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The Arts in Psychotherapy 40 (2013) 201205

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The Arts in Psychotherapy

The effects of sedative and stimulative music on stress reduction

depend on music preference
Jun Jiang a , Linshu Zhou b , Daphne Rickson c , Cunmei Jiang a,
a

Music College, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China

Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China
c
New Zealand School of Music, Wellington, New Zealand
b

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Keywords:
Music preference
Sedative music
Stimulative music
Stress reduction
Tension and state-anxiety levels

a b s t r a c t
To examine the effects of sedative and stimulative music and music preference on stress reduction when
participants are exposed to a stressor, 144 female music education students performed a stressful, mental
arithmetic test. After the stress was induced successfully, participants were randomly assigned to four
experimental groups. They listened to preferred sedative music, preferred stimulative music, unpreferred
sedative music, and unpreferred stimulative music, respectively. Tension and state-anxiety levels were
obtained after listening to music. The results revealed that participants who listened to sedative music
showed signicantly lower tension and state-anxiety levels than did those who listened to stimulative
music when music was unpreferred. However, there was no signicant difference of tension and stateanxiety levels between listening to sedative music and stimulative music when music was preferred.
These ndings demonstrate that the effects of sedative and stimulative music on stress reduction depend
on music preference. Our study has important implications for the practice of clinical music therapy since
it provides strong support for the use of preferred music when working to reduce patient stress.
2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction
It is well known that stress is considered to be a causal factor in
many physical and psychological illnesses. Excessive or prolonged
stress can lead to many kinds of emotional disorders and psychosomatic diseases, such as anxiety disorders, heart disease and high
blood pressure. Stress reduction has therefore been considered one
of the major goals of music therapy (Elliott, Polman, & McGregor,
2011).
There is virtual consensus that music, like language, has the ability not only to convey or express emotions (e.g., Collier, 2007; Juslin
& Laukka, 2004; Vieillard et al., 2008), but also to inuence emotions (e.g., Hunter, Schellenberg, & Schimmack, 2010; Khalfa, Roy,
Rainville, Dalla Bella, & Peretz, 2008; Koelsch, Fritz, Cramon, Mller,
& Friederici, 2006; Lundqvist, Carlsson, Hilmersson, & Juslin, 2009;
Pereira et al., 2011; Trost, Ethofer, Zentner, & Vuilleumier, 2012).
Numerous studies have shown that listening to music can be an
effective means of alleviating tension and anxiety. On the other
hand, not all music is appropriate for stress reduction (Chan, Roy,
Gerin, & Christenfeld, 2004; Yehuda, 2011). The selection of music
is therefore an important consideration for music therapists (Elliott

Corresponding author at: Music College, Shanghai Normal University, 100 East,
Guilin Road, Shanghai 200234, China. Tel.: +86 21 64322990; fax: +86 21 64322935.
E-mail addresses: cunmeijiang@126.com, cunmeijiang@shnu.edu.cn (C. Jiang).
0197-4556/$ see front matter 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2013.02.002

et al., 2011; Pelletier, 2004). Interest in the use of music for stress
reduction has grown in the past few decades and research which
provides evidence to support this practice is needed.
Some studies compare the effects of different music genres on
stress reduction, and suggest that classical music has higher effects
on stress reduction compared to non-classical music such as hard
rock music and heavy metal music (e.g., Burns et al., 2002; Labbe,
Schmidt, Babin, & Pharr, 2007). Atonal music makes participants
feel signicantly less relaxed than romantic music and stimulating
classical music (Stratton & Zalanowski, 1984), while no signicant
differences were found between classical, jazz and pop music in
reducing the levels of relaxation and state-anxiety (Chan et al.,
2004).
Music has also been classied as sedative and stimulative in
terms of level of arousal. Stimulative music is commonly characterized by fast tempos, loud volume, and rhythmic patterns, while
sedative music is slow, soft, with little rhythmic activity (Iwanaga,
Ikeda, & Iwaki, 1996; Pellitteri, 2009; Radocy & Boyle, 2003). Listening to sedative music and sitting in silence can reduce tension more
than listening to noise or stimulative music (Hasegawa, Uozumi,
& Ono, 2003; Iwanaga, Kobayashi, & Kawasaki, 2005; Lingham &
Theorell, 2009; Sandstrom & Russo, 2010). Similarly, participants
who listened to sedative music reported lower state-anxiety level
than those who listened to noise and sitting in silence (Hasegawa
et al., 2003; Knight & Rickard, 2001; Moradipanah, Mohammadi,
& Mohammadil, 2009), although Stratton and Zalanowski (1984)

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did not observe signicant differences in relaxation levels between

listening to sedative music, stimulative music, and sitting in silence.
Music preference is also regarded as an important factor in
musics potential to alter mood (Schfer & Sedlmeier, 2009;
Wheeler, 1985). Recent evidence shows that listening to preferred music can decrease state-anxiety for air trafc controllers
(Lesiuk, 2008) and surgical oncology patients (Chaput-McGovern
& Silverman, 2012), and reduce emotional distress and symptom
activity during radiation therapy (Clark et al., 2006). Stratton and
Zalanowski (1984) asked participants to rate the level of music
preference after listening to music. Participants who liked the
music the most were signicantly more relaxed than participants
who liked the music the least, and a high positive correlation was
observed between music preference and relaxation. Jeong (2008)
also reported that subjects who listened to favourite music experienced a signicant decrease in state-anxiety compared to those
who listened to unpreferred music.
Notably, Iwanaga and Moroki (1999) investigated the effects of
music type (sedative music vs. stimulative music) and music preference on tension and relaxation levels. All subjects were required to
listen to both sedative and stimulative music, before being asked
to rate their levels of relaxation, tension and degree of satisfaction with the music. They found that sedative music contrasted
with stimulative music had a higher effect on decreasing tension
and increasing relaxation. Moreover, listening to preferred music
resulted in reduced tension compared to listening to unpreferred
music, while there was no signicant difference in relaxation level
between listening to preferred and unpreferred music. The authors
argued that this might be due to subjects being more sensitive to
tension than to relaxation.
Iwanaga and Moroki (1999) did not control for participants levels of stress prior to the test. That is, the participants may have
had different levels of tension and state-anxiety prior to listening to music, a variable which is said to affect the potential for
music to reduce state-anxiety levels. Knight and Rickard (2001) did
ask participants to do a cognitive task prior to listening to music.
They found that participants who perceived the cognitive task as
stressful had lower state-anxiety levels compared to those who did
not perceive the task as stressful, when they were presented with
sedative music. From this perspective, the effects of sedative and
stimulative music and music preference on stress reduction when
participants are exposed to a stressor still remain uncertain.
To provide further evidence for music therapists, the present
study examined the effects of sedative and stimulative music
and music preference on stress reduction when participants are
exposed to a stressor. All participants in the study performed a
stressful, mental arithmetic test prior to listening to music. Only
participants whose stress was induced successfully were chosen
to take part in the subsequent experiment. The participants were
randomly assigned to four experimental groups, and listened to
preferred sedative music, preferred stimulative music, unpreferred
sedative music, and unpreferred stimulative music, respectively.
We hypothesized that listening to sedative music would result in
lower tension and state-anxiety levels than listening to stimulative
music, and listening to preferred music would result in lower tension and state-anxiety levels than listening to unpreferred music
after exposure to a stressor.

Table 1
The characteristics of the four groups.

PSeM group
PStM group
USeM group
UStM group

Age

Years

19.69 (1.09)
19.86 (0.99)
19.33 (0.99)
19.72 (1.26)

6.69 (5.03)
6.10 (3.73)
5.42 (3.81)
6.83 (3.96)

Note: Years = years of musical training; PSeM = preferred sedative music;

PStM = preferred stimulative music; USeM = unpreferred sedative music;
UStM = unpreferred stimulative music.

result, 144 participants took part in the experiment. They were

randomly assigned to four experimental groups (n = 36). These
four groups listened to preferred sedative music (PSeM), preferred
stimulative music (PStM), unpreferred sedative music (USeM),
and unpreferred stimulative music (UStM), respectively. All participants had normal hearing, volunteered for the research and
provided written informed consents.
Table 1 displays the characteristics of participants. A one-way
analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that there were no signicant
differences between groups in age (F(3,140) = 1.55, p > .05) and years
of musical training (F(3,140) = 0.87, p > .05).
Materials
Musical selection
Nineteen musical pieces composed by Chinese composers and
45 musical pieces composed by western composers were available
for selection by the participants. Each participant reported a piece
of preferred instrumental music and a piece of unpreferred instrumental music. They were also asked to classify whether the two
pieces of music were sedative or not. All pieces were instrumental
music to avoid the inuence of lyrics on listeners responses (Ali &
Peynircioglu, 2006; Brattico et al., 2011; Hunter et al., 2010). The
duration of stimuli ranged from 3 to 6 min (4.93 1.01 for PSeM,
4.77 1.16 for PStM, 4.93 1.26 for USeM, and 4.48 1.14 for UStM,
respectively). A one-way ANOVA revealed that there was no significant difference with regard to the stimuli durations between the
groups (F(3,140) = 1.25, p > .05).
Stressor task
A mental arithmetic task designed by Zhou (2007) was used to
induce students psychological stress. In order to ensure that they
felt stressed, we adapted the mental arithmetic test to increase its
degree of difculty. The test included 40 items (e.g., 1.8026 37 = ?,
5.6988 + 36 = ?, 10.7386 2 = ?), and participants were required to
complete the whole task within 5 min.
Questionnaires
The State Anxiety Inventory (SAI), the subscale of State-Trait
Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger, 1983), was employed to assess the
participants state-anxiety level. Moreover, they were also asked
to rate how tense they felt on a 4-point Likert scale (1 = not at all,
2 = slightly, 3 = moderately, 4 = very much).
Procedure

Methods
Participants
172 female music education students were recruited by means
of advertisements in a bulletin board system. Out of 172 students,
28 students whose stress was not induced were excluded. As a

Each participant listened to only one piece of music to avoid

carry-over effect (Harris, 2008). Music was presented through
Philips SHE1360 headphones at a comfortable listening level.
Prior to listening to music, participants rated their levels of tension and state-anxiety before and after the mental arithmetic task
to examine whether or not stress was induced successfully. 114
participants who experienced stress then listened to the music. The

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J. Jiang et al. / The Arts in Psychotherapy 40 (2013) 201205

203

Fig. 1. Mean tension ratings for the four groups in (a), and mean state-anxiety score for the four groups in (b). Error bar indicates 1 standard error.

levels of tension and state-anxiety were obtained again after listening to music. The entire experiment took approximately 30 min.
Results
Efcacy of the stressor
Means and standard deviations of tension and state-anxiety levels before and after the mental arithmetic task are displayed in
Table 2. As can be seen, the participants in the four groups showed
increased tension and the state-anxiety levels after the mental
arithmetic task. A mixed factor two-way ANOVA was employed,
where time (pre-test and post-test) was the within-subjects variable, and experimental group (PSeM, PStM, USeM and UStM)
was the between-subjects variable. For tension level, the results
revealed a signicant main effect of time (F(1,140) = 735.51, p < .001,
2p = .84), but the main effect of group and the interaction effect
between time and group were not observed (all p > .05). Likewise,
we found a signicant main effect of time for state-anxiety level
(F(1,140) = 504.89, p < .001, 2p = .78), but the main effect of group
and the interaction between time and group were not signicant
(all p > .05). The results indicate that the mental arithmetic task
increased the participants tension and state-anxiety levels.
Effect of music on stress levels
Fig. 1 shows the means and standard errors of tension and stateanxiety levels by music type and music preference, respectively. As
shown in Fig. 1, listening to unpreferred sedative music resulted
in lower levels of tension and state-anxiety relative to listening to
unpreferred stimulative music, whereas there were no different
effects on stress reduction between listening to preferred sedative
music and preferred stimulative music. This was conrmed by the
two-way ANOVAs taking music type (sedative music vs. stimulative music), and music preference (preferred music vs. unpreferred
music) as the between-subjects factors were employed for tension
and state-anxiety levels, respectively.
Table 2
Means and standard deviations for the tension and state-anxiety levels before and
after the mental arithmetic task for the four groups.
Tension

PSeM group
PStM group
USeM group
UStM group

State-anxiety

Pre-test

Post-test

Pre-test

Post-test

1.25 (0.44)
1.19 (0.47)
1.28 (0.45)
1.22 (0.42)

3.08 (0.77)
3.08 (0.84)
3.03 (0.77)
2.89 (0.82)

33.94 (7.17)
33.67 (7.57)
34.28 (7.20)
35.56 (7.47)

54.31 (9.22)
54.61 (7.52)
52.64 (11.71)
51.72 (11.22)

For tension level, the ndings exhibited a main effect of music

preference (F(1,140) = 76.04, p < .001, 2p = .35), a main effect of
music type (F(1,140) = 12.33, p = .001, 2p = .08), and music type
by music preference interaction (F(1,140) = 4.63, p < .05, 2p = .03).
Simple effects analysis revealed that individuals who listened to
sedative music perceived themselves to be signicantly less tense
than did those who listened to stimulative music when music was
unpreferred (F(1,141) = 10.46, p < .01), whereas there were no different effects between listening to sedative and stimulative music
when music was preferred (F(1,141) = 0.60, p > .05).
For state-anxiety level, the ndings showed a signicant main
effect of music preference (F(1,140) = 72.99, p < .001, 2p = .34), a main
effect of music type (F(1,140) = 12.21, p = .001, 2p = .08), and an interaction of music type and music preference (F(1,140) = 5.10, p = .025,
2p = .04). Simple effects analysis demonstrated that participants
who listened to unpreferred stimulative music perceived themselves to be signicantly more anxious (F(1,141) = 10.96, p = .001)
than listening to unpreferred sedative music, although listening
to sedative and stimulative music did not show any difference on
state-anxiety reduction when music was preferred (F(1,141) = 0.51,
p > .05).
Discussion and conclusion
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of
sedative and stimulative music and music preference on stress
reduction after participants are exposure to a stressor. The results
revealed that, after exposure to a stressor, individuals who listened to sedative music perceived themselves to be signicantly
less tense and anxious than did those who listened to stimulative music when music was unpreferred. However, individuals did
not show difference between listening to sedative and stimulative
music in reducing tension and state-anxiety levels when music
was preferred. These ndings suggest that the effects of sedative
and stimulative music on stress reduction depend on music preference. This has important implications for music therapists since
it suggests that the selection of music must be based on clients
music preferences. As a vehicle for stress reduction sedative music
is unlikely to be more effective than stimulative music, unless
client-preferred music is used.
As predicted, after exposure to a stressor, the participants
who listened to preferred music in the current study signicantly
reduced stress relative to those who listened to unpreferred music.
This is consistent with the suggestion that listening to preferred
music increases relaxation more than listening to unpreferred
music (Iwanaga & Moroki, 1999; Jeong, 2008) and the suggestion
that preferred music can improve sad mood, while unpreferred
music has no impact on sad mood (Wheeler, 1985). This could

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J. Jiang et al. / The Arts in Psychotherapy 40 (2013) 201205

be explained by appraisal theory (Lazarus, 1982). Proponents of

the appraisal theory argue that emotions are aroused by peoples
evaluations of events; which in turn suggests cognitive factors may
be major determinants of emotional states (Ellsworth, Goldsmith,
& Scherer, 2003; Scherer, 1999; Smith, Haynes, Lazarus, & Pope,
1993). From this perspective, emotions could be evoked by evaluations of music. If music is evaluated as preferred, then it could act as
a distracter by shifting individuals attention away from stress (Mok
& Wong, 2003; Pothoulaki et al., 2008), and help subjects relax.
Conversely, if subjects do not like the music, they may experience
unpleasant emotions.
It should be noted that music preference often creates cognitive
dissonance. This cognitive dissonance can lead people to justify
their behaviour, change their behaviour, and change what they
believe (Festinger, 1957). This is not to indicate that participants are
pretending or falsifying the results, but that they become genuinely
more relaxed. This is an important and relevant concept in relation
to this research, yet it does not refute the results. If participants
genuinely believed that they were more relaxed after listening to
preferred music, even if it was the result of cognitive reframing, the
desired clinical outcome has been achieved.
With regard to the music type by preference interaction, it
seems that listening to sedative music, compared with listening
to stimulative music, is more effective in reducing stress when
participants do not like the music. The nding partly supports previous studies suggesting that listening to sedative music results in
reduced stress relative to listening to stimulative music (Hasegawa
et al., 2003; Iwanaga et al., 2005; Knight and Rickard, 2001; Lingham
and Theorell, 2009; Sandstrom and Russo, 2010). Listening to
stimulative music may induce more negative emotions relative
to listening to sedative music when participants do not like the
music. In contrast, when they like the music, listening to sedative
music does not induce better effects on stress reduction than listening to stimulative music. The results to some extent support the
view that listening to sedative music does not reduce signicantly
lower tension levels than listening to stimulative music (Stratton
and Zalanowski, 1984). Our data also suggests that participants are
more sensitive to music preference than music type when they are
exposed to a stressor.
The more interesting result of the present study involved the
interaction between music type and music preference. This is, however, inconsistent with of the data reported by Iwanaga and Moroki
(1999) who did not nd a signicant music type by preference interaction. Two possible methodological reasons for the discrepancy
could be explained.
As noted above, all of the participants in the current study were
exposed to a stressor before listening to music. However, the participants in the study of Iwanaga and Moroki (1999) did not engage
in a stressful test, and it is therefore not possible to determine that
they were indeed stressed before listening to music. In this case,
the inconsistent results between the two studies may be due to the
difference in participants stress levels before listening to music.
A second possible explanation relates to whether participants
have a feeling of personal control over events. Health psychology
research shows that perceived control may affect peoples ability
to cope with stress. Even a minimal amount of control can be
benecial to stress reduction (Allen et al., 2001; Brannon & Feist,
2009). The music stimuli used in our research was subject-selected
(or selected by subjects), while all of the participants in Iwanaga
and Morokis (1999) study heard experimenter-selected music.
Participants in the current study therefore may have experienced
a greater sense of personal control over their environment (Labbe
et al., 2007).
In conclusion, the current data indicates that listening to sedative music results in signicantly reduced tension and state-anxiety
levels relative to listening to stimulative music when music is

unpreferred after exposure to a stressor. However, sedative and

stimulative music did not have a differing effect on tension and
state-anxiety when music was preferred. Our ndings suggest that
the effects of sedative and stimulative music on stress reduction
depend on music preference. This has important implications for
music therapists choosing music for clients in clinical settings. Further research is needed to determine the relative importance of
music type and music preference in predicting stress reduction.
Acknowledgement
We thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor-in-chief,
Dr. Robyn Flaum Cruz, for their insightful comments.
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