Disliked Music can be Better for Performance than Liked Music

Abstract

Although liked music is known to improve performance through boosting one's mood and arousal, both liked music and disliked music impair serial recall performance. Given that the key acoustical feature of this impairment is the acoustical variation, it is possible that some music may contain less acoustical variation and so produce less impairment. In this situation, unliked, unfamiliar music could be better for performance than liked, familiar music. This study tested this by asking participants to serially recall eight-item lists in either quiet, liked or disliked music conditions. Results showed that performance was significantly poorer in both music conditions compared with quiet. More importantly, performance in the liked music condition was significantly poorer than in the disliked music condition. These findings provide further illustration of the irrelevant sound effect and limitations of the impact of liked music on cognition.

Does listening to preferred music improve reading comprehension performance?

“…As with Perham and Vizard () and Perham and Sykora (), the DLYR and NLYR were chosen by the researchers and the genre was heavy/thrash metal. Death Angel's ‘Seemingly Endless Time’ was used for the DM song and Death Angel's ‘The Ultra Violence’ was used for the NLYR song.…”

Mental arithmetic and non-speech office noise: An exploration of interference-by-content

“…[9] When this requirement is not present, as in the missing item task or when items are recalled by categories, then the ISE is absent. [10,11] Furthermore, the ISE cannot be habituated e.g., [12,13] is not affected by preference e.g., [14,15] affects around 92% of participants. [16] and it is independent of the intensity of the sound (from the levels of a whisper, 48dB[A], up to a shout, 76dB[A], [17] ).…”

Distraction of Mental Arithmetic by Background Speech

“…A simple laboratory demonstration of this situation known as the irrelevant sound effect (ISE) reveals that irrelevant sound can cause a drop in performance of 30-50%, the magnitude of the effect is not affected by preference for the sound (Perham & Sykora, 2012;Perham & Vizard, 2010) and very few people (around 8%) are invulnerable to the distraction (Jones, 1999). In this paper, we explore the novel view that background sound disrupts mental arithmetic performance to the extent that it primes habitual responses that threaten to assume control over behavioral output (Marsh, Sörqvist, Halin, Nöstl, & Jones, 2013).…”