Heroic music stimulates empowering thoughts during mind-wandering

Abstract

It is generally well-known, and scientifically well established, that music affects emotions and moods. However, only little is known about the influence of music on thoughts. This scarcity is particularly surprising given the importance of the valence of thoughts for psychological health and well-being. We presented excerpts of heroic- and sad-sounding music to n = 62 individuals, and collected thought probes after each excerpt, assessing the valence and the nature of thoughts stimulated by the music. Our results show that mind-wandering emerged during listening to either type of music (heroic, sad), and that the type of music strongly influenced the thought contents during mind-wandering. Heroic-sounding music evoked more positive, exciting, constructive, and motivating thoughts, while sad-sounding music evoked more calm or demotivating thoughts. The results thus indicate that music has a strong effect on the valence of thought contents during mind-wandering, with heroic music evoking more empowering and motivating thoughts, and sad music more relaxing or depressive thoughts. These findings have important implications for the use of music in everyday life to promote health and well-being in both clinical populations and healthy individuals.

Mind-Wandering during Personal Music Listening in Everyday Life: Music-Evoked Emotions Predict Thought Valence

“…The correlation analysis between the intensity ratings of the GEMS emotions and the ratings of thought valence also corroborated these findings and the role of each individual emotion highlighted above (with the exception of peacefulness, which despite exhibiting a strong positive correlation was not a significant predictor of thought valence). The observed correspondence between the valence of both thought and emotion is in line with previous studies on music and mind-wandering, which, mainly by means of qualitative analysis, found a relationship between the tone of the music and the one of the reported thoughts [36,38]. The present study, by employing linear mixed-effects model analyses and experience sampling in daily life, provides a much stronger and ecologically valid evidence as well as a broader generalizability of the findings to everyday life personal music listening settings and to a wider variety of music genres.…”

“…Moreover, we also highlighted the predominance of visual mental imagery (compared with inner speech) as a modality through which mind-wandering episodes during music occur, regardless of the type of emotion experienced (sadness or happiness). In a following laboratory study employing heroic- and sad-sounding music [ 38 ], similar effects of the music on thought content were observed, but not on mind-wandering’s frequency. In particular, heroic-sounding music was linked to more positive, exciting, constructive, and motivating thoughts, while sad-sounding music was linked to calmer or more demotivating thoughts.…”

“…In these “task-free” contexts, the emotional tone of the music could be harnessed to manipulate the content of listeners’ thoughts in order to favour a beneficial style of mind-wandering (i.e., one that features positive thought content and leads to subsequent positive mood), which could in the long-term boost overall wellbeing. Despite this unexplored potential of music to steer ongoing thoughts and images toward positive directions, research on music and mind-wandering is still scarce, with only a few studies published on this topic [ 36 , 37 , 38 ]. Nevertheless, this is clearly a crucial avenue for future mind-wandering research, given the ubiquity of this mental phenomenon and its strong impact on wellbeing and mental health [ 39 ] as well as the well-known power of music for mood regulation [ 40 , 41 ].…”

“…During the ten days, the application also administered a series of psychometric questionnaires. Specifically, I sought to test the following hypotheses: First, I expected participants to mind-wander frequently (i.e., >50–55%) during the music listening in accordance with the averaged reported occurrence of mind-wandering of previous laboratory and online studies [ 36 , 37 , 38 ]. Second, I predicted that the selected playlist would be effective in enhancing participants’ moods [ 40 ].…”

Music as an evolved tool for socio-affective fiction

“…It is worth noting that these brain areas are not activated as much by non-musical emotional sounds, such as vocal or natural ones (Frühholz et al, 2016). In a related study, Koelsch et al (Koelsch et al, 2019) investigated the influence listening to different types of emotional music has on your mind and found that listening to both heroic and sad music increases mindwandering and that the valence of the music influenced the valence of the content of this mindwandering. Nostalgic music can also induce strong states of remembrance, which seems associated with hippocampal activity (Frühholz et al, 2014;Trost et al, 2012).…”