couples (114). Thus, given the benefits of EMA studies, we invite future studies to continue exploring the dynamics and contextual factors of music listening behaviour for stress recovery in daily life.”

of salivary alpha-amylase and lower cortisol compared to when music was listened to for other purposes [56].”

Our apologies for not appropriately conveying the effects of music listening on salivary alpha-amylase. The sentence in question has been deleted. The paragraph now reads:

“For example, music listening has been associated with lower heart rate [48–50], systolic blood pressure [21,49,51], skin conductance [17,19,52,53], and cortisol [54,55] compared to silence or an auditory control condition. Furthermore, music listening has been associated with higher parasympathetic activity [56] compared to silence [3,37]. Together, these findings suggest that music listening may generate beneficial changes in ANS and HPA axis activity that should be conducive to the stress recovery process [27,57,58].”

Submitted filename: ma20220426_rebuttal_PLOS.docx

Decision Letter 2

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Music listening and stress recovery in healthy individuals: a systematic review with meta-analysis of experimental studies

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NYT Connections hint and answers (Friday, August 9)

Need a hint for Connections? Read our guide for help with Connections #425

This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today's solution? Check out the Connections hint and answers for Saturday 17th August !

Want a hint for Connections today? Piggybacking off the monumental success of daily puzzle game Wordle , the New York Times has another fantastically popular word game out now. It's called Connections , and if you haven't played it before, now's the time to start.

In this guide, we'll give you a handy hint selection for today's Connections puzzle on Friday, August 9th, before revealing the group themes and the Connections answers themselves. We'll also explain how to play Connections if this is your first time coming over from Wordle!

Connections words on Friday, August 9

For reference, here are the 16 Connections words for today:

Connections hint for August 9

Here's a hint for each of the word groups in today's Connections puzzle, plus a couple more clues to help you find the answer:

• Yellow (Easiest): Missing.
• Green (Easy): Types of people that will back an idea, person or thing.
• Blue (Medium): Types of a certain music genre.
• Purple (Hardest): These words all come after a type of surprise.
• Extra hint 1: Jock and Cheerleader belong to two different groups.
• Extra hint 2: Mia is an abbreviation, not a name here.

Connections groups for August 9

If you need an even bigger clue to figure out today's Connections puzzle, below we'll reveal the four correct Connections groups - the themes which link together each set of four words in the Connections grid.

Here are the Connections groups for today:

• Not present
• Rock genres

Now that you know the themes for the various different Connections in today's puzzle, see if you can solve it! If not, check just below for the full answer.

Spoiler warning! Today's Connections answer lies ahead!

What is the answer to Connections today (Friday August 9)?

• Not present: Absent, Elsewhere, Gone, Mia
• Supporter: Advocate, Champion, Cheerleader, Exponent
• Rock genres: Glam, Goth, Metal, Punk
• Shock ___: Horror, Jock, Value, Wave

Congratulations if you got today's Connections answer right, with or without the help of our handy hints above! And if you didn't succeed today, don't worry - a new Connections puzzle is released every day at midnight, so you can try again tomorrow, just like with Wordle!

What is Connections?

Connections is a word puzzle game published every day by the NYT, the hosts of the endlessly popular Wordle puzzle. Crafted each day by crossword puzzle-maker Wyna Liu, Connections presents you with a selection of 16 seemingly disparate words, and you have to group them together in four sets of four, where each group of four words has a common theme.

For instance, the words "Hook", "Nana", "Peter", and "Wendy" are all Peter Pan characters. Or to take another example, "Action", "Ballpark", "Go", and "Stick" are all words which commonly come just before the word "Figure".

Your job is to figure out what these themes are that connect the various words together - but be wary, because a lot of the time there are red herring connections placed in there deliberately to throw you off! To win the game, you have to find all four Connections without making 4 mistakes. On your fourth mistake, the game is over and the answer is revealed automatically.

Each of the four groups in each day's Connections puzzle is also assigned a different colour, which represents how easy or difficult the Connection is to find. These colours are: Yellow (Easiest), Green (Easy), Blue (Medium), and Purple (Hardest).

That wraps up today's guide on how to solve the NYT Connections word puzzle. If you're looking for help with Wordle, we've also got you covered with our list of past Wordle answers , as well as the Wordle hint and answer for Saturday 17th August . You can also check out our list of the best starting words for Wordle , or use our Wordle Solver tool to help you find the answer with ease!

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