Objectives This study aimed to replicate music’s positive effects on dementia-related symptoms, determine whether a 6-month intervention would lead to greater positive outcomes than typical 3- to 4-month interventions, and examine changes in sundowning symptoms after music listening. Methods 282 nursing home residents with dementia listened to personalized music playlists 1–3 times weekly for 30 minutes across 6 months. Standardized assessments of affect, behavior, and cognition and direct observations of sundowning symptoms comprised the outcomes. Results Results documented significant improvements in residents’ general neuropsychiatric symptoms, agitation, and depression across the first 3 months, but no additional improvements across the subsequent 3 months. Seven sundowning symptoms significantly improved following music listening, with some (e.g., disengagement) being more amenable to music than others (e.g., aggression). Discussion Results support short-term individualized music listening as an effective non-pharmacological approach for improving dementia-related symptoms in nursing home residents and suggest new applications of music-related interventions.

Listening to music is a common method of regulating unpleasant emotions such as sadness, but music listening has not been compared to prototypical interpersonal emotion-regulation strategies. We examined music’s response-independent benefits (i.e., benefits that do not require a response from another person) and response-dependent benefits (i.e., benefits that do require a response from another person) and compared those to other regulation strategies such as talking to a friend and asking someone for advice. College students ( N = 353) completed an online survey in which they rated their likelihood of using eight different strategies to regulate sadness and the benefits of using each strategy. Repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed listening to music was the most likely strategy used when sad. Moreover, listening to music provided the most response-independent benefits of any strategy we examined, including talking to a friend and asking someone for advice. Talking to a friend provided more interpersonal support than listening to music did, but listening to music did not provide any less of a shared experience than talking to a friend or asking someone for advice. These findings suggest that listening to music shares much in common with interpersonal emotion-regulation strategies such as talking with other people when sad.

No abstract

No abstract

Past literature has suggested that individuals use the emotion regulation strategies of catharsis, emotional support, understanding emotions, and mood congruency when deciding to listen to sad music when feeling sad (