The Music That You are Listening to is Impacting Your Mental Health

One of the most important factors of your mental health is your ability to regulate your emotions. We know that music has the powerful ability of impacting our emotions. Music therapists use carefully selected music to alter their patient's moods and emotions. But we listen to music every day! Should our itunes playlists come with medical warning labels? Can what we are loading onto our MP3 players when we go out for a jog be impacting our mental health? A recent study conducted by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä was started to establish the link between what you're listening to, your mental health, and how your brain reacts to different types of music. They used a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging data to support their findings.   Rumination – continually brooding over negative things –  as a way of coping with negative emotion, has been linked to poor mental health. The scientists wanted to find out if listening to certain styles of music could have a similar negative effect on a persons mental health. So could that breakup mixtape really be doing you more harm than good? The study assessed the participant's overall mental heath before, and after listening to sad or aggressive music. After analyzing the data, they found that the patients became more anxious and neurotic than before being exposed to the sad or aggressive music. They also found the music had a greater effect on the male participants! The researchers came to the conclusion that listening to negative music results in the expression of these negative feelings, but it doesn’t get you in a better mood. So they decided to investigate what the brain’s unconscious emotion regulation will show, and recorded the participants’ neural activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they were listening to music that was happy, sad and fearful sounding. Why do some people get chills when they listen to their favourite music? Even if you havent, youll know what I mean in a second. Triggered by your favourite songs, or types of music. Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill decided to tackle this question. Why do some people get chills when they listen to their favourite music? 5 Ways To Get The Most Out Of Your Child's Piano Lessons! Find the right Curriculum The right curriculum makes all of the difference. It is a long term strategy for your childs success in music. The definition of success varies from student to student. merriammusic.com  

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