Music and emotion regulation: what listening can and cannot change

Why people reach for music

Few regulation tools are as easy to use as music. It is available on a phone, it needs no instruction, it can be used alone or with others, and it acts on attention, bodily arousal and meaning at the same time. Researchers who study everyday music use start from this observation. Cook, Roy and Welker (2019) open their study by noting that people frequently use music to regulate their emotions, and Saarikallio (2011) describes emotional self-regulation as one of the most important reasons people engage with music at all ages.

That frequency matters for this library. Music is the most obvious medium of the artifact’s process, repetition, synchronization and discharge, and it is the medium through which many people seek something they would call catharsis. The questions here are therefore practical: what changes when people use music to regulate emotion, how reliable those changes are, and what kind of change the evidence does not cover.

Two terms need to be kept apart throughout. Music interventions are structured uses of music, usually listening, delivered in a study or a care setting and compared with a control condition. Music-based emotion regulation (glossary) is what people do on their own initiative, choosing music to create, change or maintain a state. The first is studied mostly with randomised trials; the second mostly with interviews and questionnaires. They answer different questions.

What the meta-analyses show about stress-related outcomes

De Witte, Spruit, van Hooren, Moonen and Stams (2020) pooled randomised controlled trials of music interventions aimed at stress reduction. They ran two multilevel meta-analyses of 104 RCTs, containing 327 effect sizes and 9,617 participants, one for physiological outcomes and one for psychological outcomes. Physiological outcomes included heart rate, blood pressure and hormone levels; psychological outcomes included experiences such as restlessness, anxiety and nervousness.

Music interventions had an overall significant effect on stress reduction in both domains. The standardised mean difference was d = 0.380 for physiological outcomes and d = 0.545 for psychological outcomes. In the conventions commonly used to describe effect sizes, these are small-to-moderate and moderate effects. The type of outcome assessment moderated the results: effects were larger on heart rate (d = 0.456) than on blood pressure (d = 0.343) or hormone levels (d = 0.349).

Three features of this evidence shape how it should be read.

Physiological and psychological outcomes are not the same thing. The larger effect on self-reported stress than on physiological measures is consistent with the general finding that how people feel and what their autonomic and endocrine systems do are related but only partly overlapping (Research note 05). A person can report feeling calmer before heart rate or cortisol changes much, and the reverse can also occur. Neither measure is the “real” stress; they are different signals that support different inferences.

A pooled effect is an average across varied studies. The trials differed in who took part, what music was used, how long sessions lasted and which outcomes were measured. The moderator analysis on outcome type is itself a sign that effects are not uniform. A pooled d does not predict what a particular piece of music will do for a particular person.

The outcomes are stress states, not stressors. The trials measure change in stress-related responses, typically during or shortly after the intervention. They do not measure whether the circumstances that produced the stress changed. That distinction is the subject of Research note 04, and it applies here without modification.

Who reaches for music, and what that does and does not show

Miranda and Blais-Rochette (2020) asked a narrower question: are people who are more emotionally unstable more likely to use music to regulate their emotions? They meta-analysed 13 correlational studies with a total of 2,641 participants and found a significant positive correlation between neuroticism and emotion regulation through music listening, r = .22 (95% CI 0.17 to 0.27), with no evidence of significant heterogeneity across studies. The authors describe the relationship as relatively moderate and suggest that people higher in neuroticism may be more prone to use music listening as an accessible resource for managing negative emotions in everyday life.

This finding is easy to over-read in either direction. It does not show that music use increases neuroticism, and it does not show that music use reduces it. It shows that the two tend to co-occur. A plausible reading is that people who experience negative emotion more often reach more often for a tool that is always at hand. Whether that tool then helps them, leaves them where they were, or in some cases keeps a negative state active, is a separate question that correlational designs cannot answer.

Strategies people describe

Saarikallio and Erkkilä (2007) built a theoretical model of music in adolescents’ mood regulation from group interviews and follow-up forms with eight adolescents, analysed with grounded-theory methods. The model describes mood regulation by music as a process of satisfying personal mood-related goals through various musical activities. The strategies it distinguishes, which later became the basis of questionnaire measures, are:

• Entertainment: creating a pleasant atmosphere and maintaining or enhancing a good mood.
• Revival: gaining new energy or relaxing when tired or stressed.
• Strong sensation: seeking intense emotional experiences.
• Diversion: distracting oneself from unwanted thoughts or feelings.
• Discharge: releasing negative emotion such as anger or sadness through music that expresses it.
• Mental work: using music as a framework for contemplating and reappraising emotional concerns.
• Solace: seeking comfort and the feeling of being understood when sad or troubled.

The list is useful because it shows that “listening to music to feel better” covers several different functions. Diversion moves attention away from a concern. Discharge expresses the emotion. Mental work stays with the concern and changes how it is understood, which resembles reappraisal. Solace resembles seeking support. These are not interchangeable, and the research on emotion regulation more broadly suggests they should not be expected to have the same consequences.

Saarikallio (2011) extended the question to adulthood with group interviews of 21 people aged 21 to 70. The basic nature of regulation, including the goals and strategies, remained highly similar across adulthood. Changes were also evident and fell into three types: change with age, fluctuations related to life events, and changes around the transition to retirement. Both studies are qualitative and small. They describe what people do and how they explain it; they do not measure effects.

Cook, Roy and Welker (2019) approached the same topic with a survey of 794 university students, relating music preferences to reported use of music for regulation. Preferences for pop, rap/hip-hop, soul/funk and electronica/dance were positively associated with using music to increase emotional arousal. Soul/funk preference was also associated with using music to increase positive and decrease negative emotion. More broadly, a preference for energetic and rhythmic music was positively associated with every form of musical emotion regulation examined. The authors note that future research would need to test how effective different kinds of music actually are; the study measured preferences and reported use, not outcomes.

A field with loose concepts

Baltazar and Saarikallio (2016) conducted a critical, integrative review of research on affect self-regulation through music, systematically searching publications from January 1994 to June 2014 and selecting 34 for analysis. They examined what the studies said about four levels: goals, strategies, tactics and mechanisms. The levels had not been studied with equal weight or precision, and the review found a considerable degree of inconsistency in terminology and conceptual imprecision across publications, made worse by the lack of a shared model.

This is not a technical footnote. When one study’s “discharge” is another study’s “venting” and a third study’s “emotional release”, pooled conclusions about any one strategy become hard to draw. The practical consequence for readers is caution about claims of the form “music strategy X works”: the strategy may not be defined the same way across the studies being summarised.

Pleasure, reward and careful wording

Salimpoor and colleagues (2011) used [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography together with psychophysiological measures while listeners heard music that produced intense pleasure for them. The PET measure was consistent with endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal. With functional MRI in the same listeners and stimuli, activity in the caudate was more associated with anticipation of peak responses, and activity in the nucleus accumbens with the experience of them. The authors conclude that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system.

The finding explains part of why music is so rewarding, and why people return to the same pieces. It should not be stretched further. It concerns pleasure at emotional peaks in selected listeners with self-chosen music. It does not show that music regulates distress through dopamine, and reward during listening is not evidence that anything outside the listening episode has changed. Reward is precisely the kind of consequence that reinforces a behaviour whether or not the behaviour addresses a problem (Research note 04).

When music may maintain a state instead of changing it

None of the verified sources in this note measured whether using music for discharge or strong sensation maintains rumination or delays resolution. That gap should be stated plainly rather than filled with a plausible story.

What can be said is narrower. First, discharge through music is the musical counterpart of expressing emotion, and laboratory research on venting anger found that expression focused on a grievance did not reduce anger and aggression (Research note 02). Listening to music that matches one’s sadness is not the same as hitting a punching bag while thinking about a provocateur, and those findings cannot be transferred directly. They do show that the felt release of expression and its measured effect can diverge. Second, the correlation between neuroticism and music-based regulation means that people who most often feel bad are also those most often using music to manage it, so the question of which uses help them is not academic. Third, the strategies Saarikallio and Erkkilä describe differ in whether they keep attention on the concern (discharge, mental work) or move it away (diversion), and differ in whether they change interpretation (mental work) or only the state. Whether those differences lead to different outcomes over time is an open empirical question.

A reasonable working position is that music reliably changes states, that some uses of music engage with the source of a difficulty and others do not, and that the evidence does not yet tell us which use is better for whom.

Music in groups

Much of the research above concerns solitary listening. Music is also a collective activity. Moving and making sound in time with others adds processes that solitary listening lacks: interpersonal synchrony, which in experiments increased liking and cooperation, and shared exertion, which in group dance raised pain thresholds and closeness. These findings are reviewed in Research note 03. They suggest that the social benefits of collective music are real and distinct from its effects on individual mood, and the same limit applies: the outcomes measured are connection and state during or shortly after the activity.

Practical implications, with limits

• Use music deliberately for state change. The trial evidence supports using music to reduce stress-related responses in the short term. Choosing music with that aim is a reasonable, low-risk step.
• Notice which function you are using. Asking whether a given listening session is for diversion, discharge, solace or working something through makes it easier to see what it can and cannot accomplish.
• Check what changed afterwards. If only the state changed, that is relief and it has value. If the same concern returns unchanged each time, pair music with a strategy that addresses it, such as reappraisal.
• Do not treat music as a substitute for care. None of the evidence here supports using music in place of treatment for persistent anxiety, depression or trauma-related difficulties.

These implications follow from the evidence but have not themselves been tested as a package. They are reasoned suggestions, not validated protocols.

Limits of the evidence

The trial evidence is broad but heterogeneous in populations, music and outcomes, and it measures short-term stress-related responses. The correlational meta-analysis on neuroticism cannot establish direction or benefit. The strategy research is largely qualitative or survey-based, depends on self-report, and uses concepts that a systematic review found inconsistent. The neuroimaging evidence concerns pleasure at musical peaks, not regulation of distress. Across all of it, the outcome that matters most for the question of catharsis, whether the conditions producing distress change, was not measured. See the evidence ledger for how these grades are assigned and the methods page for the distinction between measurement and interpretation used throughout this library.