What Is Music Really Doing To Your Brain!?
By Holly Stewart
When you hear the words, “music psychology,” what do you immediately think about? Probably something about how music affects your brain, right? Even though this isn’t exactly wrong, music psychology is so much more than what music directly does to your brain. Music psychology is just about as broad as the field of psychology itself, and it can be about brain chemistry, human behavior, or even understanding speech. Regardless of what your interests are, there is something in the field of music psychology for you.
To prove this point, I talked with my roommate Emily, a junior biology major, about “Music listening as a strategy for managing COVID-19 stress in first-year university students,” from Vidas et al. (2021) and “‘Lass Frooby Noo!’ The interference of song lyrics and meaning on speech intelligibility,” by Brouwer et al. (2021). With her background in biology, Emily also used to think that music psychology was just about music in the brain, but after our conversation, I think that Emily might feel a little differently now.
For people in the world of psychology, it may seem obvious that music can relate to all aspects of psychology. Music can help people perform better in the workplace, which is like industrial and organizational psychology. Music can also help people feel less stressed, which is similar to counseling psychology. Different kinds of music can even help people understand each other’s words better, which is a form of cognitive psychology. Altogether, music can help psychologists better understand so much more about psychology. Even more importantly, music can also help everyone outside of the field of psychology better understand how their own interests fit into the world of psychology research.
References
Brouwer, S., Akkermans, N., Hendriks, L., van Uden, H., & Wilms, V. (2021). “Lass Frooby Noo!” The interference of song lyrics and meaning on speech intelligibility. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xap0000368
Vidas, D., Larwood, J. L., Nelson, N. L., & Dingle, G. A. (2021). Music listening as a strategy for managing COVID-19 stress in first-year university students. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.647065
