Music: Healthy Habits and Heavy Moods

“Oh my gosh this band totally saved my life!” said every thirteen year old ever. Okay okay maybe not all of them but it is true that music can have positive effects on our lives. In addition to music’s strong influence on our emotions and ability to enhance our mood, it can also help with resilience and build community (Fink et al., 2021). But what about negative moods and emotions; can music ever lead us down the wrong path? If music can do so much good, can it also be bad? How often have you found yourself listening to a song and you had to change it because it was just hitting too hard or the lyrics were bringing you down? I’m sure I’m not the only one that has listened to Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt and just felt it a bit too much. We often tend to think about all the benefits music has but it can also hold a dark side. Here’s a look into the interesting relationship Kanagala and colleagues found between depression and maladaptive behaviors with music use.

Depression is a pretty widely known mood disorder, so to keep everyone on the same page, Kangala defines depression as a mental disorder which affects the regulation of mood and emotions (2021). There are three different categories of symptoms that are typical of depression, these clusters include affect (mood), somatic (physical) or cognitive (mind). Symptoms within the first cluster, affective, include feelings of worthlessness, loss of interest or pleasure, excessive or inappropriate guilt and suicidal thoughts. The somatic category includes reduced energy and changes in sleep or appetite and the cognitive category includes symptoms such as difficulty concentrating, hopelessness or agitated movements such as pacing or toe tapping. In order to be classified with depression, five out of the nine possible symptoms need to be present with at least two symptoms persisting for two weeks, according to the International Classification for Diseases 11th edition. Along with depression, affect was also measured. Researchers explain that both positive and negative affect are a predictor of depression and therefore provide a more full picture. Kangala and team also needed to be clear on what they meant by maladaptive behaviors. This was defined as behaviors that led to or increased a negative mood and decline in well-being. Music can amplify our emotions and, while working through our emotions may be beneficial, it can also pose a problem. In my personal life I volunteer as a crisis counselor and many people have told me they use music to cope. Poor coping habits such as rumination and social isolation may actually be perpetuated by music, the opposite of what these people are working towards.

In order to find levels of depression and maladaptive behaviors, researchers promoted their study on social media as well as on posters in three different cities in India and one in Poland where the survey was sent out to Indian immigrants. Kangala and collegues focused on India to get a better understanding of a Non-Western population. Data was gathered via survey from 1,329 participants whose ages ranged from 18 to 65 years of age. There were two parts to the survey: the first part involved gathering general demographic and background information while the second part consisted of three different scales of interest. The first scale was the Healthy Unhealthy Music Scale which explored both healthy and unhealthy music habits. Participants responded to questions in terms of how much they identified with the prompt using a 1 to indicate “never” and a 5 to indicate “always”. The second scale was the Beck Depression Inventory, a common measure of depression. In this scale, questions were asked about symptoms of depression with 4 possible responses where a 0 meant not experiencing the symptom and a 3 meant severely experiencing the symptom. The final scale, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, asked participants to indicate how they generally feel. Using a 1–5 scale, similar to the music scale, with questions asking about either positive or negative affect. Based on the responses gathered, researchers were able to make inferences and compare them to previously published studies.

As this is not the first study done on music use and depression there have been some mixed results, so take these findings with a grain of salt. Everyone uses different forms of music for different reasons so despite finding many associations, these are not hard and fast rules. Researchers were able to use the data to demonstrate various findings but first and foremost, they did indeed find a correlation between unhealthy music engagement and depressive symptoms. Although individual symptoms had small to medium correlations on their own, overall depression seemed fairly strongly correlated with unhealthy use. One of the symptoms with the strongest correlations with unhealthy music use is suicidal thoughts. Whether it is the unhealthy music use that leads to suicidal ideation or vice versa is still unclear. The researchers turn to mood congruence theory to try and explain this, illustrating that being in a sad mood can conflate perceptions of sadness in music. Another interesting finding from Kangala’s study is that genre choice does not seem to correlate with music use habits, both good or bad. This goes against what Victoria Williamson presents in her book “You Are The Music” in which she talks about how rock and heavy metal specifically have a relationship to mood regulation in music (2014). It is so difficult to discern facts with music because of how subjective it is and may influence one person differently than another.

As a society we hold music in such high regard (note that each of those words is a link to a different TED talk that discusses the benefits of music). We are always talking about how much good music does whether it is bringing people together, fostering a shared culture or just making our commute a little better, but we seldom consider the downsides that music may have. Studies like this deserve to be discussed because the findings may help to shed light on some poor coping mechanisms that people may have. Rather than debating whether Mozart can make babies smarter (as evidence points to the fact that it doesn’t), maybe we should explore music and emotion a little deeper. Keeping in mind all of the people in crisis that mentioned to me they use music to cope, these findings have raised some concerns for me endorsing music as a healthy coping strategy. However, not all of these people are struggling with depression so how does music work for people who don’t have depression or maybe have another diagnosis like anxiety or even schizophrenia and alzhiemers? Kangala mentions that this study was able to find a strong association between the negative affect that comes with depression and maladaptive music use but not whether one causes the other. A deeper understanding of how music affects our mood or how mood affects our music listening could be the key to unlocking music as the perfect coping mechanism.

References

Fink, L. K., Warrenburg, L. A., Howlin, C., Randall, W. M., Hansen, N. C., & Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (2021). Viral tunes: Changes in musical behaviours and interest in coronamusic predict socio-emotional coping during COVID-19 lockdown. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00858-y

Kanagala, S. C., Schäfer, T., Greenberg, D. M., & Gabińska, A. (2021). Depression symptoms relationship with music use: Investigating the role of trait affect, musical ability, music preferences. Music & Science, 4, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043211057217

Williamson, V. (2014). Adolescent Experiments With Music. In You are the music: How music reveals what it means to be human (pp. 47). story, Icon Books.