Music effect on pain threshold evaluated with current perception threshold

Music effect on pain threshold evaluated with current perception threshold     

Music can facilitate blood pressure recovery from stress

Objectives: Interventions that reduce the magnitude of cardiovascular responses to stress are justified, at least in part, by the notion that exaggerated responses to stress can damage the cardiovascular system. Recent data suggest that it is worthwhile to explore, in addition to the magnitude of the cardiovascular responses during stress (reactivity), the factors that affect the return to baseline levels after the stressor has ended (recovery). This experiment examined the effect of listening to music on cardiovascular recovery. Design and method: Participants (N = 75) performed a challenging three‐minute mental arithmetic task and then were assigned randomly to sit in silence or to listen to one of several styles of music: classical, jazz or pop. Results: Participants who listened to classical music had significantly lower post‐task systolic blood pressure levels (M = 2.1 mmHg above pre‐stress baseline) than did participants who heard no music (M = 10.8 mmHg). Other musical styles did not produce significantly better recovery than silence. Conclusions: The data suggest that listening to music may serve to improve cardiovascular recovery from stress, although not all music selections are effective.     

The influence of auditory background stimulation (Mozart's sonata K. 448) on visual brain activity.

Twenty individuals solved a visual oddball task in two response conditions: while listening to the Mozart's sonata K. 448, and while listening to nothing. The recorded event-related potentials (ERP) were analyzed in the time and frequency domains. In the music response condition the ERP peak latencies on the left hemisphere increased, whereas on the right hemisphere a decrease of peak latencies as compared with the silence response condition was observed. In the theta, lower-1 alpha and gamma band increases in induced event-related coherences were observed while respondents solved the oddball task and listened to music, whereas a decoupling of brain areas in the gamma band was observed in the silence response condition. It is suggested that auditory background stimulation can influence visual brain activity, even if both stimuli are unrelated.     

Cerebral mechanisms underlying the effects of music during a fatiguing isometric ankle‐dorsiflexion task

The brain mechanisms by which music‐related interventions ameliorate fatigue‐related symptoms during the execution of fatiguing motor tasks are hitherto under‐researched. The objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of music on brain electrical activity and psychophysiological measures during the execution of an isometric fatiguing ankle‐dorsiflexion task performed until the point of volitional exhaustion. Nineteen healthy participants performed two fatigue tests at 40% of maximal voluntary contraction while listening to music or in silence. Electrical activity in the brain was assessed by use of a 64‐channel EEG. The results indicated that music downregulated theta waves in the frontal, central, and parietal regions of the brain during exercise. Music also induced a partial attentional switching from associative thoughts to task‐unrelated factors (dissociative thoughts) during exercise, which led to improvements in task performance. Moreover, participants experienced a more positive affective state while performing the isometric task under the influence of music.     

The effect of different genres of music and silence on relaxation and anxiety: A randomized controlled trial

High stress and anxiety in healthy individuals may lead to use different pharmacological and non-pharmacological therapies. The study aimed to investigate the effect of different genres of music on anxiety and relaxation in healthy participants. This study was a randomized controlled trial with a cross-over design. Forty-six healthy undergraduates participated in the study and randomly received different genres of music (Pop, Rock, Western Classical, and Persian Traditional) and silence for five consecutive days between February and June 2018. Each participant was her/his own control. Relaxation and the State Anxiety were checked with Smith Relaxation States Inventory 3 and The State Anxiety Inventory before and after listening to 15 min of music or laying down in silence. None of the five procedures were preferred for a more relaxing effect (P > 0.05). Also, none of the interventions were preferred for reduction of the state anxiety (P > 0.05). Although different genres of music, i.e., Pop, Rock, Western Classical, Persian Traditional, could reduce state anxiety and improve relaxation, they had no extra effect compared to Silence.     

The Influence of Mozart’s Sonata K. 448 on Brain Activity During the Performance of Spatial Rotation and Numerical Tasks

Summary: The study investigated the influence of Mozart’s music on respondents’ brain activity while solving spatial rotation and numerical tasks. The method of induced event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) and coherence (ERCoh) was used. The music condition had a beneficial influence on respondents’ performance of spatial rotation tasks, and a slightly negative influence on the performance of numerical tasks as compared with the silence condition. On the psychophysiological level a general effect of Mozart’s music on brain activity in the induced gamma band was observed, accompanied by a more specific effect in the induced lower-2 alpha band which was only present while respondents solved the numerical tasks. It is suggested that listening to Mozart’s music increases the activity of specific brain areas and in that way facilitates the selection and “binding” together of pertinent aspects of sensory stimulus into a perceived whole.     

Listening to music: the case for its use in teaching medical humanism.

Listening to music has rarely been used by educators as a tool to teach humanism to medical students and residents. The authors present the argument that music embodies the characteristics of medical humanism (i.e., caring, empathy, human dignity, compassion, and the fostering of relationships) and that listening to music is ideally suited for inclusion in a humanism curriculum. The authors also describe an eight-session "music and medicine" course for residents given at their institution as part of an ongoing humanism-in-medicine initiative. The results of a post-course survey given to the participants showed that residents valued the course as an academically valid approach to humanism training.     

Spontaneous activity of neurones of nucleus reticularis thalami in freely moving cats

1. Fifty-four neurones of the caudal part of the nucleus reticularis thalami (nuc. ret.) were recorded during different phases of sleep and wakefulness in unanaesthetized freely moving cats.2. During wakefulness the activity of the neurones was characterized by a continuous, well-spaced discharge. The mean firing rate was 35.58 +/- 15.06 spikes/sec (average +/- S.D.).3. During sleep with synchronized e.e.g. (S-sleep) the neurones fired in high frequency bursts with long pauses in between. Each burst was formed of 10-15 spikes. Often the bursts were followed by prolonged discharges formed of spikes well spaced one from the other. Bursts followed by prolonged activity were more commonly observed at the beginning of S-sleep and during the S-sleep periods preceding sleep with desynchronized e.e.g., whereas bursts immediately followed by silence were more frequent in the S-sleep periods with e.e.g. delta waves. The long periods of silence between the bursts usually lasted over 200 msec and values greater than 1 sec were frequently found. The mean firing rate of neurones during S-sleep was 19.22 +/- 10.50 spikes/sec.4. During sleep with desynchronized e.e.g. (D-sleep) the activity of the neurones was, as during wakefulness, characterized by a continuous, well spaced, unclustered discharge. The mean firing rate was 40.00 +/- 18.74 spikes/sec. During the rapid eye movements of this phase most units increased the frequency of their discharge, which, nevertheless, maintained the unclustered feature proper to the desynchronized phase of sleep.5. Interspike interval distribution was similar during wakefulness and sleep with desynchronized e.e.g., whereas that for sleep with synchronized e.e.g. was markedly different from those for both the other stages.6. The implications of the striking similarity between the activity of reticularis neurones during wakefulness and sleep with desynchronized e.e.g. are discussed.     

In-car countermeasures open window and music revisited on the real road: popular but hardly effective against driver sleepiness

This study investigated the effects of two very commonly used countermeasures against driver sleepiness, opening the window and listening to music, on subjective and physiological sleepiness measures during real road driving. In total, 24 individuals participated in the study. Sixteen participants received intermittent 10‐min intervals of: (i) open window (2 cm opened); and (ii) listening to music, during both day and night driving on an open motorway. Both subjective sleepiness and physiological sleepiness (blink duration) was estimated to be significantly reduced when subjects listened to music, but the effect was only minor compared with the pronounced effects of night driving and driving duration. Open window had no attenuating effect on either sleepiness measure. No significant long‐term effects beyond the actual countermeasure application intervals occurred, as shown by comparison to the control group (n = 8). Thus, despite their popularity, opening the window and listening to music cannot be recommended as sole countermeasures against driver sleepiness.     

Music facilitate the neurogenesis, regeneration and repair of neurons

Experience has shown that therapy using music for therapeutic purposes has certain effects on neuropsychiatric disorders (both functional and organic disorders). However, the mechanisms of action underlying music therapy remain unknown, and scientific clarification has not advanced. While that study disproved the Mozart effect, the effects of music on the human body and mind were not disproved. In fact, more scientific studies on music have been conducted in recent years, mainly in the field of neuroscience, and the level of interest among researchers is increasing. The results of past studies have clarified that music influences and affects cranial nerves in humans from fetus to adult. The effects of music at a cellular level have not been clarified, and the mechanisms of action for the effects of music on the brain have not been elucidated. We propose that listening to music facilitates the neurogenesis, the regeneration and repair of cerebral nerves by adjusting the secretion of steroid hormones, ultimately leading to cerebral plasticity. Music affects levels of such steroids as cortisol (C), testosterone (T) and estrogen (E), and we believe that music also affects the receptor genes related to these substances, and related proteins. In the prevention of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, hormone replacement therapy has been shown to be effective, but at the same time, side effects have been documented, and the clinical application of hormone replacement therapy is facing a serious challenge. Conversely, music is noninvasive, and its existence is universal and mundane. Thus, if music can be used in medical care, the application of such a safe and inexpensive therapeutic option is limitless.     

Discrimination of stress in speech and music: A mismatch negativity (MMN) study

The aim of this study was to determine if duration‐related stress in speech and music is processed in a similar way in the brain. To this end, we tested 20 adults for their abstract mismatch negativity (MMN) event‐related potentials to two duration‐related stress patterns: stress on the first syllable or note (long‐short), and stress on the second syllable or note (short‐long). A significant MMN was elicited for both speech and music except for the short‐long speech stimulus. The long‐short stimuli elicited larger MMN amplitudes for speech and music compared to short‐long stimuli. An extra negativity—the late discriminative negativity (LDN)—was observed only for music. The larger MMN amplitude for long‐short stimuli might be due to the familiarity of the stress pattern in speech and music. The presence of LDN for music may reflect greater long‐term memory transfer for music stimuli.     

Music Listening and Stress in Daily Life—a Matter of Timing

Purpose

Despite increasing evidence suggesting that music listening in daily life has stress-reducing effects, studies mostly rely on subjective, retrospective data on music listening. Thus, the temporal dynamics underlying the stress-reducing effect of music listening remain unclear. Therefore, we aimed to examine the temporal dynamics of the associations between stress and music listening by assessing subjective and objective data on music in daily life.

Design

An exploratory Ambulatory Assessment study examining a total of 60 participants (37 women), aged 18 to 34 years (M = 22.4 years, SD = 3.5) was conducted.

Methods

For 1 week, participants answered questions on music listening and stress six times per day via an electronic diary device, which additionally objectively sampled the exact time point of music listening and its duration.

Results

Self-reports on mere music listening were associated with lower stress reports, whereas objectively assessed data was not. However, concerning duration of music listening, both subjective and objective data on music listening showed associations between a minimum of 20 min of music listening and lower stress reports. Concerning the latency, objective data on music listening revealed that the association between stress reports and music listening occurs in a time-delayed manner.

Conclusions

Although the study design does not allow for causal inferences, substantial associations among subjectively and objectively assessed data on music listening were found to differentially affect the experience of stress after music listening. In particular, when focusing on the temporal dynamics, objectively assessed data allowed for a more fine-grained analysis. In consequence, subjectively and objectively reported data on music listening should be assessed jointly when investigating effects of music listening on health. Experimental research with rigorous methodological control is required in order to corroborate our findings in a laboratory setting.

     

Crossmodal transfer of emotion by music

Music is one of the most powerful elicitors of subjective emotion, yet it is not clear whether emotions elicited by music are similar to emotions elicited by visual stimuli. This leads to an open question: can music-elicited emotion be transferred to and/or influence subsequent vision-elicited emotional processing? Here we addressed this question by investigating processing of emotional faces (neutral, happy and sad) primed by short excerpts of musical stimuli (happy and sad). Our behavioural experiment showed a significant effect of musical priming: prior listening to a happy (sad) music enhanced the perceived happiness (sadness) of a face irrespective of facial emotion. Further, this musical priming-induced effect was largest for neutral face. Our electrophysiological experiment showed that such crossmodal priming effects were manifested by event related brain potential components at a very early (within 100 ms post-stimulus) stages of neuronal information processing. Altogether, these results offer new insight into the crossmodal nature of music and its ability to transfer emotion to visual modality.     

A randomized controlled trial of bedtime music for insomnia disorder

Music is often used as a self‐help tool to alleviate insomnia. To evaluate the effect of bedtime music listening as a strategy for improving insomnia, we conducted an assessor‐blinded randomized controlled trial. Fifty‐seven persons with insomnia disorder were included and randomized to music intervention (n = 19), audiobook control (n = 19) or a waitlist control group (n = 19). The primary outcome measure was the Insomnia Severity Index. In addition, we used polysomnography and actigraphy to evaluate objective measures of sleep, and assessed sleep quality and quality of life. The results showed no clear effect of music on insomnia symptoms as the group × time interaction only approached significance (effect size = 0.71, p = .06), though there was a significant improvement in insomnia severity within the music group. With regard to the secondary outcomes, we found a significant effect of the music intervention on perceived sleep improvement and quality of life, but no changes in the objective measures of sleep. In conclusion, music listening at bedtime appears to have a positive impact on sleep perception and quality of life, but no clear effect on insomnia severity. Music is safe and easy to administer, but further research is needed to assess the effect of music on different insomnia subtypes, and as an adjunctive or preventive intervention.     

Arterial pressure and heart rate changes during natural sleep in rat

Mean arterial pressure and heart rate data during quiet wakefulness and phases of sleep in conscious rat are sampled by a computer at a rate of 100/sec. Average values and variability expressed as standard deviation are computed for each recording session. Mean arterial pressure and heart rate and their variability decrease from quiet wakefulness to synchronized sleep. During desynchronized sleep, mean arterial pressure increases to the level of quiet wakefulness and is more variable than during synchronized sleep. Heart rate is lower and more uniform during sleep than during quiet wakefulness, and there is no difference between synchronized and desynchronized sleep except that a greater variability occurs during desynchronized sleep. The study shows that characteristic and specific cardiovascular changes accompany the phases of sleep and that a hierarchy of arterial pressure is present during the resting behavior in rat.     

A method for continuously assessing the autonomic response to music-induced emotions through HRV analysis

Interest in therapeutic applications of music has recently increased, as well as the effort to understand the relationship between music features and physiological patterns. In this study, we present a methodology for characterizing music-induced effects on the dynamics of the heart rate modulation. It consists of three steps: (i) the smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution is performed to obtain a time–frequency representation of HRV; (ii) a parametric decomposition is used to robustly estimate the time-course of spectral parameters; and (iii) statistical population analysis is used to continuously assess whether different acoustic stimuli provoke different dynamic responses. Seventy-five healthy subjects were repetitively exposed to pleasant music, sequences of Shepard tones with the same tempo as the pleasant music and unpleasant sounds overlaid with the same sequences of Shepard tones. Results show that the modification of HRV parameters are characterized by an early fast transient phase (15–20 s), followed by an almost stationary period. All kinds of stimuli provoked significant changes compared to the resting condition, while during listening to pleasant music the heart and respiratory rates were higher (for more than 80% of the duration of the stimuli, p < 10⁻⁵) and the power of the HF modulation was lower (for more than 70% of the duration of the stimuli, p < 0.05) than during listening to unpleasant stimuli.     

The influence of background music on recognition processes of Chinese characters: an ERP study

In this paper, we employed RSS (rapid stream stimulation) paradigm to study the recognition processes of Chinese characters in background music. Real Chinese characters (upright or rotated) were used as target stimuli, while pseudo-words were used as background stimuli. Subjects were required to detect real characters while listening to Mozart's Sonata K. 448 and in silence. Both behavioral results and ERP results supported that Mozart's music mainly served as a distracter in the recognition processes of real Chinese characters in the experiment. The modulation of Mozart's music on RP (recognition potential) was different across different orientations of Chinese characters; in particular, the modulation of RP elicited by upright Chinese characters was more significant, suggesting that the music factor and orientation factor interact to affect the RP component. In brief, the simultaneous playing of Mozart's music did not improve subjects' performance in the detection of real Chinese characters.     

Sensorimotor adaptation is influenced by background music

It is well established that listening to music can modify subjects’ cognitive performance. The present study evaluates whether this so-called Mozart Effect extends beyond cognitive tasks and includes sensorimotor adaptation. Three subject groups listened to musical pieces that in the author’s judgment were serene, neutral, or sad, respectively. This judgment was confirmed by the subjects’ introspective reports. While listening to music, subjects engaged in a pointing task that required them to adapt to rotated visual feedback. All three groups adapted successfully, but the speed and magnitude of adaptive improvement was more pronounced with serene music than with the other two music types. In contrast, aftereffects upon restoration of normal feedback were independent of music type. These findings support the existence of a “Mozart effect” for strategic movement control, but not for adaptive recalibration. Possibly, listening to music modifies neural activity in an intertwined cognitive–emotional network.     

Reflexiones sobre la deshumanización de la educación médica: empatía,emociones y posibles recursos pedagógicos para la educación afectiva del estudiante de medicina

While medicine is going through a phase of increasing technical growth, it is also a time of increasing depersonalisation in the doctor-patient relationship. Empathy is a required element to build this relationship, and is a bridge between evidence-based medicine and patient centred clinical practice. Studies that have appraised empathy demonstrate its erosion during the undergraduate years. This fact has boosted the development of tools for assessing empathy, such as the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy, or the Interpersonal Reactivity Index adapted by Davis. However, the real challenge is how to promote strategies aimed at promoting empathy and to prevent its erosion. This, in short, requires strategies on how to educate student emotions and feelings that are intrinsically related to empathy. Educational tools for this purpose are emerging in the teaching scenario, represented by literature, music, poetry, narrative medicine, opera and, especially Cinematic Education. Academic and Medical Educators find it difficult to find effective answers for the current mandatory challenge of promoting empathy in the training of medical students.